The top American basketball league has a megabucks plan to take over the European market. But it’s no slam dunk.
European officials and major sports leagues are trying to hamstring the National Basketball Association — home to global superstars including LeBron James and Steph Curry — before it can get off the ground ahead of a mooted 2027 launch in key cities around the continent.
Proponents of the NBA-backed European competition reckon it will be an essential investment for a widely popular sport that doesn’t turn a massive profit in Europe across smaller domestic tournaments. Opponents say the global behemoth’s entry across the continent would stifle national basketball leagues and instead funnel cash to American companies.
The divide comes at a moment of major commercial and political tension, with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration attempting to bend European legislators and regulators to its America-first agenda.
Basketball also marks the latest clash in a broader debate over the European sports model, which is based on promotion and relegation between leagues, and solidarity payments across a pyramidal structure. The NBA operates under the American sports model, in which franchises maintain permanent places in closed leagues, generating significant revenues for team owners and creating highly paid superstars matched only by top European football clubs.
For this account of the backroom negotiating currently taking place between some of the world’s most powerful sports officials, POLITICO spoke to several European political figures, sports executives and industry heavyweights with direct knowledge of talks, some of whom were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.
NBA executives have already been sounding out Europe’s biggest multi-sport club owners and team officials about backing the project, triggering unease from other parts of the continent’s sports establishment.
“The main reason we don’t support NBA Europe is that closed leagues and competitions benefit only the top percent of the commercially successful clubs, but cause significant harm to the sport at national level,” one senior European government official told POLITICO.
While the EU doesn’t run sports in Europe, it does police the marketplace in which sports operate — and officials were quick to defend the values the EU seeks to uphold.
“As policymakers, including at EU level, there is a clear duty to uphold the competition acquis, but also to give full weight to the wider EU values repeatedly underlined in court judgments, such as solidarity, openness, and fairness,” EU Sports Commissioner Glenn Micallef told POLITICO.
He added: “The current debate suggests that this balance requires recalibration, placing greater emphasis on those values to safeguard the integrity of European sport and its pyramidal model.”
Private negotiations
Business titans have long eyed the European sports market as an attractive commercial proposition, buying clubs and even moving to upend existing competitions.
A previous attempt to set up a semi-closed American-style football league in Europe — the ill-fated Super League bid by a group of 12 leading clubs in 2021 — hit a wall of political and public resistance.
Basketball is a slightly different case as the continent’s flagship Euroleague is already a semi-closed competition — a design that has faced significant blowback since its launch around the turn of the century. But NBA critics are sounding the alarm as crunch talks intensify about the potential launch in 12 proposed cities including Rome, Berlin and Madrid.
Senior officials from the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) met with Micallef and key EU sports figures in Brussels earlier this month, where they pressed the case that the new league — with its semi-closed structure but pathway to Europe for clubs that perform well in their domestic leagues — would be a European success story.
“Current developments in European basketball highlight long-standing concerns around closed league models,” Micallef said after the meeting, in remarks that may be interpreted as a subtle warning about the American sports model.
“They also invite reflection on the growing role of investment in sport, recognising that such investment can be welcome and beneficial provided it respects sound governance principles and remains aligned with Europe’s sporting values, traditions, and structures.”
He added: “While breakaway competitions usually promise growth and stability, restricting open competition comes at the expense of national leagues and the wider sporting pyramid: a lesson other sports should consider carefully.”
Two industry officials told POLITICO that Spain’s La Liga — the domestic football league — held a meeting with the NBA to emphasize that the format presented is contrary to the European sports model and that, if implemented, it would be met with staunch opposition from EU institutions and other sporting organizations from across Europe.
NBA officials have been approaching major European football and multi-sports club owners over the past year about joining the basketball project, according to one executive with direct knowledge of negotiations.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and his deputy Mark Tatum have been talking regularly to Paris Saint-Germain owner Nasser al-Khelaifi, a powerful sports leader from Doha, to try and convince Qatar Sports Investments to own a new franchise in Paris — as part of the PSG group of sports clubs. The American sports bosses have also conducted talks with Barcelona and Real Madrid, the executive said.
“Our conversations with various stakeholders in Europe have reinforced our belief that an enormous opportunity exists around the creation of a new league on the continent,” Silver said in a statement. “Together with FIBA, we look forward to engaging prospective clubs and ownership groups that share our vision for the game’s potential in Europe.”
In an announcement Monday that the two parties were pressing ahead with the European expansion, FIBA Secretary-General Andreas Zagklis said: “The format of the league respects European sport model principles by offering any ambitious club in the continent a fair pathway to the top. The project is conceived in a way that will improve the sustainability of the entire European basketball ecosystem, including players, clubs, leagues and national federations, by generating a knock-on effect that will strongly benefit basketball fans throughout Europe.”
Keen to assuage EU regulatory concerns, the NBA and FIBA added that they plan to dedicate financial support and resources to development throughout Europe’s basketball ecosystem.
No domination
The announcement by the NBA and FIBA of some “permanent spots” in the league is central to the looming resistance in Brussels, which is also skeptical about the economic benefits for Europe.
“What about the governance and economic value?” said Bogdan Zdrojewski, an MEP from the conservative European People’s Party group in the European Parliament. “It seems that with the NBA Europe these risk being siphoned out of Europe, leading to a lack of accountability on governance and a staggeringly high loss of economic value if we look at how the economic return — TV rights, sponsorships — generated in Europe will be systematically funneled to U.S.-based holding entities.”
Zdrojewski added, “We need to look carefully at how the economic model is likely to lead to a corporate shift with traditional clubs being excluded in favor of global investment funds and state-backed clubs, who will be the only ones able to afford the prohibitive costs like the estimated $500 million to $1 billion founding franchise fees.”
At a meeting of EU sports ministers in Brussels last month, several countries — including Italy, France and Slovenia — spoke out against the NBA’s plans. Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda also recently urged “basketball organizations on both sides of the Atlantic to cooperate, not compete, to take into account and appreciate the deep traditions of European basketball, and not to forget that values come before commercial interests.”
Those who have built up European basketball in its current form agree.
“European basketball is built on history, identity and community. Fans here are not a market to be conquered; they are the people who have sustained clubs for decades, across generations,” said Paulius Motiejunas, CEO of the existing top competition Euroleague Basketball. “Any new project should start by respecting that and by strengthening the entire pyramid: elite competition, domestic leagues, and grassroots.”
But, he added, collaboration is possible “if the goal is genuinely to grow basketball in Europe.” His terms, he said, were simple: “It has to be a partnership, not a takeover or, as they have mentioned, domination.”
The NBA’s billion-dollar bid to crack Europe is already hitting political resistance
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