ABA League Assembly Delayed, Zvezda Wants Kmetovic Out

The letter reached the ABA League’s offices on Wednesday, a day and a half before the assembly was due to convene, and that alone was enough to shift the entire schedule. Red Star Belgrade demanded that a procedure be opened to remove competition director Dubravko Kmetovic, and shortly afterward league president Ostoja Mijailovic proposed moving the session, originally planned for Friday, September 4, at 10 a.m., to Saturday, September 5, at 9 a.m. The proposal passed.

The official explanation for the delay is that the agenda items carry particular weight, and that the organizer needed extra time to coordinate the arrival of guests for the league’s 25th anniversary celebration, which will be held on the occasion. Behind that sentence, however, lies a clear rift within the league’s leadership.

How the vote split

Seven clubs voted to move the date:

• Partizan
• Buducnost
• Cedevita Olimpija
• SC Derby
• Krka
• Cibona
• Mornar

Five voted against, and they were the very clubs that raised the leadership issue in the first place:

• Red Star
• Mega
• FMP
• Zadar
• Igokea

Seven against five, and the president’s proposal went through. Saturday’s session will take up the election of a new sporting director, a referee commissioner, the head of the officiating committee and a disciplinary judge, a full slate of positions the league currently has vacant.

What exactly Red Star is demanding

The letter that set off the chain of events formally calls for the removal of the competition director, but it is clear from the text that the target is Kmetovic himself. Red Star is also demanding that the league end its cooperation with the law firm representing it, headed by Mihovil Granic, and that it suspend the ongoing process to elect a sporting director in order to launch a new, and, the club says, more transparent, contest.

There are four objections, all specific. The first concerns the situation around the Vienna basketball club, about which, Red Star says, league members were not informed fully or on time. The second concerns the sporting director selection process itself, in which, according to the club, the competition director communicated with individual candidates during the application stage and offered them the position, undermining equal treatment among applicants. The third objection is that the sporting director was chosen outside the league’s own rulebook, with a number of procedural lapses. The fourth concerns the election of the disciplinary judge, which Red Star says was carried out against the assembly’s own decision.

A league without its key officials, weeks before the season starts

What makes the whole dispute urgent is the calendar. Less than a month remains before the new season begins, and the ABA League currently has no sporting director, no commissioner in charge of assigning referees, no officiating committee and no disciplinary judge. The sporting director’s post has been vacant since Milija Vojinovic left the position, and that vacancy is exactly why Saturday’s session matters so much: without decisions on all four items, the league heads into the season without the bodies that keep the competition running day to day.

Until now, coverage has followed the league’s schedule and roster, not conflicts inside its leadership, so this marks the first time an open rift has surfaced between the region’s most decorated club and the competition’s administration. Seven against five is enough to get a postponement through, but not enough to make the dispute go away, especially when the votes line up so neatly with the sides of the conflict: the five clubs that voted against the delay are the same ones behind the push to remove Kmetovic.

For the league leadership, Saturday carries a double task. First, it has to respond to Red Star’s letter and to all four objections, not with a general statement but with a decision on each point. Second, it has to fill the positions that were already empty before this dispute began, since a competition without a referee commissioner or a disciplinary judge cannot get off the ground normally. Saturday at 9 a.m. will be the first test of whether the league leadership and Red Star can reach an agreement before the ball is even tossed up.