The basketball country

VILNIUS - There are two kinds of sports in Lithuania: basketball, and the rest. Basketball occupies the same share of Lithuanians’ hearts as football does in the majority of other European nations. The biggest business interests related to sport are also concentrated around basketball.

The Lithuanian sports industry has felt some influence from the global economic crisis. The Baltics are represented in the Euroleague, which is the league of Europe’s strongest and richest basketball clubs, by two Lithuanian clubs - current Lithuanian champion Vilnius Lietuvos Rytas, and Kaunas Zalgiris. Last week it became clear that Kaunas Zalgiris will continue its fight among the Top 16 teams of the Euroleague, while the Vilnius club did not make it because of last week’s annoying defeat, by 71-73, against Malaga Unicaja despite the screams and shouts of 10,000 supporters who gathered to watch this game in Vilnius’ Siemens Arena, which is one of the best basketball arenas in Europe. Vilniusites will continue to watch the Euroleague on the telly because of Kaunas Zalgiris and the rest of the Euroleague clubs, as the majority of these clubs have some Lithuanians on their teams.

Lietuvos Rytas started the 2008-2009 season with a 12 million litas (3.5 million euro) budget. That year was the dreams-coming-true season for Lietuvos Rytas. It won the President’s Cup, Baltic League, Lithuanian League, Lithuanian Cup and its second Eurocup trophy. In all of these competitions, except the Eurocup, its main rival was Kaunas Zalgiris. In the Eurocup final, Lietuvos Rytas defeated Khimki of the Moscow region which has a several times larger budget and superstars from all over the world.

This season of 2009-2010, Lietuvos Rytas’ budget is just six million litas. It did not manage to keep its previous season’s stars - Chuck Eidson, Mindaugas Lukauskis and Marijonas Petravicius. The club belongs to the daily Lietuvos Rytas. It is an extremely rare international practice when the daily paper owns a professional sports team. The crisis year 2009 was difficult for the newspaper business because of dropping income from advertisements as well as an increase in state-imposed taxes. The basketball club’s chairman of the board is Jonas Vainauskas, son of Gedvydas Vainauskas, the main owner and editor-in-chief of Lietuvos Rytas.

The Lietuvos Rytas basketball club, contrary to the absolute majority of the rest of Euroleague’s clubs, has no Americans on its team this season though it has four foreigners - three Serbs (now one of them will be replaced by a Bosnian) and one Australian, while the main player of Kaunas Zalgiris is American Marcus Brown.

One of Zalgiris’ numerous sponsors is the daily Respublika which is the main rival of Lietuvos Rytas in Lithuania’s media market. In 2009, Kaunas Zalgiris was on the edge of bankruptcy. In May, 2009, it was saved by Lithuanian businessman Vladimir Romanov’s Lithuanian bank, Ukio Bankas. Romanov bought the main stake of shares of Kaunas Zalgiris, the pride of his childhood’s city. Now, the Kaunas club for the first time plays its Euroleague games without the inscription “Zalgiris” on its uniform. There are inscriptions advertising Zalgiris’ sponsors instead. Those inscriptions are “Ukio Bankas” and “PZU Lietuva” (the latter is an insurance company).

Romanov is majority shareholder of the Ukio Bankas Investment Group. This group will also manage the basketball arena, with a capacity of 15,000 spectators, in Kaunas. The arena’s construction is financed by the Kaunas municipality and EU funds. The new arena, on the island in the River Nemunas, which crosses Kaunas, will be completed by this October. It will host the European men’s basketball championship of 2011. The championship will be held in six Lithuanian cities.
On Jan. 18, Ukio Bankas Investment Group and the Kaunas municipality signed a deal. According to this agreement, Ukio Bankas Investment Group will control the new arena during the next 25 years paying to the Kaunas municipality 300,000 litas each year in rent concessions.

Earlier, during the negotiations, Ukio Bankas Investment Group promised to hold Euroleague’s final four tournament as well as games with participation of NBA clubs in the new Kaunas arena. A Madonna concert was also promised. However, now the group’s representatives are less talkative about such plans.
Kaunas Zalgiris currently plays in an ‘ancient’ arena, built for the European basketball championship of 1939 where Lithuania for the second time in its pre-war history won the European championship.
Earlier, Romanov was more interested in football in various countries which coincide with his business interests in those countries. He owns a football club in the Belarusian capital Minsk. Now Romanov’s company is renovating Traktor Stadium and is constructing a huge shopping and amusement center near the stadium in Minsk. He also owns the Lithuanian football and baseball club Kaunas.

Romanov is a majority shareholder of the Scottish league’s Edinburgh Hearts football club. Lithuanian players are always present on the team. During some seasons they have constituted up to one-third of Hearts’ players on the field. The Hearts’ stadium is dominated by advertisements of Ukio Bankas. Romanov spends a lot of his time in Scotland. It seems that Edinburgh residents have some emotional opinions about Romanov, who they call Vlad.

“Hearts FC was in a severe financial situation when Romanov came on board, ultimately accruing a majority shareholding in the club. The deal offered by Romanov for a renovated Tynecastle stadium and the prospect of winning a great deal of league cups due to his investment was quite a lure for the board and fans and they thought him their Knight in Shining Armor. However, lately from what I have read and heard from fans, Romanov has never let his managers or coaches run the team. He himself decides who plays, who stays. The man is a control freak,” Norma McDonald, PA to the divisional managing director of the biggest Scottish daily The Scotsman, told The Baltic Times.

Now the Scots complain that Romanov abandoned his interest in Hearts in favor of Kaunas Zalgiris, his newest toy. On Jan. 16, Lietuvos Rytas published its interview with Romanov. “I came to the conclusion that there is no football in Scotland. It is just show business where the champion is chosen in advance,” Romanov said. He added that basketball is cleaner from corruption than football, though football is bigger business.