One Team 2026-26: Four Names and a Yardstick EuroLeague Never Uses for the Standings

On September 9, EuroLeague announced the winners of the 2026-26 One Team Awards. Four names were called: Fenerbahce Tarfin Istanbul, Cosea JL Bourg-en-Bresse, Armani Olimpia Milan, and Sasha Vezenkov of Olympiacos Piraeus as Best One Team Ambassador. None of them scored a point that day. No three-pointer was mentioned, no quarter was broken down, no efficiency metric appeared in the release. What was recognised sat somewhere else: a group of elderly participants stepping onto a basketball court in Istanbul, a session-by-session activity plan in eastern France, an education programme in Milan, and the steady appearances of one Greek player.

Eight years ago I stood inside a community club in Chicago as it was coming apart. The main sponsor had pulled out, the gym was closed, the season was suspended by a pandemic. I wrote more than forty fundraising appeals, called former students, organised a livestream and raised eight thousand five hundred dollars. The club survived. But what I remember most is not that night. It is the emptiness of the third month afterwards, when the donor list had closed and nobody mentioned the club again.

That experience taught me something I still carry into every release like this one: money saves a season, it does not save a habit. In community work, the habit is the only thing worth measuring. So I read the One Team release differently. I do not ask which programme was more moving. I ask which programme will still exist next March.

Context: a competition with no scoreboard

One Team is EuroLeague's corporate social responsibility programme, built to bring basketball to groups with limited access to the game. For the 2026-26 season, the league shortlisted ten clubs and five players for the ambassador category. The overarching theme is tied to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10 on reduced inequalities. An annual workshop closes each cycle before the awards are announced.

Look at the scale the league describes. According to the organisers, these programmes reach thousands of people across Europe. The shortlist spans several basketball markets: Turkey, France, Italy, Slovenia, Greece. That spread is not accidental. A community programme only proves its value when it shows the model can run in very different conditions, from a basketball capital like Istanbul to a small town such as Bourg-en-Bresse.

Structurally, One Team operates almost like a parallel competition. There are criteria, an evaluation process, a ranking, winners and names that never get called. Only one thing is missing: a scoreboard. That absence creates both the strength and the weakness of the whole system.

The strength is that it opens a field where smaller clubs can genuinely compete. In EuroLeague, Bourg-en-Bresse cannot match the biggest clubs on budget. In the community category, the resource gap narrows considerably, because results are decided not by transfer spending but by the quality of local organisation.

The weakness is that no scoreboard also means no objective yardstick. Who confirms a programme actually works? How? Without verification, the line between real community work and a well-presented press release stays thin.

Fenerbahce Tarfin Istanbul: choosing a group with no sporting upside

Most community programmes at sports clubs put children at the centre. That choice makes sense on every level: positive imagery, easy media coverage, and a hidden talent pipeline. A ten-year-old nurtured by a club today may become a player, or at least a ticket-buying fan for the next two decades.

Fenerbahce Tarfin Istanbul went the other way. Their programme brings elderly people onto a basketball court.

I stopped on that detail longer than on anything else in the release, because it contains a rather cold strategic decision. Elderly participants cannot become sporting assets. They are not part of the development pipeline. Most of them will never become a meaningful revenue source for the club. This is a group with almost no commercial return in the narrow sense.

Choosing them means accepting a harder organisational problem. Participants differ sharply in physical condition and daily rhythm, and the structure of each session has to be adjusted continuously rather than locked into a fixed curriculum. This is not communications work. It is operations work.

Programme manager Mert Ahmet Gunduz, in his comments, named four groups at once: Fenerbahce fans, One Team participants, staff, and local residents. That list happens to describe the real operating structure. The programme does not run on an advertising budget; it runs on local relationships. Beko, the club's long-standing sponsor, appears as the resource guaranteeing continuity. In this model, a sponsor is not buying a short campaign but a position in local life, an asset that never appears on a balance sheet yet shapes how a city treats its club in difficult seasons.

Cosea JL Bourg-en-Bresse: the mindset of a coaching staff

The detail that struck me most at Bourg-en-Bresse is the kind of detail media usually skips. Their programme is described as planning each individual session, rather than planning by month or by season. One sentence, but it says a great deal about how this organisation thinks.

In basketball, that is the language of a coaching staff. You never say the team will defend better in March. You say that on Wednesday we change our coverage, and on Friday we adjust our weak-side rotation. Breaking the workload down to the level of a single session is a sign of an organisation that has passed the initial enthusiasm stage and entered genuine operations.

The point worth dwelling on: a small French club is applying the planning discipline of a professional coaching room to community work, while more than a few big clubs still handle this area with a handful of media events per year.

The reported outcome is dry: strong retention and a steady stream of new recruits. To me those are the two most important figures in the entire release, more important than any thank-you quote. In community work, the only trustworthy number is not attendance on opening day, but the share of people who come back in week ten.

Programme manager Mathis Rolly was recognised alongside staff, participants and the local community. That collective framing suits the nature of the work: nobody runs a multi-year programme alone.

Seen from another angle, the Bourg-en-Bresse story reflects a reality of European basketball. Mid-tier clubs cannot compete in the transfer market. They cannot buy stars. But they can build something money cannot buy quickly: a place in the life of their city. When the transfer budget is capped, local standing becomes a different kind of financial space.

Milan and resources from outside

Armani Olimpia Milan won in the education category. Programme manager Michele Samadan was recognised alongside partners Laureus and Scalo Milano. The analytical point is that the club does not carry the programme alone.

This model differs in nature from Fenerbahce's. Fenerbahce ties its programme to a long-term sponsor of its own. Milan extends into an external partner ecosystem, including an organisation active in sport and social work plus a local entity. The benefit is clear: resources beyond the club budget, shared expertise, and access to groups a basketball club struggles to reach alone.

The model also carries a structural risk. When a programme depends on several parties, it depends on all of them wanting to continue. One link withdrawing breaks the momentum, and the participants, who have no voice in budget decisions, are the first to feel it.

In this category I always want to see multi-year contracts and independent third-party evaluation. The release provides neither.

Sasha Vezenkov: the value of small gestures

In the ambassador category, EuroLeague selected Sasha Vezenkov of Olympiacos Piraeus from a group of five candidates. What was recognised is concrete: adherence to his committed schedule, small but genuine gestures rather than staged activities, and continued media presence on official and personal channels.

I think that is a fairly accurate selection criterion, because the ambassador role has a quality many undervalue: it is not measured by peaks, it is measured by consistency. One carefully staged orphanage visit with full camera crew produces a good day. Twelve on-time appearances across a year, most of them with no camera, produce trust. And trust is the only thing that brings someone back a thirteenth time.

The smallest detail on the court is where the biggest truth hides. That holds for work off the court too. You can read a community programme through what never makes the release: whether participants arrive on time, whether they bring friends, and whether the organiser remembers their names the following session.

There is a second layer here, and I want to state it plainly because it affects how we read this kind of story. The ambassador role is not purely giving. For a player building a personal brand, consistent presence in community programmes brings clear image benefits and strengthens relationships with the club and sponsors. Saying so does not diminish Vezenkov's contribution. It simply notes that all community work in professional sport is a form of exchange, and a programme that lasts must be designed so both sides see an advantage. Programmes resting entirely on one person's goodwill usually end when that person's career does.

Programme design: two underrated indicators

Two technical details in the One Team descriptions matter to me more than any quote.

The first is the gender composition of participants. Achieving balanced male and female participation sounds minor, but in practice it is a hard operating problem. Grassroots basketball tends to skew heavily one way for cultural and infrastructural reasons: court access, session times, how the programme is promoted. Balance requires redesigning session hours, team-splitting and outreach, not just posting a recruitment notice. A community programme that is automatically gender-balanced is almost always a programme that has already rebuilt its own structure.

The second is the role of volunteers. A volunteer-based model has a big advantage: low fixed costs, which lets a programme survive periods of shrinking budget. It also has a familiar weakness: quality depends on a small core group, and when one of them leaves for personal reasons the whole programme can lose momentum for months. That is a risk invisible in financial reporting but very visible in the session calendar.

Neither detail comes with hard numbers in the release. But they indicate which programmes are designed to run long, and which are designed for photographs.

A continent-wide model

Across years of following basketball from Chicago, I see a clear difference in how Americans and Europeans organise community work in professional sport.

In the United States, community work is usually tied tightly to a single team and a single city. Players work with schools, hospitals and local organisations where they play. The local character is strong, but links between teams are loose.

EuroLeague runs a different model. The programme is designed at league level, crosses national borders, uses shared criteria, and includes an annual workshop cycle where clubs exchange methods. The organisers describe it as a network of interconnectedness across an entire continent, and that description has substance: the same framework is deployed in Turkey, France, Italy, Slovenia and Greece, working with completely different target groups.

The benefit of a centralised model is scalability. A club does not need to invent a programme from zero; it can learn from a club in another country. That is why the annual workshop matters more than it appears. It is where failures get discussed, and in community work a list of failures is more useful than a list of successes.

But centralisation also creates pressure toward uniformity. When criteria are set at continental level, local programmes tend to adjust to fit those criteria rather than grow according to the real needs of the community next to the gym. This risk is hard to see from outside, and it only surfaces when a programme still looks good on paper while the room is empty on session night.

The numbers missing from the release

This is the part I hesitated over before writing, and eventually decided to write anyway.

The One Team 2026-26 release contains no financial figure. No programme budget, no sponsorship value, no operating cost per participant. Sponsors and partners are named, but the scale of their contribution is not published. Nor is there independent evaluation of participant outcomes, detailed retention data, or comparison between programmes.

Which means most of what we know about the effectiveness of these programmes comes from the organisers themselves. There is nothing ethically wrong here. Social programmes in sport are not required to publish detailed data the way club financial statements are. But readers should know where they stand: we are judging a programme through narrative, not yet through evidence.

The biggest risk in this kind of awards model is not dishonesty. It is pressure to look better than reality. When the reward comes from presentation, organisations have an incentive to optimise the presentation. A programme that keeps twenty participants for a year can be rated lower than one that gathers two hundred for a photo shoot. If a yardstick is not clearly defined, it will select the easiest thing to measure, and in community work the easiest thing to measure is almost always the least meaningful.

There is a further asymmetry rarely mentioned. Community awards naturally favour clubs that already have public relations and partnership infrastructure. A big-market team with a professional communications department tells its story more effectively than a small club with two part-time staff. The awards are fair on criteria, but not fair on storytelling capacity.

That is why I gave more attention here to Bourg-en-Bresse and Fenerbahce. Not because they deserve it more emotionally, but because what they do can be verified through operating structure: session-level planning, retention rates, and participant groups chosen the hard way rather than the easy one.

There are rescues nobody sees, but the club remembers them for life. I still believe that. I would only add one clause: for those quiet rescues not to be forgotten, they need to be recorded in something sturdier than a quote on awards night.

What to watch next cycle

Three signals worth tracking, the way I would mark them in my notebook.

The first is retention at next year's workshop cycle. If the reported figure rises clearly, that is the strongest evidence the programme is taking root. If participation grows while retention stays flat, we are watching an expanded communications campaign, not an expanded community programme.

The second is multi-year commitment from sponsors. A one-year deal means a programme must prove its value from scratch every year, and the energy spent proving it usually comes out of the time spent with participants.

The third is how visible the ambassador group stays for the rest of the season. This indicator is easily undervalued, but it says a lot about whether the ambassador role is a line on a player's profile or a genuine part of his calendar.

The real star is not the one who scores, but the one who makes scoring easier for others. In professional basketball that line usually describes passers and screeners. It applies just as well to the people running gym sessions for the elderly in Istanbul, planning each individual session in Bourg-en-Bresse, and opening a classroom in Milan. They do not appear on the score sheet. They make participation easier for people who never imagined they had a place inside a basketball arena.

The court never lies, we are simply not patient enough to hear it breathe. One Team sessions are the same. No shot there decides a game, yet a different kind of truth is being recorded, slowly, by the very people who showed up, and came back.