Olympic Committee Warns KSS Over Serbian Basketball Crisis
The Executive Board of the Serbian Olympic Committee called an emergency session and demanded that everyone in Serbian basketball return to the rule of law, after the KSS and KLS dispute reached it.
The crisis over how Serbia’s top men’s basketball league is run has now reached the very top of the Olympic movement. The Executive Board of the Serbian Olympic Committee (OKS) held an emergency session on September 15 to discuss how the turmoil inside the Basketball Federation of Serbia (KSS) is affecting the work of the OKS and the Olympic movement in the country, and afterward issued a statement that leaves little room for ambiguity.
The document, signed by OKS president Dejan Tomasevic, was released to the public as the Olympic committee’s sole response to the dispute between the KSS and the Basketball League of Serbia (KLS).
What the OKS Is Demanding From Basketball Officials
The Executive Board said it is seriously concerned about the state of Serbian basketball and the damage that a prolonged dispute could do to the sport’s integrity in the country. The OKS said it expects everyone responsible, from club executives and members of governing bodies to presidents and legal representatives, to act without delay to bring the operation of basketball back within the bounds of legality, institutional accountability and legal certainty, in line with the law, sporting rules and the decisions of the competent bodies.
The statement also contains a line that sums up the Executive Board’s message better than any other:
“The autonomy of sport is not, and cannot be, separate from responsibility.”
The OKS went on to say that further deepening of the dispute, and any failure to recognize or any circumvention of the competent sporting institutions, cannot be treated as an internal matter for individual organizations, because the consequences directly affect the legal certainty of competitions, the position of clubs and athletes, the integrity of basketball, and by extension the integrity of the entire Olympic movement in Serbia.
The OKS stressed that the Basketball Federation of Serbia is the competent national federation for the sport and one of the first-category federations within Serbia’s sporting system, which carries heightened institutional responsibility toward athletes, clubs and the public. At the same time, the Executive Board specifically underlined the OKS’s duty to protect the institutional integrity of its own bodies, including the Permanent Sports Arbitration, its mechanism for resolving sporting disputes.
The statement also makes clear that this is the only response the OKS plans to issue on the matter. The Olympic committee said it will not take part in public polemics, nor will it use the media to conduct proceedings that fall within the jurisdiction of other bodies and institutions, but that it will, in line with the Law on Sport and the rules of the International Olympic Committee, take all legal and institutional steps necessary to protect the integrity of the OKS and the Olympic movement.
How the Crisis Got This Far
The OKS did not call an emergency session overnight. The draw for Serbia’s top men’s league for the 2026/27 season was held publicly on September 9, and the very next day, September 10, the KSS announced that the question of who runs the league was closed and that the competition would be organized in line with the Law on Sport and basketball’s own rules.
In that same statement, the KSS also had a message for referees, saying that basketball referees are judges on the court but not judges of the regular courts, warning that they must not be pressured to interpret legal questions. That wording made it clear that the dispute between the KSS and the KLS over who runs the league was no longer just a sporting issue, but had started to raise legal ones as well.
Five days later, that dispute reached the Executive Board of the Serbian Olympic Committee, which concluded that the fallout was no longer confined to one sport, but was also affecting the authority and integrity of the OKS and the Olympic movement as a whole.
Neither the KSS nor the KLS had publicly responded to the OKS statement by the time it was published. As the OKS itself put it, the statement closed its side of the story, with the next steps left to the competent bodies.
