Gymnastics, athletics, weightlifting, football, hockey – one can add basketball to the long list of beleaguered Bulgarian sports. At times when the entire country seems to be immersed in an economic crisis, financial crunches and unprecedented corruption on all levels, one would have been naive, if not delusional, to have imagined that basketball would have managed to have escaped unscathed from the clutches of the brutal Bulgarian reality.

CSKA Sofia basketball club was banned on February 6 for two years by the Bulgarian Basketball Federation (BBF) and the National Basketball League (NBL) simultaneously. The shocking announcement was made personally by BBF president Mihail Mihov, joined at the news conference by NBL head Stefan Stanev and the general secretary of the BBF, Eleonora Rangelova. "The decision is final and not subject to further discussion," Mihov said, as quoted by eurobasket.com.

As a consequence, the club will be banned from the league until the end of the 2010/11 season.
It comes at a times when Bulgarian basketball needs a strong league, with CSKA as one of the few teams to give a game to the dominant Lukoil Akademik (seven straight titles and counting).

"There are several reasons for the ban; some quoted are the lack of professional management and sound financial stability," Mihov said.
The decision came just four days after the Greek owner and president of CSKA, Georgious Sterianopoulos, and the sports director of the club, Branislav Prelevic, opted to pull out of the NBL.

"Allegedly, CSKA are unaware of Sterianopoulos and Prelevic’s whereabouts at the moment, but the club was left with the steep bill that has to be paid to the Bulgarian federation for abandoning the League in the middle of the season and refusing to play in the tournament for the National Cup," Mihov said.
CSKA owe 25 000 euro to the BFB and NBL – the fine the club must pay after dropping out of the NBL.

In a statement to CSKA supporters, Georgious Sterianopoulos said the following: "Mr Sterianopoulos has temporarily withdrawn the team from any official game in Bulgaria. The decision was made by the team and it was made on February 6, by officially notifying the Bulgarian Basketball Federation."

"In 2007, when CSKA was next to bankruptcy, owing more than six million euro, and no businessman wanted to take over the team, about one week before the deadline to submit the paperwork to ensure the club participates in the league, during this most difficult period in the team’s 60-year proud history, Mr Sterianopoulos dared to take over CSKA," the statement said.

The row between Sterianopoulos and Bulgarian federation officials was inevitable, with trouble brewing for months before finally erupting in the first week of February. The immediate reason appears to be BBF’s decision to allow two CSKA players, Toni Dechev and Georgi Davidov, to quit the club. The duo claimed they had not received their wages for months.

Back in the summer of 2008, CSKA filed the paperwork to participate in the 2008/09 NBL season at the last minute and had to be reminded by the federation officials that they had to do so.

In autumn, reports claimed that the club was struggling to meet its quota of Bulgarian players on the team. The media had a field day, saying the club resorted to registering "kids off the streets".

Conflict between the Bulgarians and foreigners seems to be a running theme of Sterianopoulos’ ownership of the club. The first to go was Rossen Barchovski, who took over as club president after the death of general manager Emil Cohen and team president Vladimir Fedyaev in a car crash in France in June 2007.
In the dusk of his career, Barchovski was a key player in the team that won the Bulgarian Cup in 2005 during the short-lived upswing in CSKA’s fortunes under Cohen.
Barchovski’s departure paved the way for Prelevic, who has often been accused in the media of favouring foreign players, an allegation that Sterianopoulos has rejected in his letter to fans.

Clearly, he has not persuaded his Bulgarian staff, with the club’s five players and two coaches resigning on January 30, claiming that while they were owed two months of wages, foreign players received their money on time.
Sterianopoulos said that he did not plan to abandon the club and that the team would continue playing friendlies after quitting the NBL.