Andreas Zagklis, FIBA Secretary General, spoke to media at the recent Global Sports Week in Paris. Here are some key takeaways from his interview.
Shaping international club competitions:
“I’ve said since the first weeks of my appointment [in December 2018] that club competitions and shaping international club competitions is one of our strategic objectives. This was also approved by the Congress.
We have in Asia the FIBA Asia Champions Cup, which is a one-week tournament. We know the calendar challenges, though I think we will move with this format of tournament, but at a higher level of delivery and promotion for the short-term future.
However, we are studying the possibility of having an expanded version of that tournament in the [longer-term] future similar to what BCL does in Europe and the Americas.
For us there are some key principles. One of them is respecting the sporting criteria, meaning that the ones that play at international level are coming in principle through their performance in the domestic championships. This is very important. The second is having a robust competition network, so we have competitions like the FIBA Intercontinental Cup in partnership with the NBA and the host.
The project in Africa with the NBA is advancing and next week at the All-Star Game there will be some news on that. In Europe, the Basketball Champions League, after three years of high-level performance, has managed to attract third-party investment coming from people who are well established in the media and entertainment business and have taken a genuine basketball as well as investment interest in this European league.
And Basketball Champions League Americas has now started and is into the playoffs. So we do believe that this shows a broader strategy and in every continent a very clear action plan.”
In a recent interview to BallinEurope, he then added about the Intercontinental Cup:
“Moving from 4 teams to 6 teams is part of the short-term to mid-term strategy. Then of course, we will see where this takes us,” he said, “Finding a spot in the calendar for the BCL champion, the FIBA Americas champion, the G League champion [is a challenge] and, hopefully, from 2021, the Basketball Africa League champion and the FIBA Asia Champions Cup champion would be an excellent platform for us. This is a tournament which is the pinnacle for us.”
Olympic Games 2020 in Tokyo:
“It is an outstanding opportunity for us, an opportunity that we’re working hard to not let pass, and to make the most out of it for the promotion of basketball. We know that Japan loves basketball. I was at the test event inside the arena last August when Japan faced Germany just before the World Cup. The excitement is absolutely at a very high level. The ticket sales are going very well.
We will also have the biggest-ever 3×3 venue for the Olympics, with almost 7,000 seats, so I think both basketball and 3×3 will make an impact during the games.”
Preparations are going well. We’re very excited. We will have for the first time our second discipline in the Olympics – 1936 basketball entered the Olympics, 1976 women’s basketball, and now 2020 3×3.
We have also received very positive feedback from not only from the IOC and the TOCOG (Tokyo organising committee), but also from the broadcasters regarding the desire to show 3×3 in their programmes, and I think we’ll see some great basketball in those five days of 3×3 in Tokyo.”
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