Maccabi Tel Aviv Ask Cyprus to Host Their EuroLeague Home Games Before the September 30 Clash With Beşiktaş

On September 30, Maccabi Tel Aviv will play their first EuroLeague home game of the season against Beşiktaş. The official league schedule still lists Belgrade as the venue. Meanwhile, according to a report published by CyprusBasket, the Israeli club's management has formally asked the Republic of Cyprus to let the team use the country as its home base this season. The two arenas considered the strongest candidates are "Spyros Kyprianou" in Limassol and "Tassos Papadopoulos" in Nicosia. A decision is expected within days, because the clock is running down to the Beşiktaş fixture.

Skim it and this looks like a story about renting a court. Read it properly and it is the story of Israel's biggest club trying to escape two years of living on someone else's property.

Two years as a tenant

Last season Maccabi used Belgrade as its EuroLeague home, except for the window in which the league allowed Israeli clubs to return to their own arenas, when both Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv were permitted back. Oded Kattash's team therefore existed with two addresses: domestic league games in Tel Aviv, EuroLeague games in Serbia. Each game carrying the label of a home fixture in Belgrade meant a flight of almost three hours, a hotel, a practice in a place that was not home, and a trip back to Israel immediately after the final buzzer.

People tend to judge home courts by the scoreboard. But a EuroLeague season runs past thirty rounds, and every small change in geography multiplies into hundreds of flight hours, dozens of days lost from the training calendar, and hundreds of recovery sessions cut short. That is the kind of detail that never shows up in a box score but decides how much a team has left in its legs in April.

The first contact between Maccabi and the Cypriot side did not happen in an official meeting room. It happened around the tournament named "Neophytos Chandriotis", in which the Israeli club was one of the participants. The person who handled the talks directly was Simon Mizrahi, the club's emblematic owner. That detail is worth pausing on: an administrative staffer scouting venues is routine. The owner sitting down at the table makes it a strategic priority.

According to the report, the Republic of Cyprus views the request favourably. The two leading candidates are "Spyros Kyprianou" in Limassol and "Tassos Papadopoulos" in Nicosia. Nothing has been signed, but the direction is clear.

Forty minutes in the air is worth more than a beautiful arena

Cyprus sits in the same time zone as Israel. Belgrade is an hour behind. That sounds small, and it is only the visible part. The hidden part is flight time: Tel Aviv to Larnaca is roughly forty minutes in the air, while Tel Aviv to Belgrade is close to three hours. A home game in Serbia swallows almost two full days for the squad. A home game in Cyprus can be organised as a morning flight out, an evening tip-off, and a night flight back. For a team playing more than thirty rounds on top of a packed domestic schedule, that is the single biggest saving a change-of-address request can deliver.

Based on my experience tracking these games, big clubs usually lose not because they lack talent but because of accumulation. One extra flight hour per week, multiplied across thirty rounds and combined with time-zone shifts, produces a team that is half a step slower in the fourth quarter. That half step is exactly what visiting teams in the EuroLeague live on.

And the crowd? This is the least discussed part of the whole story. Cyprus is one of the few nearby countries with a substantial Israeli resident community, particularly around Limassol, served by short, cheap and frequent commercial flights. A "home" game in Cyprus can be filled by people who genuinely support Maccabi rather than curious onlookers. In Belgrade, Maccabi still drew Israeli fans, but it was a self-selecting group: you needed a passport, a few days off, and a not-insignificant budget. Cyprus lowers every one of those thresholds.

The choice between Limassol and Nicosia is therefore not only about capacity. Limassol offers the demographic advantage and proximity to Larnaca airport; Nicosia carries the institutional weight of a capital and national-scale arenas. But the EuroLeague does not allow venues to be picked on sentiment. The league sets standards on minimum capacity, lighting systems, media areas, locker rooms and hotels within travelling distance. An architecturally beautiful arena can still be rejected if the press-conference corridor cannot seat thirty journalists.

The real variable: the schedule and security

Maccabi's first home game is against Beşiktaş. That fact turns the change-of-address request into a state-level problem rather than a lease problem. A game between an Israeli club and a Turkish club on Cypriot soil requires government-level security guarantees, along with a decision on whether away supporters will be admitted at all. No private arena operator can handle that part alone.

EuroLeague still lists Belgrade as the venue, simply because nothing has been signed. But if the Cyprus move becomes reality, the league itself must redo its entire logistics chain: referees, broadcast crews, hotels and the travel plans of nine different opponents. Every opponent has been planning a trip to Serbia for months. Changing the venue at this stage is a genuine administrative headache, and that is exactly why a decision has to arrive in days rather than weeks.

Euro 2026 taught me a lesson: a hot take does not need to be right, it needs to be on time. A request filed three weeks late comes back with a form letter. A request filed before September 30 can open a new era for Maccabi in Europe.

This is also not the first time European basketball has had to live with the idea of a neutral home court. The 2026 NBA Bubble had no fans. I could only listen to myself, and I learned that when the outside noise disappears, what remains is the quality of the roster, not the address of the arena. Maccabi has played two seasons by exactly that principle.

Where I could be wrong

Maccabi's problem this season is not an address. It is an office. Yam Madar cannot currently be registered to play in the EuroLeague because of the debt the club owes to Hapoel Tel Aviv. At the same time, Maccabi have just crushed Dimitris Itoudis's side to win the Israeli Super Cup. Winning on the floor, stuck in the paperwork. A gleaming arena in Limassol does not solve that, and if I focused only on the venue story I would have let the more important story slip past me.

A second possibility: this request may be a negotiating tool. Two years in Belgrade is enough for a temporary arrangement to harden into a habit. No major club wants to enter a third season in that state without creating pressure. Making the Cyprus request public, precisely as EuroLeague is finalising its schedule, may be far more effective than an internal letter. A transfer is never real until I write it as real, and so is a venue switch: it only becomes real when there is a signature.

A third possibility: I may be overrating home-court advantage. For a club that has grown used to playing on neutral ground for two straight years, moving from one neutral venue to another does not produce a large difference in points. Its real value lies in player health and in the feeling of playing in front of your own crowd, two things that never appear in the standings until the season reaches its decisive stretch.

The call

My judgement is that the request will be approved, and that Maccabi will host Beşiktaş on Cypriot soil. If that happens, it will be the first time in years the club has a home court its supporters can genuinely fill without a long journey. But the number that will decide Maccabi's season is not the capacity of a new arena. It is the number of players the club is allowed to register when the first round tips off, and no diplomatic letter can change that number.

Sports culture is an endless argument after the final buzzer. The question worth tracking over the coming days is not whether Maccabi play in Limassol or Nicosia, but whether a new home court is enough to hold together a roster that is currently tied up in an office.