Mathieu WARNIER, Media365, published on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 at 4:33 p.m.

The Euroleague Board of Directors has agreed to extend the authorization granted to Monaco allowing the Principality’s club to play in the Salle Gaston-Médecin, which does not meet the standards imposed for the competition.

Monaco’s leaders can take a breather. Qualified this season for the Euroleague thanks to their success in the Eurocup last April at the expense of Unics Kazan, the “Roca Team” should initially have relocated their matches. Indeed, the organizers of the competition impose on the participating clubs strict standards concerning the installations with, in particular, a minimum of 5000 places for the rooms in which the matches are held. Or, with barely more than 4,000 seats available, the room installed under the Stade Louis-II in Monaco obviously does not meet this standard. While the hypothesis of a relocation of matches to Antibes and its Azur Arena offering a little more than 5,200 seats had been raised, the Euroleague Board of Directors had granted before the start of the season a special authorization for the Gaston-Médecin room but with a reassessment planned upstream of the return phase.

Monaco remains in the Principality

While a large part of the matches played at home by Monaco on a European scale were played out at sold-out, everything indicated that an extension of this authorization was possible. In addition, the Monegasque authorities recently validated a project to expand the Salle Gaston-Médecin from next summer, with the number of places available which would then exceed the limit of 5,000 seats requested by the Euroleague. It’s through his official account Twitter that the Principality club has confirmed the news. “The Board of Directors of the Euroleague has extended the authorization to play Salle Gaston-Médecin in Monaco for the rest of the 2021-2022 season”, announces AS Monaco in a message published on the social network. As a result, it is in Monaco that Sasa Obradovic’s players will challenge Maccabi Tel-Aviv to start the second half of the Euroleague season, after a first leg to conclude with four wins and four losses on their floor.