2025-26 JL Bourg
107 · 2026-04-24 · medium
As I often like to point out, footsoccer is a game of low common denominators. It translates in every language, it's completely legible to toddlers and pensioners alike, and it doesn't matter how many drinks you've drunk. Comprehension of Our Game requires a certain complexity of intelligence; that means basketball will never become the world's number one sport, but it does keep a lot of riff-raff out. (If you're the random barfly I watched the Coppa Italia semifinal alongside the other day, then yes I'm talking about you.) Take promotion and relegation, for instance. In England's Footsoccer Association (FA), team go up, team go down, and that can be anybody. (Even Milwall!) Hoops? Ummm, you're going to have to sit down for this, it's going to take a while. The Pacers, Nuggets, Spurs and Nets were, arguably, the last teams to earn promotion to the NBA – and yes I am making that argument – but that was 50 years ago. When it comes to the old continent, ascension techniques are more complicated than VAR. There's formally and technically a path upwards from a second division to the EuroLeague: winning the 2025 EuroCup is how Hapoel Tel Aviv made the jump last year, and why they're currently queued up for a quarterfinal series with Real Madrid next week. Both EuroCup finalists are supposed to get upgraded to a top-flight license, except when they don't. Gran Canaria won in 2023 over Turk Telekom, but both teams were informed that their budgets and facilities weren't good enough. It's a little like when KK Igokea was screwed out of a spot in 2012 after the EuroLeague suddenly changed the rules after they earned a "B-License" on the court; if you don't have a 5,000-seat arena and two four-star hotels within a certain radius, you can't be promoted. So it's that time of year again, and here we are with the 2026 EuroCup finals. The Kara Kartallar of Besiktas, Istanbul's Black Eagles, finished the regular season 13-5 and will surely replace whichever weirdos defect to NBA Europe. (Looking at you, ASVEL Villeurbanne.) But they lost the first of a best-of-three on Wednesday to plucky Jeunesse Laïque de Bourg-en-Bresse. La JL plays in a 3,500-seat arena, the only thing with four stars in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes countryside is Saint-Nectaire cheese, and they've already "qualified" once, back in 2024, when they lost in the finals to EuroLeague-bound Paris Basketball. So what good is the EuroCup? If you're a poor club, why even bother playing for the useless thing? You can't even drink out of it.
