Finished the game

The Basketball Super League is dead

An unprecedented event occurred yesterday in Russian men's basketball. At a meeting of the Super League Council, nine clubs that played in the A division in the 2009/10 season and the winner of the B division announced their withdrawal from the tournament in its current form, that is, under the direct control of the Russian Basketball Federation. Ten clubs have announced their intention to establish a fundamentally new competitive structure in which all decisions will be made directly by its participants.

What happened was a logical and quite predictable continuation of the scandal that flared up in May with the release of an audio recording made in the referee's locker room during the quarterfinal playoff match between Dynamo (Moscow) and Lokomotiv-Kuban (Krasnodar). The inspector of these games and the chief specialist for the men's super league clubs, Maxim Astanin, reprimanded the judges for improper efforts to ensure a positive result for the Kuban players, indirectly referring to the wishes of certain “Cherny” and “Viktorich”, in whom the basketball community almost unanimously recognized the president of the RBF and executive director Super League of Sergei Viktorovich Chernov. When the scandal broke out, he left the second of these positions, but he does not intend to leave the post of head of the federation - his powers are valid until 2013.

“Representatives of the clubs of the men’s super league “A”, in connection with the events of the last month that have stirred up Russian basketball, decided to announce their withdrawal from the council of the basketball super league. In the current situation, we find it impossible to take part in a competition conducted and managed by leaders who have lost our trust. The country's leading clubs intend to establish a new, professional and independent league to hold basketball competitions among the best teams in Russia,” the ten clubs said in a joint statement.

The clubs that left the tournament created a working group tasked with developing “regulatory and legal documents necessary for the creation and holding of competitions.” “Only the independent status of the tournament, under the control of bodies established by the clubs, guarantees a high level of competition, fair competition and contributes to raising the level of Russian basketball,” representatives of the clubs are convinced.

The statement was signed by the heads of the following clubs: CSKA, Khimki, UNICS (Kazan), Dynamo M, Lokomotiv-Kuban, Spartak (St. Petersburg), Triumph (Lyubertsy), Red Wings (Samara ), “Yenisei” (Krasnoyarsk), winner of division “B” “Nizhny Novgorod”. A resolution has already been adopted to liquidate the old league. The leadership of the RBF, in turn, if the leading men's clubs create a new professional basketball league, is ready to consider (probably on a commercial basis) the issue of transferring to it the rights to host the Russian Championship. This can only happen through a special agreement and if the new league complies with the requirements of the law “On Physical Culture and Sports in the Russian Federation”, the regulations of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) and the RFB.

Having the status of a non-profit institution, the Basketball Super League (BS) was created in 1994 and held the Russian Championship on the basis of an agreement with the RBF. In recent years, due to frequent judicial scandals, organizational troubles, increases in entry and license fees, the activities of the BS management (and in fact, RBF officials) have been subjected to severe criticism from various clubs. But for some reason, the participating teams did not take decisive action to reorganize the championship. For the current joint decision to create a league with a new management team, it was precisely a blatant precedent that received a huge public outcry that was required, that is, conversations on that same audio recording from the referee’s locker room. But the fact of its appearance in the public domain is a violation of the constitutional rights of those involved (judges, commissioner and game inspector) and the provisions of the legislation of the Russian Federation.

However, the situation in our basketball is such that next season the Super League championship may have the status of a third-tier tournament for the leading clubs in Russia. In addition to the European Cup system, there is also a young VTB United League. In its new format, four places are reserved for the quartet of the best teams from the past Russian championship; representatives from Poland and Finland are ready to join participants from the post-Soviet countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus). It is worth noting that the general director of the United League is the vice-president of the RFB Andrei Shirokov, who received nomination to these posts at the suggestion of Sergei Chernov.

Ilya TRISVIATSKY