AEK Athens

Greek refugees from Constantinople, displaced by the Greco-Turkish War, formed the club as a way of carrying the city they had lost into a new one. The basketball section followed the same year, in 1924, and won a regional Athens title before the season was out. Yellow and black trace back to the double-headed eagle of the Palaiologos dynasty, and that eagle still sits on the emblem.

The championship years cluster early: six titles between 1958 and 1970, then a long wait before a seventh in 2002. Europe gave the club its most-told night. In 1968, AEK beat Slavia Prague in the Cup Winners' Cup final at the Panathenaic Stadium in front of a crowd put at 80,000. A second Cup Winners' Cup followed in 2000, against Kinder Bologna, and the run of European silverware stretched into the last decade with the Basketball Champions League in 2018 and the Intercontinental Cup in 2019, the latter won in Rio de Janeiro against Flamengo.

Not every chapter reads that way. In 2011, financial trouble sent the club sliding out of the top division and, within a year, out of the second as well, a fall that took AEK down to the third tier. The club's old ground, Nikos Goumas, was pulled down in 2003 by the football club's owners, leaving the basketball side without a home of its own for years.

They settled that question in 2021, moving into the SUNEL Arena in Ano Liosia.