Dubai Basketball

A club assembled in roughly a year

The club did not exist before 2023, when it was set up by Abdulla Saeed Juma Al Naboodah and Dejan Kamenjašević. In January 2024 it was confirmed as an entrant to the ABA League, the regional competition built around clubs from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Montenegro, on a three-season term. Jurica Golemac was appointed head coach that June, and the first competitive game came on 22 September 2024, with the 17,000-capacity Coca-Cola Arena as the home court — a venue built for concerts and comedy, now fitted with a FIBA-compliant floor, custom LED displays and broadcast-grade audio.

For a start-up franchise, the first season went better than the structure suggested it should. Dubai finished the 2024-25 ABA League regular season 28-8 and reached the semi-finals, which was enough to make the arena's management talk about a new category of event in the city rather than a novelty booking.

The EuroLeague licence and a level debut

EuroLeague Basketball granted Dubai a five-year licence, and the club began competing in Europe's top division in 2025-26 with a reported player budget of €16 million. The debut campaign ended 19-19 across the 38-game regular season and 11th in the 20-team table, one place short of the play-in bracket. That is a respectable first pass at a league where several entrants have taken years to reach.500, and it was still treated internally as a miss.

The coaching seat then turned over twice inside four months. Golemac and the club parted ways in April 2026, with Aleksander Sekulić taking charge until the end of the season. Sekulić left in July 2026 to become head coach of FC Barcelona, and Dubai hired the man he was replacing: Xavi Pascual, who won the 2010 EuroLeague with Barcelona and had just taken the Catalan club to the 2025-26 Liga ACB final. Pascual signed a three-year contract running to 2029.

Nine home games played 4,000 miles from home

The 2025-26 season was also disrupted in a way few clubs have to absorb. Regional unrest from February 2026 meant Dubai could not host, and EuroLeague Basketball approved alternative venues; the club played nine home fixtures across both competitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the Zetra Arena in Sarajevo and in Zenica, starting with the EuroLeague game against Baskonia on 12 March 2026.

The side came back to the Coca-Cola Arena after 66 days away, in time for the ABA League semi-final against Budućnost VOLI. The timing mattered: a team that had spent a quarter of the season on neutral floors got its own building back for the part of the year that decides titles.

The title, settled by two free throws

Dubai reached the 2025-26 ABA League final against Partizan Mozzart Bet, a club with a trophy cabinet and a support base several decades older than the entire franchise. Dubai won Game 1 at the Coca-Cola Arena 99-93 on 5 June 2026, then took Game 2 in front of more than 11,000 spectators, the largest crowd in the club's short history.

Partizan pulled a game back in Belgrade, winning 84-70 after holding Dubai to ten points in the opening quarter. Game 4 followed on Friday 12 June, again in Belgrade, and was decided in the last fifteen seconds: Aleksa Avramović converted two free throws to put Dubai 83-81 ahead, and Justin Anderson took the defensive rebound on Partizan's final possession. The series finished 3-1, Avramović was named MVP, and a club in its second season had won the regional championship away from home.

Pascual's squad and where the season stands

Dubai recruited hard over the summer of 2026. Élie Okobo arrived from AS Monaco, Tornike Shengelia joined, and Thomas Walkup signed after Olympiacos agreed to release him at the end of a drawn-out contract dispute; Davion Mintz also came in. They were added to a core of Dwayne Bacon, Mfiondu Kabengele, Filip Petrušev, McKinley Wright and Avramović.

The second EuroLeague campaign opened at home to Real Madrid on 24 September 2026 and Dubai won 78-77 in a game of repeated lead changes, Bacon scoring 24. Barcelona were beaten 94-87 at the arena on 30 September, Kabengele posting 21 points and 6 rebounds after Dubai outscored the visitors 29-12 in the second quarter. Round four brought the first home defeat, 77-58 to Crvena Zvezda, with Dubai shooting 32.8 per cent from the field; Pascual's verdict was that it had been a disastrous forty minutes in every aspect.

The response came in Vitoria-Gasteiz on 14 October 2026, a 93-79 win over Baskonia for the club's first away victory of the season — Petrušev 17, Kabengele 16 and 10, Bacon 15, Okobo 14 — which left the record at 3-2 after five rounds. The side travelled straight on to Milan for round six against EA7 Emporio Armani on 15 October.

Match night at the Coca-Cola Arena

The commercial case has been made faster than the sporting one. Across the nine-month debut ABA League season the arena took more than 61,000 spectators for Dubai Basketball, including 5,700 visitors from outside the UAE, alongside 200,000 website visits and over 12,000 merchandise items sold. The club's general manager at the venue, Mark Jan Kar, framed the debut playoff run as a milestone for professional sports entertainment in the region rather than for the team alone. More than 20,000 school pupils were brought to games, and the club ran 18 community initiatives, 16 of them school visits.

The home schedule is unusually dense because two competitions share the same building, often inside the same week: 19 October against Studentski Centar in the ABA League at 19:30, then Paris Basketball in the EuroLeague on 27 October at 20:00, with Hapoel Tel Aviv three days later. Later in the season the arena hosts Anadolu Efes on 17 November, Panathinaikos AKTOR on 23 December, Fenerbahçe Beko on 12 January and Olympiacos on 5 March.