The NBA is the closest thing America has to a global sports league. The last five NBA MVPs are from Greece, Serbia and Cameroon, while the league’s next great player – 19-year-old Victor Wembanyama – is French.
Much like football, basketball is the world’s game. Hotbeds across Europe and Asia are producing more top-level talent than ever, to the point that even so-called ‘second-tier’ markets are making themselves known on the world stage. Basketball could be described as a developing sport in Germany, despite being the home of the reigning Fiba World Cup champions and the NBA’s first non-American MVP, Dirk Nowitzki.
As a result, the NBA has the most balanced media rights revenue streams of any American sports league. About 15 per cent of the league’s media rights income derives from outside the US and Canada, compared to MLB’s three per cent and the NFL’s one per cent.
Currently, the NBA earns around $650m per year in media rights revenue outside the US, by far the most of any major American sports property. It makes up about 16 per cent of its overall media rights earnings in 2023.
Half of that amount – about $340m per season – derives from China and Japan alone as the vast majority of NBA games tip off during the morning in Beijing and Tokyo, giving the league and its media partners a live sports timeslot it can work with.
However, the NBA’s combined media rights value in France, the Balkans and Greece – the homes of its biggest stars – amounts to just $15m per season. Its value in Spain has declined and market conditions in France, the home of its biggest burgeoning star, could also produce downward pressure.
European revenues aren’t capped by the NBA’s lack of popularity. Euroleague Basketball – the continent’s top-tier club basketball competition – earns only slightly more than the NBA across Europe’s biggest basketball markets, despite having significant time zone and proximity advantages.
European sports fans love the NBA. They’re just never awake to watch it.
Untapped potential
Unlike European football leagues that enjoy much higher percentages of international media rights revenues, the NBA barely changes its live game tip-off times to capture international audiences. The league holds just one or two games per week in friendly timeslots for European viewing – beginning at 9pm CET. When there are multiple games scheduled, they often overlap.
All other games – be they regular season or playoff – are shown during the middle of the night in Europe, leaving fans to catch up the next morning via the NBA’s first-party platforms or via their social media channels.
Indeed, the league’s enduring brand value and popularity in Europe is largely due to its best-in-class digital content strategy. It is often said that the NBA produces so much content – live games, clips, highlights, interviews, documentaries, studio debates – that its international broadcasters barely know what to do with it all. The NBA requires several first and third-party platforms to house everything it produces, distributing most of that content for free. It has been the bedrock of the league’s marketing plan in the digital age and remains the envy of its peers.
The league has figured out how to attract global eyeballs without relying on live content, but European broadcasters and basketball business experts still believe the NBA is leaving money – and brand value – on the table.
Inflexible game scheduling and a focus on delivering content via social channels has meant that for many European media companies, the NBA is a difficult property to monetise and promote. European broadcasters and media companies that hold NBA rights are often reluctant to advertise their NBA coverage or cross-promote NBA games during marquee local sport and entertainment programming.
One source at an international broadcaster that holds NBA rights said the property is “a nice to have, a good brand to align with”, but that the timeslots for live games make the broadcaster’s live coverage “unmarketable” to a mass audience.
Another executive at a European broadcaster with basketball rights said: “One or two live games isn’t enough to attract new audiences and their existing hardcore fans often subscribe to League Pass. Everyone knows they have commitments to ESPN and TNT, but if they want to take a big step forward outside the US, they have to be more flexible.”
The NBA also limits its ‘Global Games’ – regular-season games that take place outside the US and Canada. Over the past five years the league has brought two or three isolated regular season games per season to either Mexico City, London or Paris as part of its Global Games initiative. For the 2023-24 season, this will be repeated with games played in Mexico and France.
International visits are a crucial tool for American sports leagues to grow their businesses abroad, and the NBA knows this better than most. Its regular season visits to Japan in the early-to-mid 1990s created a foundation for the league’s popularity that endures to this day – partly evidenced by a $40m-per-season media rights deal with subscription streaming platform Rakuten.
But with a French superstar in Wembanyama playing for the San Antonio Spurs, the NBA has made an unusual decision to send the Brooklyn Nets and Cleveland Cavaliers for its Paris regular season game in 2024.
It is, in the eyes of several European basketball experts, a missed opportunity for the league to grow its presence in the home of its future MVP and, potentially, show exactly why it should earn more for its media rights in France when pay-television broadcaster beIN Sport’s $8m-per-season deal expires at the end of 2023-24.
Home comforts
International growth is clearly not the NBA’s number-one priority, but it’s easy to see why. In the US, the league earns $2.6bn per season from its media rights deals with ESPN and TNT up until the end of the 2024-25 season.
From 2025-26 onward, it’s widely tipped to double that amount from the US as it will be the last major US sports property to hit the market there until the end of the decade.
After the NBA’s new domestic deals are done, it is expected that over 90 per cent of the league’s media rights revenues will derive from its domestic markets of the US and Canada. As such, these are the markets the league caters to first, second and third. But when it comes to the league’s international priorities, there is more that can be done.
The success of England’s Premier League in the US has some replicable elements. It has carved out the early-morning slot on Saturdays as its own, facing no competition from other US sports and staying well away from the likes of the NBA and the NFL in the process.
While the NBA’s weekday-heavy schedule isn’t ideal for capturing European audiences, it does have opportunities to own certain windows with limited competition from other major sports in Europe.
Its current Sunday scheduling could ensure separate tip-off times for earlier games, guaranteeing at least two games are shown in a good European timeslot each week. Friday and Saturday nights on European time – primetime viewing for young sports fans – are currently unoccupied by NBA games that could feasibly be scheduled there with minimal impact on US broadcast schedules.
The NBA can also learn plenty from the NFL’s incredible growth in the UK and Germany over the past decade, markets where the NFL has historically ensured consistent free-to-air broadcast coverage for at least one live game per week. Various UK free-to-air broadcasters have shown live NFL games over the past two decades, while commercial broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 has made sure live NFL has been shown to mass German audiences.
Given the NBA’s relatively small European media rights revenues and the anticipated leap in domestic media rights revenue, would an exposure-focused strategy not be more appropriate for its current stage of development?
Whatever the NBA’s path forward in Europe, its current generation of breathtaking, charismatic stars could become true global sensations with just a little more flexibility.
Because if Victor Wembanyama drops 38 points on the Phoenix Suns at 4am and nobody in France is awake to watch it, can the NBA ever truly become a global sports property?
