EuroLeague

The EuroLeague, known as the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague for sponsorship reasons, is a European professional basketball club competition. The league is widely recognised as the top-tier league in Europe. The league consists of 18 teams, of which 16 are given long-term licences and wild cards, making the league a semi-closed league. The league was first organized by FIBA in 1958, subsequently by ULEB in 2000 and then solely the Euroleague Basketball. The competition was introduced in 1958 as the FIBA European Champions Cup (renamed to the FIBA EuroLeague in 1996), which operated under FIBA's umbrella until Euroleague Basketball was created for the 2000–01 season. The FIBA European Champions Cup and the EuroLeague are considered to be the same competition, with the change of name being simply a re-branding. The EuroLeague is one of the most popular indoor sports leagues in the world, with an average attendance of 8,780 for league matches in the 2017–18 season. This was the fifth-highest of any professional indoor sports league in the world (the highest outside the United States), and the second-highest of any professional basketball league in the world, only behind the National Basketball Association (NBA). The EuroLeague title has been won by 22 clubs, 14 of which have won the title more than once. The most successful club in the competition is Real Madrid, with ten titles. The current champion is Anadolu Efes, which defeated Real Madrid in the 2022 final, winning the club's second and back-to-back Euroleague title.