How far can the NBA globally expand?
The NBA has been making inroads on its international impact for years.
The NBA has become the most internationally-watched American sports league. YouGov compared the viewership between the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB in several significant countries, including some major population hubs like China and India and found the NBA’s global viewership to be at the top with a 28% share. This dwarfs its American competitors: the NFL, NHL and MLB wielded audience shares of 21%, 18% and 18% respectively. The NBA has broken into international markets through numerous business ventures, but it has one of the most internationally diverse athlete bodies as well. Past players like Yao Ming (China) and Leandro Barbosa (Brazil), as well as current ones like Rudy Gobert (France) and Lauri Markkanen (Finland) have given the NBA marketing tools in the form of players whose presence have more potential to make an impact with the scarcity of roster spots (15) compared to the NFL (53), MLB (26) and NHL (23). The NBA has not been expanding the basketball world in an American vacuum though.
Other countries’ developmental programs have started to accelerate their efficiency through the help of placing players on professional foreign teams instead of exporting their talents to America’s NCAA. The 2023 NBA Draft saw the #1 and #7 picks in Victor Wembanyama and Bilal Coulibaly establish their resumes overseas in the top French league with Metropolitans 92. This continues a trend of international prospects exchanging the Americanized development that would require the extra responsibilities of school and little-to-no-pay for the professional structure of professional leagues around the world. Just to list off some top prospects who took advantage of this route, there is Alperen Sengun (2021 #16th pick), Deni Avdija (2020 #9th pick) and Ousmane Dieng (2022 #11th pick). We also mustn’t forget 2-time MVP Nikola Jokic, who played for Serbia’s KK Mega Basket and superstar Luka Doncic, a Euroleague teenage legend with Real Madrid. This is not to say that the American professional basketball pipeline is becoming obsolete, but that there are more options available to NBA-hopefuls than ever before. Some of this year’s top prospects like Alex Sarr and Zaccharie Risacher are foreign talents that decided to remain abroad for their development. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is well aware of the growing audience for the sport that is coinciding with an increase in other leagues’ commitment to growing the sport in their own countries. If it wasn’t made obvious by the sleuth of foreign players traversing to America and dominating the NBA, refer to the past couple of FIBA World Cups, where the nonchalance granted by America’s pride as the world’s basketball capital has seen them fail to medal.
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Silver has tried to capitalize on these markets through collaboration that aims to draw talent away from domestically based development programs. There is NBA China and NBA India, which were initiated in countries without an established basketball heritage but with a massive fanbase and a massive pool of prospects due to the sheer size of their populations. The China program struggled with human rights issues, both regarding prospective talents enrolled in it, but also due to its geographic proximity to the civil rights catastrophe that is China’s treatment of the Uyghur population. The latter Indian effort just simply has not been successful in scouting NBA candidates.
Beyond external methods of grasping the ever-growing basketball market, Silver has also been trying to innovate the NBA’s model in ways that are reminiscent of European soccer structures. This season’s inaugural In-Season Tournament replicates the FIFA World Cup’s group-stage-to-knockout tournament structure, while the addition of the play-in to the postseason that was added in 2019 is similar to the promotion qualification knockout matches that occur in domestic soccer leagues, such as the Premier League. The In-Season Tournament’s championship game between the small-market Indiana Pacers and celebrity-driven Los Angeles Lakers reached over 4.5 million viewers, which broke the league’s non-Christmas regular season audience record within the past 5 years. While not as astronomical as NFL playoff matches, or even hot College Football rivalry games, it is a nice bump up from the NBA’s average national television viewership for last season that was at about 1.6 million. Additionally, the play-in games also serve as a boost towards regular ratings, but still retrieve about half of the typical NBA playoff matchup. While these are positive signs, they are still relying heavily on the domestic market with disregard to international time differences. So, what is Silver’s next step to conquer the basketball world?
The Ringer mentions how Silver is seemingly starting to consider the idea of cross-continent competitions between the NBA and other leagues, specifically the Euroleague. The Euroleague is largely seen as the best professional basketball league in a world without the NBA, as it produced the aforementioned Luka Doncic, but also successful NBA journeymen like Ricky Rubio and Nikola Mirotic as well. While The Ringer proposes this merger as a potentially attractive offer to expand the NBA’s global scope, it does not seem economically favorable for a league that has essentially monopolized its sport’s professional market. The NBA is the hottest basketball commodity; as depressing as it has been to see the U.S. get battered in international play, it is still a step down for the country on a consumer level. The FIBA 2023 World Cup Final between Germany and Serbia reached audience levels comparable to the NBA’s In-Season Tournament Championship. It is arguable that more eyeballs would have been glued to the screen if the U.S. were in this matchup, especially if the likes of global phenoms like LeBron James and Stephen Curry participated. Thus, the FIBA World Cup’s star power was dispersed heterogeneously rather than concentrated on a roster like America’s, whereas Olympics often draw more commitment from the NBA elite. More than this, it is a statement in itself that a star known for his international journey like Joel Embiid has opted to play for the U.S. over Cameroon for the upcoming Summer Olympics, where he’ll be able to reach more of his American base that dominates his fandom. It makes little sense for Adam Silver to give up the ground that he maintains over the basketball world, especially with these already existing threats of diminishment.
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The NFL could lead as an example for Silver if he wants to maximize profitability through intense domestication of the basketball market; this would be a stark reversal from Silver’s international endeavors, but it is still possible with new opportunities of streamlined broadcasting. The NFL has 30 of its 32 franchises ranked within the top 50 sports franchises around the world. This is not an accident. The NFL is absurdly profitable because of several factors: it has no real competition (the USFL and XFL play during the NFL offseason for a reason); there is no relegation or promotion structure like in European soccer, so teams are secured television revenue that is dispersed i n a socialist manner to bolster small market clubs; it has the smallest number of games per season compared to its professional league competitors, so local fans have more of an incentive to fill up their stadiums that far exceed the capacity levels of the other American sports leagues. Instead of trying to expand the sport abroad, the NFL simply inserts the league into other countries. This has paid dividends with NFL games being played in Germany and England often filling up the most massive stadiums to the brim without having to truly diversify the sport’s portfolio and developmental footprint.
Beyond the economic aspects of it all, the NBA cannot replicate international competitions’, like the Champions League, popular appeal. International basketball league teams do not have the funds or existing structure to attract top-tier talent and build developmental programs that can rival the NCAA or the G-League. Even if there are certainly international rosters that can compete with NBA-level talent, as depicted by the FIBA World Cup, why would Silver want to risk diluting the NBA’s reputation as the pinnacle of the basketball universe?
One extreme solution to mesh multiple international basketball leagues with the NBA would be to take another note from European soccer with the infamous Super League. The Super League was decimated by fans and pundits alike for its capitalistic desires, but that is the type of mindset needed to convince Silver. It could share the wealth of the American market, while further cementing the country as the sport’s leader by installing itself as its pioneering force. The hypothetical Super League is made up of 64 clubs that are separated into three tiers: Star, Gold and Blue in that order of best to worst. Star and Gold each have 16 teams that are separated into groups of 8, while Blue contains 32 teams that are split into 4 groups of 8. Without getting into the minutia, there is essentially a promotion/relegation system that is based on the performances of clubs in their own domestic leagues. This would still allow the NBA to dominate global viewership over the course of the regular season, while sending their best teams to represent them in a series of FIBA-esque round-robins and knockout stages. The NBA would safely occupy their role as the best league in the world, while gradually incentivizing international leagues to seek out further third-party- like that of a City Football Group for the rags-to-riches Girona in La Liga -investments to compete with American rosters in this disparate competition. Investors who may not be able to afford stakes in American teams would likely be willing to take a gamble with a high-profile international club like Real Madrid to try and infiltrate the American market through their performances in this theoretical league. This would help solve the problem of international clubs not having the money to compete with American squads, while enabling them to gain notoriety as they continue to develop through this auxiliary competition. Ultimately, the goal would be to elevate the standing of international basketball associations without the NBA having to diminish their own.
If Silver were to somehow swallow the other top-tier leagues into this NBA umbrella, there could be some parity constructed down the line, but until then, it seems unrealistic that the NBA would risk allowing another league to threaten its throne unless it is on terms that serve the economics of the league.
This entire hypothetical globalization of the NBA is assuming that other countries’ domestic leagues and governments would tolerate this athletic encroachment. The NFL’s aforementioned expansion into foreign countries has been praised by domestic evaluators of the league’s future, but critics do exist abroad. The NFL recently announced that its season opener will occur in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the heart of ‘jogo bonito’ or the other football to some Americans. While maybe a stretch, this expansion could be seen as a continuation of America’s goal of Western cultural and capital domination of the international economy. Even though the numbers back up that this endeavor would largely be welcomed by a swath of Brazilian American-football fans, it could seem like an attempt by the West to enforce a societal shift towards American sensibilities. Regardless, American sports leagues are adamant to spread their footprints on the global sporting world and only time will tell if Silver extends this trend.
Originally published at https://justapointofview.substack.com.
