The multi-club model is well-known in football but Zalgiris seem to be making waves on that front in basketball now. With Paulius Motiejunas and Tesonet buying a majority stake in Joventut Badalona, there’s the making of a four layered multi-club model including London Lions and a partnership with Dziki Warszawa. Emmet Ryan goes deep.
Zalgiris is one of basketball’s greatest institutions. The size and wealth of its home market in Lithuania creates limitations that prestige can’t overcome on its own. Yet the moves made in recent times by the club and its partners shows that such restraints are arbitrary.
On Friday, Joventut Badalona announced that Scranton Group was selling its stake in the Catalan club to Confluence Valley Group. This group is led by Zalgiris shareholders Paulius Motiejunas and Tesonet. The business is much more than a basketball focused entity.
Indeed, technically speaking, it’s not Zalgiris owning anything beyond itself. Yet the ties between Confluence Valley and the Kaunas club are as tight as they come. Throw in the London Lions purchase in 2024 and the partnership with Dziki Warszawa earlier this year and the tale gets fascinating. Then add on the reason Confluence Valley got created in the first place and it goes up another level.
A network in plain sight
Like I said, Zalgiris doesn’t own any other club. This isn’t the City Football Group. Yet, at the same time, it’s a multi-club model in all but name. Motiejunas has a 55 per cent stake in Zalgiris while Tesonet, best known for every VPN you can name, owns the other 45 per cent.
London Lions were acquired by Tesonet in 2024, with Zalgiris immediately becoming involved in its management and development. Then in October, a much more limited partnership was announced by Zalgiris with ENBL champions Dziki Warszawa. That involves scouting, academy development, and knowledge exchange. There’s no shareholding but oodles of influence.
The fourth component is Joventut Badalona. This is a major basketball institution. It’s also based in a talent hub while already being strong on the academy front. The 86 per cent shareholding is essentially total control for Confluence, which is Tesonet and Motiejunas.
More than flexibility
The levels of ownership from zero to total across the four clubs involved brings flexibility but there are basketball reasons to be intrigued. With the Joventut Badalona deal, all four levels of pan-European basketball are covered through Zalgiris (Euroleague), London Lions (Eurocup), Joventut (Basketball Champions League), and Dziki Warszawa (FIBA Europe Cup).
Regionally speaking as well this gives Zalgiris tentacles into two interesting markets for prospect development in the UK and Spain. Dziki presents an opportunity to tap into Warsaw’s underrated talent pool in sports as a whole. It’s a city of 1.9 million people, with over 300,000 under 18. That’s before considering the wider Polish market with over 6.5 million people under 18.
There’s every reason to believe this isn’t the end. So long as the right mix of fiscal market conditions, access to talent, and assets are there, moves into other parts of Europe should be considered probable.
Others have failed
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first attempt at multi-club ownership in European basketball. Gediminas Žiemelis and Basketball Holding Company tried such an approach, built around BC Wolves.
Wolves was established in 2022 with an explicit international expansion strategy. This included creating Sandstorm Shooters in Dubai and an acquisition of Helsinki Seagulls in Finland.
Then in June of 2025, Wolves ceased operations. Sandstorm Shooters were never created. Helsinki Seagulls dodged a bullet as the sale never went through. Zalgiris, of course, is in a very different situation when it comes to this project. Its presence as an established entity is part of it but it made the moves backed by sound business behaviour.
Motiejunas is a difference maker
Paulius Motiejunas is best known as a firebrand chief executive of Euroleague Basketball. His willingness, arguably eagerness, to battle the NBA distracted from the reasons he was considered for the job in the first place.
Motiejunas led an extraordinary recovery at Zalgiris, one coming from the depths of Vladimir Romanov’s bad decisions. The club had inherited around €12.5 million in debts by the time of Motiejunas and his associates taking over in 2013. That shrunk to €1.7 million in 2016.
Then came the true rebuild. Zalgiris became financially disciplined and on court results improved. This grew revenue enormously, with the Kaunas club now capable of spending more than treble what it did a decade ago because it has the income to back it up.
Healthier but with a lot of room for growth
The Zalgiris budget for this season is around €28 million. That’s still in the bottom half of Euroleague. Yet it has found more ways to make money. Having wealthy backers is nice. Having smart wealthy backers is better. Knowing how to capitalise on having the latter is brilliant.
That’s what having Tesonet, who still haven’t asked us to promote a VPN on our videos, involved has done. That the owners of it are fans of Zalgiris sounds good but actually could have been a hindrance.
Instead they weren’t blinded by being basketball fans and actually thought about Zalgiris as an entity that could generate revenue. In the process it has become one that can stand on its own two feet and is aiding the wider vision of the investors.
BallinEurope is ramping up its YouTube game this season. Subscribe to our channel now for player exclusives, analysis videos, and much more.
The arena is the business
Like I said in my column on Super League Expansion in the UK, arena ownership or at least control is a huge asset for any sports club. Conferencing, concerts, and other events create stable and repeatable revenue streams. Zalgirio Arena is owned by the city of Kaunas but it is operated in full by a Zalgiris-linked business called Kauno Arena Operating Group.
That business had revenue of €20.3 million in 2024/25 with a net profit of €3.1 million. With London Lions, they are tenants at the Copper Box but Tesonet’s plan is to build a multipurpose 15,000 seat arena. Given the enormous demand on events space in London right now, this is as safe as a capital investment bet in Europe gets.
This makes Joventut Badalona very interesting. The club has a long-term lease for Palau Olimpic, giving Confluence Valley a ready made asset that it can gussy up. The lack of formal ownership of Dziki Warszawa might well be because it doesn’t have an arena of note. With the Polish economy on the rise, Warsaw might well be a clever spot to establish a multi-purpose facility.
Please talk about basketball again
Bring this back to Kaunas. It’s a nice city but it’s one with a population of just 300,000. Added to this, Lithuania’s economy ranks 17th of 27 EU member states when it comes to purchasing power parity. Zalgiris is going up against clubs with bigger populations, better economies, and owners that would put the Tesonet lads in the poor house.
If they try to fight this battle on the terms of a Real Madrid or Panathinaikos, they don’t just lose, they get slaughtered. That means they have to be both smarter and faster. London, Warsaw, and Badalona spread the access to potential talent as well as potential revenue.
This also allows for commercial scaling of sponsors, all feeding back into making the crown jewel of Zalgiris shine brighter. There is little, if any, reason to think the moves stop here. Southeastern Europe is the most logical spot but it’s far from alone. From an events venue and talent hub perspective, Germany and France hold appeal.
So just feeders?
For this to actually work for Zalgiris, then it’s actually a good idea for every club along the chain to raise its standards. That means London Lions as a Eurocup contender, Joventut Badalona winning the BCL, even Dziki Warszawa contending for the Polish league or FIBA Europe Cup.
That won’t stop fans of clubs in the network, especially Joventut, not fearing being subordinate to Zalgiris. Still, if they get more out of it on the court it won’t be too hard to please them.
Getting this wrong is very easy. In fact, in football, it’s the norm. The Red Bull group is arguably the only one where results have largely trended positively down the chain. Even then, the project has been riddled with controversy and criticism from football fans.
BallinEurope has a book, a real life actual book called I Like it Loud, and you can buy it on Amazon now. It’s here as a book and here in Kindle form.
What’s in it for Joventut?
Ricky Rubio taking an ownership stake alongside Paulius Motiejunas and Tesonet certainly helps the optics. Still, it can’t be overstated how much Zalgiris needs to be respectful of the institution. This is a club that has a Euroleague title to its name, alongside 4 Spanish championships and a dozen other major trophies.
After recording a net loss of €3.38 million in the 2024/25 season there’s an obvious parallel to when Motiejunas et al took over Zalgiris. There’s obvious room to stabilise the finances and drive more revenue. That in turn means that, while Joventut would be lower in the overall system than Zalgiris, it could plausibly turn out a stronger roster than today.
That’s also rather crucial to this whole project working. The individual pieces, the clubs, need to succeed both in basketball and fiscally. Otherwise they become expenses or headaches for the wider group.
Bigger than Kaunas…without leaving Kaunas
Forget about the multi-club model for just a moment. What Zalgiris has demonstrated within the conventional confines of Kaunas already is impressive. Smart organisation and intelligent financial management has grown the club to one that can afford a budget triple what it spent a decade ago.
Now, the goal is to export those principles to expand the whole. There’s an established economic foundation underpinning this network. That is built on the arena business, Confluence Valley, and its capacity to generate stable and recurring revenue streams.
Zalgiris doesn’t need to get any bigger in Kaunas to be a bigger entity that is Kaunas to the core. The layers of ownership may not make this exactly a multi-club model but it is such in all but name. That’s a big change for basketball on this continent.
Leave a Reply