The Geography of Euroleague Basketball: Spatial Inequality, Travel Exposure and Home-Court Advantage in a Transnational League

This study conceptualizes the EuroLeague as a transnational urban network and tests whether spatial position and nominal travel distance are associated with competitive outcomes. The design integrates three empirical layers: (i) a longitudinal spatial panel covering the league-format era from 2016-17 to 2025-26; (ii) a completed 2025- 26 cross-section of 20 clubs in 17 nominal urban nodes and 11 countries; and (iii) a game-level model based on 1,943 available regular-season games from seven analytically retained seasons between 2016-17 and 2024-25. Great-circle distances were calculated between standardized club-city coordinates. Territorial concentration was assessed with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), spatial inequality with a normalized Structural Travel Burden Index, and home-win probability with logistic regression controlling for pre-game Elo difference, rest-day difference and season effects, with two-way cluster-robust inference by home and away team. The 2025-26 network had a mean pairwise distance of 1,765 km; Dubai Basketball increased the contemporaneous mean by 17.8% relative to the same network without Dubai and had a mean opponent distance of 4,163 km, compared with 1,288 km for Virtus Bologna. Country participation became less concentrated across the league-format era (HHI 0.148 in 2016-17 versus 0.110 in 2025- 26), although spatial extent fluctuated substantially and was not monotonically increasing. In the game-level sample, home teams won 62.2% of games. After adjustment, an additional 1,000 km of nominal inter-city distance was not significantly associated with home victory (OR=1.04, 95% CI 0.98-1.10, p=0.173), whereas a 100-point pre-game Elo advantage strongly increased the odds of home victory (OR=2.64, 95% CI 2.21-3.16). Championship success from 2000-01 to 2025-26 was markedly more concentrated geographically than current participation. The findings show that geography creates measurable inequalities in travel exposure, but spatial distance alone should not be interpreted as deterministic fatigue or competitive disadvantage. EuroLeague geography is best understood as a dynamic interaction among urban location, institutional design, scheduling, team quality and geopolitical contingencies.