The Basque Country, an autonomous community in the North of Spain, home to around 2.2 million people, has long been a sporting hotbed. While its coastal cities, particularly Bilbao and San Sebastian, have stolen the limelight in Spanish soccer’s top-flight LaLiga in recent seasons, the region’s capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz, boasts a rich history across two sports that share a common root.
In 2011, Deportivo Alaves was on the brink of insolvency, struggling with debts of €21.4 million (at the time $31.6 million) and meandering in Spanish soccer’s third-tier Segunda B. With the courts set to issue a winding-up order, Alaves was saved by Grupo Baskonia, now Grupo Baskonia-Alaves, the owner of Vitoria-Gasteiz’s other major sports team, Saski Baskonia.
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Saski Baskonia, a basketball side from Spain’s top-flight Liga ACB, is also one of the 12 long-term licensed clubs in European basketball’s elite EuroLeague, and as a shareholder in the competition, is consistently situated at European basketball’s top table.
In a break from the norm, this is one of the few cases in Europe where a basketball club has purchased its associated soccer team, and has not rather sprouted as an arm of the same sports club, and it has certainly succeeded.
Since the purchase, Deportivo Alaves has risen from the third tier to the elite LaLiga, and in the 2024-25 campaign secured a 15th place finish in the division, confirming a third-consecutive year in the top-flight for 2025-26, the ninth out of the last ten seasons.
Following the purchase in 2011, Grupo Baskonia first sought to improve and restructure Deportivo Alaves’ finances, institute a management model similar to Saski Baskonia, and enhance the infrastructure up and down the club to allow it to compete not just competitively, but also commercially, with its rivals in the region.
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By GlobalData“Our objective is all about consolidating our team [Deportivo Alaves] in the top flight,” says Jesús Vázquez, Grupo Baskonia-Alaves director of institutional relations, continuing: “but it's not an easy task.
“It's not an easy task because Vitoria-Gasteiz is a small place, with a small population, a small business fabric too, and a sports environment that is very competitive, with Athletic Club, Real Sociedad, Eibar, and Osasuna. And this competition has made this [consolidation] a very difficult challenge to meet.”
Four Basque sides, including Alaves competed in the 2024-25 LaLiga campaign, with more in the tiers below, and without the financial pulling power that Real Sociedad and Athletic Club boast in the region, the solution Alaves has found is not to try and outmuscle them financially, but rather outmaneuver them internationally, while consolidating its commercial infrastructure base outside of soccer.
The International Academy
In the years following the 2011 takeover, Grupo Baskonia focused not only on implementing the organization’s values in Vitoria-Gasteiz, although the grassroots element remains vital, but also on expanding into the international market.
In 2018, Grupo Baskonia-Alaves acquired Croatian top-flight side NK Istra. Since the purchase, over a dozen players have moved between Istra and Alaves’ B Team (which competes in the Spanish fourth tier), who have collectively gone on to generate over €1 million in transfer revenue for the group.
Perhaps more importantly, though, this has served not only to establish a tangible connection between the two beyond the shared ownership, but also as the jumping off point for Alaves’ global ambitions.
Other territories such as Senegal, Japan, and Indonesia (Jakarta in particular) have been contacted as the club looks to cast its net wide in order to reap the benefits of underserved, or perhaps under-scouted, markets.
To this end, Alaves is currently developing a new international academy base in Vitoria-Gasteiz with the goal of using it to host young talent from across the globe. The project features live-in residences for players with in-built soccer facilities.
Vázquez notes: “We understand that we are not a buying club, because there are other clubs that have more money and they can afford to do so. We have to be a club that trains [players] and then perhaps sells players, which also helps us economically speaking.”
Player trading has become a cornerstone of the strategy of many clubs outside of Europe’s elite competitions, and at Alaves, which generated over €19 million in player sales during the 2024-25 campaign.
The club’s expansive international focus goes beyond on-the-pitch matters, with Grupo Baskonia-Alaves’ commercial team also looking outwards to secure investment.
“The final goal for the group is to grow internationally and to generate much more [commercial] interest outside Spain,” revealed Dani Abanda, Grupo Baskonia-Alaves sponsorship director.
“Of course, we have to look after what we already have here and focus on our local sponsors,” he continued, “because they've been fundamental for Grupo Baskonia-Alaves to grow, but in order to carry on with this growth, we have to do many more things, and we have to reach out to more markets.”
This has been supported by LaLiga itself, which aids its clubs through the LaLiga Impulso project to enhance their commercial businesses beyond Spain, thinking that by growing the international profiles of its teams individually, the league as a whole will benefit.
The Impulso project aids clubs logistically by helping them to benchmark sponsorship values and conduct market analysis, but also on the wider level, has helped the club gain more digital followers, which will naturally aid in attracting both domestic and international sponsors.
Abanda finished: “We have a tiny percentage of international firms [as partners], and thanks to the fact that Grupo Baskonia-Alaves has several properties, we can use different resources to reach out to other markets, not only national markets, but also international markets.”
Cross-sport collaboration
This connection between the interlinking operations of Grupo Baskonia-Alaves creates, in the organization’s mind, a comparative advantage over many of the club’s rivals. Indeed, within Spain, only the giant multi-sports clubs Real Madrid and Barcelona stand alongside Grupo Baskonia-Alaves as owning teams in both LaLiga and the Liga ACB.
Although Saski Baskonia has the lowest budget in the EuroLeague, and Alaves certainly among the lowest in LaLiga, pairing the organizations together helps to create more opportunities for sponsors.
This is a multi-fold strategy, one where potential partners are offered not specific assets of sponsorship inventory, Abanda explains, but rather presented with solutions for their visibility aims, and from this, they can find a preferred asset, be it across the soccer or basketball teams in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the group’s sports hub, or even in Croatia with NK Istra.
“As Baskonia is one of the founders of the EuroLeague, there are some brands that are more interested in that, and of course, when we talk about Alaves, we play Barcelona and Real Madrid, which produces lots of interest outside our borders.” Says Abanda.
“We want to make use of these opportunities. And I think that in the medium-to-long term, this having Baskonia assets and Alaves assets will be an opportunity that is very interesting to certain brands.”
The cross-team collaboration is evident when considering sponsorship. Saski Baskonia and Alaves share both institutional local sponsors, such as the regional Alaves government and the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, but also lower-level commercial partners such as Spanish brands PodoActiva, Adesso, IMQ, and Halcon Viajes, among others, while car brand Hyundai supports both Saski Baskonia and NK Istra, and the Istra regional body sponsors both the Croatian club and Alaves.
Obviously, the two areas of the company, soccer and basketball, come with their differences. At Alaves, the international exposure provided by LaLiga is much higher globally than the Liga ACB, or even the EuroLeague for Baskonia.
The revenue opportunity in soccer is naturally much higher, exacerbated by the fact that Saski Baskonia is still searching for a team title sponsor (although it has sold out the remainder of its inventory).
Even still, the differences between the two clubs allow what joint sponsors they have to cover a lot of ground.
Deportivo Alaves boasts close to 17,000 members (those with season tickets), and Saski Baskonia around 10,000, but very few are members of both sides, just as in the same way, very few will watch both the EuroLeague and LaLiga both in and outside of Spain.
Abanda concludes: “We have more resources, more possibilities than only one club, and that for some companies, is a very positive thing, because it helps them to achieve different targets.”
Ondare (Legacy)
While the first five years of Grupo Baskonia-Alaves’ ownership of Deportivo Alaves focused on the development of the team’s operations to a top-flight level, and the following years have brought an international focus, the next five years of the team’s commercial focus will be defined by one word: Ondare.
Basque for ‘legacy’, Ondare is the name of the club’s major infrastructure initiative that spans the city.
It is comprised of three main pillars: the Ibaia Sports City (the club’s training complex) and the international academy (which includes NK Istra), Deportivo Alaves’ Mendizorrotza Stadium, and the Ondare center itself, a multi-purpose facility that also houses the European University Gasteiz (of which Grupo Baskonia-Alaves is a shareholder).
Alfonso Fernández de Trocóniz, Deportivo Alaves president, commented to Sportcal: “We hope, over the next five years, that the Ondare project will be mature enough to allow us to generate a significant percentage of our revenues, and allow us to rely less on TV rights (which make up 75% of the club’s annual budget).”
In effect, this will help to insulate Deportivo Alaves, should it drop out of LaLiga once more and suffer the associated drop in TV revenue.
Alongside the university and the soccer stadium, the Bakh leisure centre, the Buesa Arena (home of Saski Baskonia), Ondare residences for basketball and soccer players, and The Faktory, a business development center for sports and entertainment innovation, are all either underway or already completed within the city.
Vázquez expands: “We need to have more resources that are not related to [LaLiga] competition itself. [We need to] not focus on a single sports project because if it goes badly, you'll never recover.
“What we want to achieve is stability, and at the same time, we want the stability to give us some added resources that we would never otherwise be able to have. Because we have a small population, we cannot have a stadium seating 50,000 or 60,000 people; our maximum stadium could be something like 27,000 people, which is 10% of the overall population.
“So, in order to compete with the large teams, or to reach that range of €100 million [in revenue] that places you at a level of stability, we need to have new businesses, because this is not going to be given to us by matchday revenue, and it's not to be given to us by the resources of the stadium.”
Overall, he concludes, the club needs to consider a mixture of things, be it not just TV revenue, player trading, sponsorships, and commercial management, but also non-sports businesses that give it a comparative advantage in a strong region.
These projects are not solely profit-focused, but rather enhance the prosperity of Vitoria-Gasteiz as a whole, and much like how the international growth in LaLiga through the Impulso project can benefit Alaves, so too can the investment in Vitoria-Gasteiz aid its sports teams.
Despite the costs, which amount to an investment of over €71 million, Grupo Baskonia-Alaves has staked its past growth up until now on the Ondare project, hoping that its legacy will help to preserve Deportivo Alaves and Saski Baskonia for generations.
