The National Basketball Association (NBA) has a tentative launch month, October 2027, for its European league and has drawn up a list of 12 cities to establish the first teams in: London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Athens, Istanbul, Manchester and Lyon. The league is to have 16 teams in all.
The news comes from the NBA’s Managing Director for Europe and the Middle East, George Aivazoglou, who spoke at the Football Business Forum in Milan on Nov. 7, as reported by The Athletic.
According to Aivazoglou, the four as yet unaccounted for teams will be competing by play-in, through either FIBA’s Champions League or a domestic league. Also, the European teams might compete with regular NBA teams in a tournament.
“It would be a new competition bringing together NBA and NBA Europe teams – down the line, an NBA Cup format with American and European teams, or a tournament like last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup – as part of an increasingly integrated framework,” he said.
As The Athletic points out, such games with NBA teams would require negotiations with the NBA Players Association.
“We will have teams in three categories,” The Athletic reports Aivazoglou as having said. “First, we’re talking with some existing basketball teams. Second, we’re talking with football teams that have a strong brand, and therefore a large fan base, but don’t have a basketball team: many of the most interesting conversations we’re having in this country [Italy] and in this city [Milan] are of this nature. And there are situations, in very limited cases, where we’ll start from scratch.”
The NBA, Aivazoglou continued, has engaged JP Morgan Chase and the Raine Group to find investors – sovereign wealth funds and private-equity firms for the most part, but also wealthy families. He believes that the European sports market is worth some $50 billion and that basketball leagues are for now generating “less than 0.5 percent of that.”
