EuroLeague Expansion for 2027-28: Aris and Hapoel Jerusalem Join the 13-Candidate Field

This month, a file left Thessaloniki.

Aris, a basketball club nearly a century old, formally submitted its application for a EuroLeague place from the 2027-28 season. At the same time, Hapoel Jerusalem of Israel entered the race. The candidate list reached 13. In a single short line, PAOK — Aris's neighbour in the same city — was called a "strong favourite".

Three facts and one opinion. None of the facts carried a source. Neither did the opinion.

I have tracked money flowing through basketball leagues for 26 years, seven of them in a club financial analyst's chair. The trade taught me one thing: when a report appears without a named source, the most analysable part is usually what it does not say. Thirteen files on the table, and what I smell is not risk but tomorrow — except that tomorrow sits in the 2027-28 season, and nobody will publish the selection criteria.

So let us start with the only certain number: 13.

EuroLeague is not an open league

EuroLeague operates on a licensing system. That is the fundamental difference from every national championship, and it is why the news that "Aris applied" matters more than it appears.

In a national league, a place comes from your ranking. In EuroLeague, a place comes from a decision. EuroLeague Basketball, together with the group of owner-clubs commonly known as Euroleague Commercial Assets, grants long-term licences to a core group: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Baskonia, Panathinaikos, Olympiacos, Fenerbahçe, Anadolu Efes, Žalgiris Kaunas, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Olimpia Milano, Bayern Munich and CSKA Moscow (suspended since 2026). The rest of the field is made up of short-term places, invitations and the EuroCup gateway.

There is no salary cap. No luxury tax. No apron mechanism. EuroLeague uses Financial Fair Play and a dense licensing manual whose criteria revolve around four axes: arena, budget, competitiveness and brand strength. Anyone applying NBA mechanics here commits a category error. In the NBA, expansion is a decision by 30 owners with an entry fee measured in billions of US dollars. In EuroLeague, expansion is a negotiation between those who hold a place and those who want one, where the price of a place is not listed.

In recent seasons, EuroLeague's boundary has kept moving. Monaco joined in 2026. Paris Basketball joined in 2026, opening an urban market the league had never had. Talks with a project in Dubai were pushed high and then stalled. The ambition of a 20-team league is repeated in organiser meetings, and a dialogue with FIBA about the structure of European basketball continues. In 2026-25, EuroLeague had 18 teams.

The Greek backdrop sits in the middle of that picture. Panathinaikos and Olympiacos are two long-licence pillars; Athens and Piraeus hold two places. Thessaloniki — Greece's second city, an urban area of more than a million people — has no representative at all. That is a market gap anyone in sports commerce can see.

The 2027-28 marker says a lot. A review cycle that long means files are not graded on this season's form but on architectural drawings, three-year balance sheets and ownership structure. It also means any prediction about the outcome has a very short shelf life.

What is a EuroLeague place worth

I still remember how I once valued a competition place. In 2026, sitting as a senior specialist at a V-League club, I built a tracking sheet of 27 young players and forecast that one of them would see his commercial value rise 3.5 times if the national team succeeded at a continental tournament. Management waved it away: "Your numbers don't sell tickets." The lesson was not that I was right. The lesson was that commercial value only turns into money when a distribution mechanism sits behind it.

EuroLeague has that mechanism.

EuroLeague Basketball's commercial revenue is reported at roughly 100 million euros a season, from broadcasting rights, central sponsorship and brand agreements. That sum is shared among member clubs, with the bulk flowing to the long-licence group. For a mid-tier Greek club, the direct EuroLeague share is only part of the story.

The larger part lies in things that never appear on the distribution sheet: the value of the main shirt sponsorship, the price of domestic broadcast rights, ticket prices, and the value of being grouped with Real Madrid or Fenerbahçe in every news item. By my own valuation habit, a EuroLeague place can double or triple the main sponsorship value of a mid-tier Greek club within two seasons — provided that club has an arena big enough to sell tickets in.

That condition is where Aris is stuck.

Aris: strong brand, small arena

Aris is one of the biggest names in Greek basketball. The club won nine national titles between 2026 and 2026, seven of them consecutively from 2026 to 2026. That golden era is tied to Nikos Galis, the Greek-American guard who turned Aris into a force in European basketball in the late 1980s.

But a brand cannot sign a lease on an arena.

Aris's home, the Alexandreio Melathron, bears Galis's name and holds just over 5,000 seats. That number is enough for the Greek league and the EuroCup. For EuroLeague it is a structural obstacle. EuroLeague's licensing manual sets requirements on capacity, facilities, functional rooms and broadcast infrastructure. A plan to upgrade or rebuild an arena for Thessaloniki has been discussed for years, but a plan is not an arena.

This is the point analysts often skip: a club's EuroLeague application is largely a construction application. Anyone reading "Aris applied" without reading the arena drawings has read nothing.

Based on my experience watching EuroCup and EuroLeague games on screen from Nha Trang, I always check arena capacity before I check form. Capacity determines ticket revenue. Ticket revenue determines budget. Budget determines roster quality. Form is only the last link in that chain.

PAOK: front-runner on one unsourced line

PAOK is also in Thessaloniki. The PAOK Sports Arena holds around 8,500 seats, a better position than the Alexandreio Melathron. The club won the Greek title in 2026 and 2026, and has a large, tightly organised fan base.

The source report calls PAOK a "strong favourite". I treat that line as an opinion, because it labels itself an opinion and carries no source. But place the two Greek files side by side and a clearer logic emerges: the same city, the same fan region, the same broadcast market. EuroLeague is unlikely to admit both in one cycle. If it admits only one, the arena and financial criteria lean toward PAOK.

This is where two kinds of information must be separated. The facts are: PAOK is on the list, PAOK's arena is larger, and the report calls PAOK the front-runner. The opinion is: PAOK will be chosen. The distance between those two sentences is the entire value of this story.

Hapoel Jerusalem: arena compliant, geography not

Hapoel Jerusalem brings a file of a different nature. The club won the ULEB Cup in 2026 after beating Real Madrid 83-72 in the final — a rare verifiable fact in this story. Its Pais Arena home holds around 11,000 seats, exceeding the arena requirement many other candidates lack.

Hapoel Jerusalem's problem is not the arena.

Since October 2026, Israeli basketball clubs have had to play their "home" games abroad. Maccabi Tel Aviv chose Belgrade as its home for European games. Hapoel Jerusalem has also had to stage its continental games elsewhere. For a league that runs on schedules, broadcast contracts and season tickets, a "home" arena more than a thousand kilometres from home is an operational hole, not a minor detail.

EuroLeague has never granted a long-term licence to a club that cannot guarantee a fixed home arena. That is a practice, not a written rule. But in a system where decisions come from a meeting room, practice carries more weight than text.

Thirteen files, a number that says nothing about the odds

The number 13 is the most notable fact in the report, and also the least informative number in it.

It tells us EuroLeague is in a seller's market: more clubs want in than there are places to give. It also tells us the contest is not happening on the floor but in meeting rooms.

It does not say how many places are open. It does not say what the criteria are. It does not say who votes. It does not say how a new market like Dubai or London is ranked against an old market left empty like Thessaloniki. The first step for a number-counter is admitting he cannot count everything. On this report I can count four facts and quantify not a single conclusion.

In club financial analysis, a candidate list without a denominator is a useless list. Knowing 13 parties applied without knowing whether there is 1 place or 5 makes probability impossible. And when probability is impossible, every "strong favourite" utterance is just a feeling.

The counter-intuitive angle: expansion is about splitting the pie, not about competition

People usually read expansion news as a sporting story: who deserves it, who does not. That reading is wrong at the root.

The people who decide on admitting new members are the old members themselves. In EuroLeague, the owner-clubs both compete and vote. Adding a member means splitting the revenue pie one more way, unless total revenue grows faster than the number of teams. For a small market like Greece, a place for Thessaloniki might raise Greek broadcast revenue, but that increase is then split among nearly twenty clubs, with most flowing to Madrid, Barcelona and Istanbul.

The real motive of those in charge is to expand the market, not to expand the number of teams. A place for Dubai or London brings a new market. A place for Thessaloniki only slices the existing pie thinner. Seen on that axis, the chances of Aris and PAOK rest not on the quality of their basketball but on whether the organisers need another Balkan market — and the answer is in no document yet.

And the line "PAOK is the strong favourite"? It is an unsourced opinion, and I do not build analysis on unsourced opinions. A 40-page plan was sunk by a night rain, but I already knew how to swim — meaning I learned to tell a real file from a compelling headline.

The personnel backstory: playing in a city without an arena

Inside every competition application is a part that never appears on a spreadsheet.

At Hapoel Jerusalem, players are used to packing for "home" games. They train in Jerusalem, board a plane, and play in front of a crowd in another city. For a 25-year-old player, that is several days a month taken away from family, added to an already dense season. For a club, it is a cost line nobody lists in an application, and a risk the licensing manual has no box for.

In Thessaloniki the story is inverted. Aris has a home, has a crowd, but the arena is too small. Players who came through the Aris academy grew up in a packed hall, and their dream is to play there on a EuroLeague night. That dream depends on a construction drawing.

I once cut seven veteran players in a restructuring plan to pour money into the youth academy. The chairman called me a "cold machine". I did not care about the tears in the locker room. Then the club really did dissolve, and I lost my job. Mbappé scored, while I was studying my own mistake — I wrote that line for a football piece, but it holds for every spreadsheet I have ever built.

A EuroLeague place cannot save a club without an arena. It only delays the day that club must face its own number.

What to watch

This race will not be decided by a game but by a licensing manual and an architectural drawing. If EuroLeague publishes criteria and an official list, the 13-candidate report will gain verification value. If it does not, the report is just a line with more pull than weight.

Three signals I will watch. First, official EuroLeague confirmation of the candidate list. Second, any named-source statement about the standing of PAOK or Aris. Third, progress on the Thessaloniki arena project — the only variable that can change the board.

What interests me is not who gets in. What interests me is whether the selection process is published. A league that wants to sell itself as a global product cannot recruit members through a closed meeting. European basketball has spent three decades on that model. The 2027-28 season is its chance to prove it has changed.