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One Team is the community programme that runs alongside European basketball's biggest competitions. Every club in the EuroLeague and the EuroCup builds one, and our place in the BKT EuroCup is what puts the London Lions in that network.
It is the part of European competition that never makes the highlights reel, and arguably the part that lasts longest.
Euroleague Basketball started One Team in 2012 on a simple premise: a basketball club is one of the few places in a city that people from every background will willingly walk into, and that reach ought to be pointed at the people most likely to be left out of everything else.
Every club gets the same brief and answers it locally. There is no standard One Team session. One club might work with adults in recovery, another with children in care, another with disabled players who have never been offered a proper team. What the clubs share is the method rather than the audience — regular, coached, structured sessions with a defined group, run across a season instead of dropped in as a one-off photo opportunity.
The programme sits under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal on reducing inequalities, and clubs report against it. It is measured work, not goodwill.
One Team is not something a club opts into on the side. It comes with a place in European competition — every club in the EuroLeague and the EuroCup runs a programme, which in 2025/26 meant forty clubs across the two competitions.
The Lions compete in the BKT EuroCup. That earns the club its European nights at the Copper Box, and it also puts us in the same community network as every other club on that stage, held to the same standard for what we do away from the court as for what we do on it.
For a club our age that matters more than the badge. It means the community side of the Lions is not judged against what other British clubs manage, but against what the best clubs in Europe manage.
The programmes look very different city to city. Three broad groups account for most of them.
Half of the forty programmes in 2025/26 are built around players with disabilities — adapted sessions, and in a good number of cases a proper team with fixtures rather than a taster session.
Nine programmes work with young people at risk of social exclusion, using a coached session in the same place at the same time each week as a fixed point in an otherwise unstable one.
The rest reach refugees and new arrivals, people in prison, children in care, older people and families living in poverty — whoever the club's own city is failing hardest.
What our own One Team programme looks like for 2026/27 is still being worked out.
Euroleague Basketball tips off each campaign with an annual One Team workshop in Barcelona, where the clubs come together to shape what they will run that season. We will be there, and we will set out the detail of the Lions' programme — who it works with, where it runs and who we deliver it alongside — once we are back. Watch this space.
If you run an organisation in London working with any of the groups above, or you want to support the programme, we would like to hear from you.
Contact The Community Team