Euroleague, organized by ULEB (European Basketball Leagues Union), is a relatively new competition created in season 2000-01 as an alternative tournament to FIBA's SuproLeague (which is, in time, a sequel of the traditional Champions Cup). After a coexistence of one year, the latter disappeared at the beginning of season 2001-02, and from that moment on Euroleague became the most important club competition in Europe.

After the discrepancies (basically economic in nature) among ULEB, FIBA, and the European clubs during the summer of 2000, an unprecedented schism took place in European basketball, after which two high-level club competitions arose: SuproLeague (FIBA) and Euroleague (ULEB). Except for a few—although remarkable—exceptions, the best basketball teams in Europe decided to participate in the new ULEB competition, expecting a better management of their revenues. Thus, during season 2000-01 the "rebel" and "commercial" Euroleague co-existed with the "official" FIBA tournaments (among which SuproLeague was the main competitor of the former). At the beginning of season 2001-02, however, following the irreconcilable disagreement between FIBA and ULEB to unify their two top competitions, the International Federation decided to give up the organization of SuproLeague, after 43 years of history, thus leaving ULEB's Euroleague as the main European club competition.

NOTES

• Official ULEB scores and statistics extended and corrected with multilingual edition. Additional information sources: basketball magazine Gigantes (1985-) and newspapers El Mundo Deportivo (1941-), Marca (1942-) and As (1967-).

• Visit the official Euroleague site for a more detailed information on this tournament.