When Home Is No Longer Home: Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Erased Advantage on the EuroLeague Map

There is one number that almost no Asian newsroom bothered to mention this week: 0. That is the number of genuine home games Maccabi Tel Aviv played in EuroLeague last season. The most storied club in Israeli basketball did not set foot on the parquet in Tel Aviv for an entire campaign. Every "home game" took place in a different country, thousands of kilometers from the border, in front of a stand where not a single Israeli sat in the front row.

This week, a meeting was held in Abu Dhabi. Chus Bueno, CEO of EuroLeague, and Diego Gijón, the league's competitions director, sat with Shimon Mizrahi, president of Maccabi Tel Aviv, and Claudio Coldebella, the club's sporting director. The agenda: whether the three Israeli teams could return to play at home. The short answer: nothing has changed. And within the next two weeks, Bueno and Gijón will travel to Israel themselves for an on-site assessment.

Three Israeli teams currently compete in the EuroLeague system. All of them must play their home games abroad. The stated reason: the situation in the Middle East and international conflict. But what those reports never say is that this has stretched across multiple seasons and is quietly rewriting one of the unwritten laws of elite basketball — the law of home-court advantage.

I still remember the game I rewatched three times just to verify one detail: when Maccabi Tel Aviv played a "home game" in Belgrade, the stands were full of local fans, but the chants never matched the rhythm of the yellow-shirted team. There was a strange gap of silence after every one of their possessions. Not an eerie silence — a cold one. That was the moment I understood that some losses never appear on the scoreboard, and no stats sheet can measure them.

When an advantage stops being an advantage

Basketball is built on an almost religious premise: home court is worth between two and four points per game. The NBA has measured it for decades. EuroLeague too. Predictive models from sports analytics firms all default to adding a home-court coefficient to every game before producing a line. That premise survives because it is true: home crowds change referees, change the breathing rhythm of players, change even the way a coach calls a timeout.

So what happens when that premise is stripped from a team?

Last season, while analyzing Maccabi's data at neutral-site "home games," I found something that surprised even me: their shooting percentage in the final two minutes of games dropped noticeably compared to historical data from Tel Aviv. Never mind the absolute number — the size of the drop is the point. It did not come with a corresponding drop in mid-game possessions. This tells us something very specific about competitive psychology: players do not lose their skill in clutch situations — they lose the familiar signal from the stands that normally serves as a psychological anchor for late-game shots. When the chant is no longer the chant of your own people, the body still moves, but the mind can no longer automatically find its footing.

Three overlapping layers of loss

There is no single formula that fully accounts for a team being stripped of its home court. But from the multi-season travel data, I see losses stacking in three layers, and these three layers amplify each other in ways that people who only read final scores will never see.

First layer: the itinerary. An Israeli team competing in EuroLeague flies more than any other club in the competition. Not just because of geography, but because they must route through neutral venues for every "home" game. Cumulatively, the kilometers logged per season far exceed the threshold that strength-and-conditioning experts recommend for optimal recovery. Recovery after long-haul flights is a variable with a formula — and when that formula is broken, the data will talk. That is not a feeling, that is biology.

Second layer: unfamiliar floors. Every arena has a bounce coefficient, a lighting profile, a crowd-decibel range that home players adapt to within weeks. The Israeli teams must re-adapt from scratch at every venue change. For clubs whose identity rests on three-point shooting and precise pick-and-roll execution, that gap has a price — reflected in average shooting percentages rather than in highlight reels.

Third layer: psychological capital. This is the layer data cannot measure directly, yet it is the layer that decides the most. A home game is not just 48 minutes of basketball. It is a ritual: parents in the stands, neighbors calling out players' names, kids asking for autographs after the final whistle. When all of that is taken away, part of a player's psychological motor floats. Nothing fully replaces it. This is also why great clubs collapse not because they are weak, but because they forget that they were once small — they forget which ritual fed them.

The Abu Dhabi meeting is not a political story

There is a lazy way to read any news item about Israel and EuroLeague: it is politics. I do not deny the geopolitical element — it is the root cause. But as someone who tracks the league with data rather than headlines, I see in the Abu Dhabi meeting an operational dimension that is far more consequential.

EuroLeague leadership is being forced to answer a hard question that is rarely asked in public: does the competition still want to preserve the concept of a "home game" in the classical sense? Or is it, silently, accepting that a portion of its competition will permanently exist in neutral form?

That question is systemic, not sentimental. Because if neutral venues become the long-term norm, the league will have to restructure its calendar, renegotiate its sponsorship agreements, and redefine the concept of "host" in its rulebook. This is not a three-season problem — this is a structural problem.

I once wrote about a similar theme while following Japanese youth basketball, where teams had to play home games in arenas far from the city center due to a lack of facilities. I was 16 then, building a hand-made Excel sheet tracking 15 games for a U18 player I believed would go far. I never guessed that simple tracking skill would help me understand a EuroLeague structural issue nearly a decade later.

What the headlines leave out

This is the point I consider most important, and it runs counter to the way most reports are framing the story.

When a team plays at a neutral venue, the first question the media asks is: does that team get to play home games? The answer given is usually "no, but they still compete, they still score." That answer is administratively correct but tactically wrong. Because what is lost is not a location — it is a system of signals.

Data does not lie, but the people who read it do. A coach looking at the scoreboard will see "14 wins, 8 losses at neutral venues" and conclude his team just needs to try harder. But an analyst looking at secondary indicators will see a different pattern: late-possession efficiency falling, turnover rate rising in contested situations, and early-game focus diminishing. These three phenomena do not occur together by chance. They all point to the same thing: when a team loses its home court, it loses part of its ability to sustain peak performance — and it loses it at the most decisive moment of the game.

I have asked myself: do the EuroLeague powerbrokers see this? The answer is probably yes, but they are reassuring themselves with a convenient argument: "We still let them play." That argument is correct if the criterion is the existence of three Israeli teams in the league. But it is wrong if the criterion is fairness. Because home court in elite basketball is not a privilege — it is part of the tactical architecture, priced into every model, taught in every syllabus.

Japan taught me this

I live in Tokyo and host a basketball podcast for the Japanese market. There is a detail I often mention on air that few people think about: in the B.League, clubs without a long historical tradition often have to rebuild home-court culture from zero every time they change location. For them, "home-court advantage" is not inherited — it is created slowly, through hundreds of community events, thousands of tickets for local kids, dozens of open practices.

When I watch Maccabi Tel Aviv forced to play in Belgrade or some other neutral city, I see the opposite image: a club with a massive stand tradition, born in packed houses of chanting, suddenly placed in a situation where it must reconstruct every signal from scratch every time it takes the floor.

For a basketball club, the treasure is not in the players — the treasure is in the stands. Any player can be bought. A stand cannot. That is why I argue that home-court advantage in Maccabi's case is not merely a tactical issue — it is a matter of club identity.

What lies at the end of the road

Within the next two weeks, Chus Bueno and Diego Gijón will be on the ground in Israel. This on-site assessment could open one of two doors. First: security conditions permit the return of games, and EuroLeague will establish a timeline for returning home. Second: conditions remain unsuitable, and the league will have to formalize long-term neutral-venue arrangements.

My interest is not in those two doors — those are operational outcomes. My interest is a question that has not been asked at the right moment: if EuroLeague formalizes neutral venues as a long-term model, is the league prepared to adjust its predictive models, its scheduling regulations, and its sponsorship policies to reflect the structural unfairness it has created?

Because in basketball, saying "we still let them play" is an easy answer. Saying "we will compensate for the advantage they lost" is the answer of a league that is genuinely serious about the concept of fairness. And sometimes, how an organization handles a team stripped of its home court will reveal more about its nature than any final it stages.