**4.1 Maccabi Tel-Aviv basketball club**

Maccabi Tel-Aviv, the first Israeli basketball club, was formed in 1932. In 1954, when the Israeli basketball league was founded, Maccabi Tel-Aviv became the league's first champion. Since then the team has won 48 additional championships, a degree of dominance that is quite rare in professional sports. The team is also very successful in the European arena. Since the beginning of the seventies, it has played regularly in the major European basketball league, and won the European championship a few times.

Over the years, Maccabi evolved from an amateur to a professional organization. During the last two decades, the team's yearly budget grew from about a million dollars at the beginning of the nineties to 10 million ten years later and about 20 million today. The organizational and managerial domains have also gone through significant changes. The team broke off its public and municipal support and became a private association, controlled by private businessmen (Haaretz, June 5, 2003). However, as is often the case with sports organizations that become commercialized (e.g. Enjolras 2002), the team's public support remained strong.
