In Part A, we went over various ambitious sports projects involving Messi and Ronaldo and saw that it’s not so simple to build a “Galacticos” team that will conquer Europe overnight. In Part B, we’ll start getting closer to projects that more closely resemble the phenomenon that traveled from drive-ins on rivers of money, through Bulgaria’s finest arenas, and into a EuroLeague playoff series in its debut season. Hapoel Tel Aviv, in case you forgot.

There are quite a few reasons why the picture looks much less bleak in basketball than in soccer and why the chances that big money will translate into sporting success are significantly higher. First of all, a basic soccer squad includes at least 25 players, while a 15-man basketball roster is considered unusually deep. That means the number of players you need to acquire is much smaller and each signing has a relatively larger impact on what happens on the court than on the pitch, not to mention the greater effectiveness of the bench in basketball.

It’s also very important that in the EuroLeague and the NBA, unlike in soccer competitions, teams are much less affected by poor performances in previous seasons, both professionally and financially, making it easier to bounce back. Of course, market forces are completely different; the sums in basketball are significantly lower, contracts are shorter and transfer windows are longer. The player market (especially in Europe) is far more fluid in basketball, making it easier for teams to rebuild every season. There are certainly more reasons (to the comfort of reader Loni Herzikovitz), and still, even in Europe and even more so in the NBA, building a winning roster is not a simple task. It’s a process that usually requires more strategic planning, not just financial resources. Ask Maccabi Tel Aviv. Ask the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Ask the Brooklyn Nets, who sold their future to bring in Durant, Kyrie and Harden to rescue them from some very sleepy years. You can’t know what would have happened if KD’s foot had been two centimeters further back at the end of Game 7 against the Bucks (who went on from there to win the championship) in the Eastern Conference semifinals, but that was the last time the Nets flirted with real competitiveness and likely will for a while, at least until Ben Saraf and Danny Wolf take them all the way, speedily in our days. There’s no shortage of other examples of star-studded teams built for the short term that quickly evaporated: Phoenix 2023 (Durant, Booker and Beal), Oklahoma City 2017 (Westbrook, Melo and Paul George), and the Lakers 2012 (Nash and Howard alongside Pau and Kobe).

The most famous “Galacticos” in the NBA was probably also the most successful. I’m not talking about Golden State with Kevin Durant, mainly because the Warriors won a championship and recorded the best regular season in history without him. I’m talking about the Miami Heat’s “Big Three.” In the summer of 2010, Pat Riley managed to unite Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James. With each of them at the peak of his career, the trio immediately created a monster that threatened to dominate the league for many years. Although over its four seasons the trio reached the NBA Finals every year and won back-to-back championships (2012 and 2013), Miami failed to meet the enormous expectations placed on it by its stars. LeBron promised “not one, not two, […], not six and not seven,” but in reality, the superteam lost two Finals series, one to Dirk Nowitzki in the role of the ultimate underdog and the other to Gregg Popovich’s veteran San Antonio team, which was the antithesis of everything resembling a Galacticos squad.

Back to Europe, perhaps the best comparison to the Tel Aviv Galacticos is between two teams that built nearly their entire roster from scratch, one achieved immediate success, while the other endured ongoing failure. In the summer of 2023, Dimitris Giannakopoulos returned to manage Panathinaikos after years of drought in the EuroLeague and opened his wallet wide. Ataman arrived from Anadolu and was given an almost entirely new roster: Kostas Sloukas came from Olympiacos, Mathias Lessort from Partizan, along with Juancho Hernangómez, Luca Vildoza, Dinos Mitoglou, Ioannis Papapetrou, Jerian Grant and even Kostas Antetokounmpo (brother of…). Kendrick Nunn completed the puzzle in a season that included a comeback series win over Maccabi (Wade Baldwin, Lorenzo Brown and Bonzie Colson), and a dominant Final Four performance that capped off a perfect Galacticos season and sent a few liters of ego straight to the heads of Giannakopoulos and Ataman.

Two years earlier, in the summer of 2021, when Partizan Belgrade was on the brink, Željko Obradović returned after 28 years of a legendary career. He received a blank check and built a roster aimed like Hapoel Tel Aviv at winning the EuroCup and returning to the EuroLeague after eight years. Despite the additions of stars like Lessort, Zach LeDay, Kevin Punter and Yam Madar, Partizan did not make it past the quarterfinals. Fortunately for them, they secured a EuroLeague spot, strengthened the roster further, and came within one win of the Final Four in a series against Real Madrid during which a wild brawl broke out and shook all of Europe. In the next two seasons, Obradović failed to achieve anything despite strong financial backing, and this season, alongside his resignation, Partizan completely fell apart.

So of course it’s difficult to compare soccer and basketball. Of course you can’t compare Chris Jones, Antonio Blakeney and Elijah Bryant to Chris Bosh, Wade and LeBron. True, Hapoel Tel Aviv hasn’t won the EuroLeague (yet), and maybe the project under Itoudis is destined for the same ending as those of Željko Obradović, Eyal Berkovic and Loni Herzikovitz. But at this point in time, the professional success story of the Hapoel Tel Aviv-style Galacticos, especially in historical perspective is nothing short of phenomenal. But is it the greatest?