The Peace and Friendship Stadium — known in Greek as Stádio Eirínis kai Fílias, or simply SEF — opened in 1985 on the waterfront of Neo Faliro, overlooking the Saronic Gulf. Built as a multisport arena for Piraeus, it was transformed for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics, when it hosted indoor volleyball. The venue has since become the home of Olympiacos for basketball, handball, and other sports. When FIBA chose it to host EuroBasket Women 2025's final round, the decision was later confirmed on 11 December 2023 — a change that moved the championship climax from central Athens to the port city next door. SEF proved the right choice. Its steep bowl concentrated noise into something physical. For the Greece-Turkey match, what had been an ordinary group stage game became a spectacle that broke records simply because the stadium filled with people who believed something was at stake.

The 2025 tournament was historic in format before a single ball was tipped. For the first time in the history of the women's championship, four countries co-hosted — Czechia in Brno, Germany in Hamburg, Italy in Bologna, and Greece in Piraeus — copying the multi-host model the men's EuroBasket had used since 2015. Each nation organised a group stage, with the final round returning to Piraeus. The draw itself was held on 8 March 2025 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens — a fitting location for a ceremony steeped in European ambition. Sixteen teams competed. Portugal made their championship debut. Switzerland returned after an absence of 69 years, the longest gap between appearances in the tournament's history. The total attendance across all venues reached 92,851, breaking the previous record and confirming that women's basketball in Europe had arrived at a new level of visibility.

The defending champions were Belgium, and they left Athens as champions still. Their final against Spain on 29 June 2025 was the kind of game that earns a tournament its reputation. Belgium trailed by 12 points with three minutes remaining. They won 67–65. In doing so, Belgium became only the third country — after the Soviet Union and Spain — ever to successfully defend the title. Emma Meesseman, the Belgian centre who had won the tournament MVP in 2023, won it again in 2025, becoming the first player to claim the award twice. The records accumulated: Italy won their first medal in 30 years. Germany and Slovenia achieved their best-ever finishes, fifth and ninth respectively. France beat Switzerland 111–37, the largest winning margin in 49 years of the competition.

Piraeus is not Athens, though the two cities have merged into a single urban fabric. It is its own place — a working port, a city of cranes and ferries and the particular noise of maritime industry. Olympiacos, the great sports club of Piraeus, has long made the SEF its home, and the local passion for basketball is deep. When EuroBasket Women arrived, the city did not need to be convinced of its importance. The Greece-Turkey match was the proof. That atmosphere — 10,503 people making the kind of noise that travels through concrete and steel — was not manufactured. It was the expression of a city that understood what the game meant.

FIBA declared the 2025 edition a landmark success. The attendance record across all four host cities, the single-game crowd record at Piraeus, the quality of play, the coverage — all of it pointed toward a women's game that was growing faster than many had expected. The draw ceremony at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, hosted by journalist Lila Kountourioti and actress Yioulika Skafida, with basketball legends Dimitris Diamantidis and Sandrine Gruda assisting, set the tone: this was a continental championship that understood it was presenting itself to the world. The next edition in 2027 will be co-hosted by Belgium, Lithuania, and Sweden. But the benchmark it will be measured against was set, in significant part, by a stadium in Piraeus on a June evening, when the crowd refused to be quiet.