Dubai attracting skilled workers from Europe and North America is nothing new.
With approximately 3.9 million residents, fewer than 10 percent are Emirati citizens, according to a 2024 government report. But the city of skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates has never been a magnet for basketball players. At least not until last year.
Formed less than two years ago, Dubai Basketball will begin playing next month in the EuroLeague, widely considered the second-best basketball competition in the world, and is the first sports team based in the Emirate to compete in an international league.
Dejan Kamenjašević is one of the leading characters in this meteoric sporting rise. A Bosnian who grew up in Spain, the 50-year-old arrived in Dubai 11 years ago with an ambition to grow the sport and eventually build a franchise that would compete at the highest level.
“At that time, people were laughing at me and joking with me, and I was a crazy guy who is saying some nonsense things,” Kamenjašević told The Athletic. “But time sometimes puts everyone in our place.”
How did Kamenjašević achieve his dream so quickly? And will the franchise transform basketball in the Middle East and beyond? After all, players from the NBA and some top European teams have already been recruited.
Kamenjašević, now Dubai Basketball’s general manager, had enjoyed a successful career as both a player and coach before relocating to Dubai. His last job before moving to the Middle East was as an assistant coach at EuroLeague club Baskonia in Spain’s Basque Country.
In September 2014, Kamenjašević set up a basketball academy in his new home city with his friend Bojan Bajec, Dubai Basketball’s technical director. “We first had two kids outside in 45 degrees in the park, and this is how it really all starts,” Kamenjašević recalled.
Two years later, 300 children were training with the academy. The pair collaborated with schools, too. Kamenjašević’s vision then got bigger.
He gave an interview to local media saying Dubai could one day have a team in the EuroLeague which, much like the Champions League is to soccer on the continent, is the pinnacle of European basketball. This season, 20 of Europe’s best teams, which also take part in their domestic leagues, will compete against each other.
The possibility of forming a club became more realistic when Kamenjašević was introduced to Emirati businessman Abdullah Al Naboodah in 2020 via mutual friend Ahmed bin Sulayem, a basketball enthusiast and CEO of the multinational logistics company DP (Dubai Ports) World.
“When you make a deal with Abdullah Al Naboodah, who is from one of the most influential families in Dubai and one of the most influential families in UAE, with very strong connections with the royal family, everything is easier, but everything is more difficult as well,” Kamenjašević said of the man who has held various positions in Dubai sports.
“Everything is easier from the perspective of the sky’s the limit, but also you have a lot more responsibility and a lot more work to do, because it is not the same working for Abdullah than for anyone else here in Dubai. Abdullah is asking only for excellent results.”
Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena hosts Dubai Basketball games and various concerts. (Courtesy of Dubai Basketball)
The stars began to align when the 17,000-seat Coca-Cola Arena opened in June 2019, later becoming the franchise’s first home.
With an arena and an investment in place, they were granted a three-year ABA League license in January 2024, a competition consisting of clubs from southeastern Europe — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia — and also two EuroLeague heavyweights in Red Star Belgrade and KK Partizan.
Dubai Basketball then had nine months to spring into life, a task which felt almost impossible to Kamenjašević. Everything came down to the wire ahead of the first game against the league’s reigning champions, Red Star, on Sept. 22, 2024.
Until the eve of the first game, the court was still being adjusted to fit regulations. The reason the team wears black and white jerseys? That is all kit manufacturer Adidas could manage at such short notice.
“This is a story from a movie, and it shows that in Dubai, miracles can happen,” Kamenjašević said.
Dejan Kamenjašević celebrates with Dubai Basketball players. (Courtesy of Dubai Basketball)
Kamenjašević managed to assemble a strong roster. Dāvis Bertāns joined after an eight-year career in the NBA, and former ABA League MVP Kenan Kamenjaš was recruited from Budućnost in Montenegro.
Head coach Jurica Golemac told The Athletic the opening game was a “dream come true.” The win, he said, gave them belief. Dubai beat Red Star 86-84 in what was the standout moment of an inaugural season where they finished third in the league with a 25-5 record and advanced to the playoff semifinals.
“The first game was pretty emotional, because we didn’t know what to expect with the fans, with the gym and with our team, even though we played preparation games,” Golemac said.
What awaits Dubai Basketball next month will be an altogether different test given they have been catapulted into the expanded EuroLeague, which consists of storied franchises such as Spain’s 11-time winners Real Madrid and Greece’s Panathinaikos, a team filled with ex-NBA talent.
Thirteen clubs are EuroLeague shareholders (although CSKA Moscow are currently suspended due to international sanctions against Russia). Dubai were among five wildcards approved in June — meaning they didn’t have to go through the usual qualification route — and were given a five-year license, two years longer than the others.
For the EuroLeague itself, which began discussions with Dubai in 2022, the franchise was an appealing potential partner. In a statement, EuroLeague CEO Paulius Motiejūnas told The Athletic the five-year license would provide Dubai Basketball with long-term stability and reflected not only the league’s commitment to “supporting sustainable, strategic growth in emerging markets” but the unique nature of the “Dubai project” and its aim of becoming a “key driver of basketball development in the UAE.”
Joining the EuroLeague while the NBA seeks to expand in Europe could be seen as risky. Have Dubai backed the wrong horse?
“Any other partner who wants to come to Europe in the future needs to come with EuroLeague and with all 20 of their teams currently with a long-term license,” Kamenjašević said.
Roster building has continued this summer and will be key to the team’s success given they are set to play multiple times a week. Former NBA players Dwayne Bacon, Justin Anderson and McKinley Wright IV have joined, as has Džanan Musa, EuroLeague champion and the 29th pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, from Real Madrid.
Dwayne Bacon playing for the L.A. Lakers in October 2022. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Being able to offer EuroLeague basketball makes Dubai appealing to players, so attracting new recruits has not been a problem, even on modest wage bills. The club says it had a €4.2m ($4.9m) payroll last year, sixth in the ABA League, which will increase next year to €16 m ($18.65m). The EuroLeague’s new salary cap is €8m ($9.33m), though there are exceptions and a luxury tax.
Most teams in Europe rely on recruitment rather than developing talent, which means success can be achieved with smart signings.
Aris Barkas — founder of Eurohoops, one of the first publications to cover European basketball in English — said: “All the young, top talent of Europe goes to the NCAA because of NIL. I think that in European basketball, if you suddenly get the ability to spend (moderately), you can be competitive in every level.”
For Bertāns, who became aware of Dubai’s potential after his agent moved there a few years ago, a three-year deal was particularly enticing.
“After being traded in the NBA for the last few seasons, in season and in the summer, the moves for the family were just getting harder, with the kids having to find new schools.” he told The Athletic. “If I come from the NBA, with eight years there, I made more money than I probably need, and I’m still going to come to every practice and give 100 percent effort that just sets an example.”
Dāvis Bertāns (left) was the 42nd pick in the NBA Draft in 2011. (Jacob Kupferman / Getty Images)
The Middle East has hosted a number of major sporting events, often leading to accusations of sportswashing, essentially the use of sport to clean tarnished reputations or distract from a government’s negative actions or policies.
For the last three years, the NBA has held preseason games in Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, drawing criticism from human rights activists. According to Amnesty International, last year the UAE, an autocratic state, “continued to criminalize the right to freedom of expression through multiple laws and to punish actual or perceived critics of the government.”
Barkas, who also acts as the communication officer for the EuroLeague Head Coaches Board, did not believe Dubai would gain much politically by joining the EuroLeague.
“If Dubai wants something like (sportswashing), the EuroLeague is not an ideal vehicle to do it,” he said. “They can do it with many other popular sports that have much more influence.”
But Dubai Basketball’s EuroLeague inclusion hasn’t been welcomed by everyone. Andreas Zagklis, secretary general of the International Basketball Association (FIBA), told The Athletic: “For us, including a team from outside Europe, meaning outside European FIBA membership, is not something we approve of and it is something we will discuss both with ECA (Euroleague Commercial Assets, the shareholders) as well as with our membership.” FIBA is part of negotiations with the NBA on a European league.
For those who dispute Dubai’s place in European competition, Kamenjašević points that Maccabi Tel Aviv are part of the EuroLeague, one of two teams from Israel that will compete in the tournament this upcoming season.
“I’m laughing all the time when people say Dubai cannot be part of the EuroLeague because it’s not part of Europe, and we need to be traditional,” he said. “I’m saying to myself, the name of the league is just the name. It can be Carrefour supermarket, but at the end of the day, you need to understand what is the growth map of the EuroLeague is for the future. This is important.”
Head coach Jurica Golemac is a former forward/center who represented Slovenia. (Courtesy of Dubai Basketball)
Dubai’s geographical location means there will be a lot of travelling this season.
A journey to Madrid is approximately a 3,500-mile flight, representing the team’s furthest trip, while their closest opponents are in Istanbul, Turkey, 1,800 miles away. The team will be in the air for the equivalent of 21 days next season to play their EuroLeague opponents and compete in the ABA League, according to Golemac.
“We are not going to have the time to prepare,” he said. “This is what is worrying me the most as a coach, because a lot of players are going to be with their national team, so they are not going to be with us during the pre-season training camp. Then this amount of traveling is going to be something that nobody has done before. Traveling every two, three days to Europe and back, this is going to be challenging.”
The team mostly took commercial flights last season, but are expected to have chartered flights next season, Bertāns said.
“Sometimes, when it was available, the royal family supplied one of their planes. And that was an unbelievable experience. In Dubai, they have a separate royal terminal, and that was, I gotta say, better flights than the NBA.”
The burning question as the new season approaches: Will fans come to watch, and can Dubai quickly build a fan base? Dubai Basketball had 72,919 visitors to their arena across their 19 home games last campaign, averaging around 3,800 per game.
Bertāns remembers bumping into compatriots at a mall who didn’t know Dubai had a basketball team.
“They try to escape the cold and come (to Dubai) for a week,” he recalled. “Some don’t even know; like, they might meet me in a mall and they’re like, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I’m like, ‘I play here! We have a team.’”
Barkas added: “Their first season was so and so, the audience clearly was dependent on who was visiting. I know that Dubai wants to do things businesslike; they don’t want to throw money down the drain.
“They want what they do to have financial meaning. But the big question for Dubai, and also the big question for the new teams that may arise in the NBA Europe project, will be the fan base. It’s very hard to create a really solid fan base from scratch, especially in places where there is no basketball tradition.”
The next five years will decide Dubai Basketball’s fate, its future in the EuroLeague and, perhaps, European basketball more widely.
(Top photo courtesy of Dubai Basketball)