Panathinaikos

Panathinaikos go into another Greek Basket League season carrying the weight of forty domestic titles, a haul no other club in the country comes close to, and a European pedigree that has kept the club among the continent's names for three decades. The most recent EuroLeague crown, lifted in 2024 under Ergin Ataman, sits alongside six earlier ones spread across the club's history, from the breakthrough of 1996 to the run of victories under Željko Obradović in the 2000s and 2011.

The basketball section traces back to 1919, when Giorgos Kalafatis came home from the Inter-Allied Games in Paris with a set of basketball equipment and, working with Apostolos Nikolaidis, built a team around it inside the wider Panathinaikos sports club. The Greeks call the team Trifýlli, the Shamrock, though English-language coverage tends to settle on The Greens, a nod to the green and white the players have worn since those early years.

Ownership has stayed close to one family for decades: Pavlos Giannakopoulos and his brother Thanasis built the modern club, and Dimitris Giannakopoulos now carries that on. Among the players who passed through, Nikos Galis remains the name older supporters return to, the scorer whose era at the club still sets the standard against which later sides are measured, while Dimitris Diamantidis is remembered as much for what he stopped opponents doing as for what he did with the ball himself.

No fixture matters more than the one against Olympiacos, the Derby of the Eternal Enemies, a rivalry that runs through Greek basketball independent of where either club stands in a given season. Panathinaikos now play at the Telekom Center Athens, a 19,250-seat hall in the Olympic complex that replaced the venue long known simply as OAKA, where the club's European nights were won through the 1990s and 2000s and where the crowd still gathers in green for the visits from across the city.