The NBA’s marketing rights could soon be worth around $75 billion. The world‘s best basketball league is flourishing and becoming increasingly popular outside of North America. It has a big trump card compared to European football.
Slovenian superstar: Luka Doncic from the Dallas Mavericks is one of the most prominent players in the NBA.
Kevin Jairaj / Reuters
When the National Basketball Association (NBA) unveils its new marketing deal in the coming months, the numbers will be staggering. Over the past nine years, ESPN and Warner Brothers have paid $24 billion, and the next deal, which takes effect in 2025, will include more partners – and be worth two to three times that amount.
The NBA will never surpass the popularity of the National Football League in the USA, at least not in the long term. But the league is booming. And it is steadily gaining popularity globally – if only because basketball is a more accessible sport than American football. And is played around the world.
When the Cleveland Cavaliers and Brooklyn Nets face off in Paris on Thursday, there will be less focus on these two mediocre teams. But more on the overall NBA product, which is becoming more and more international.
At the start of the season in October, there were 125 players in the squads of the 30 NBA teams who did not come from the USA – a record. Among them is the only Swiss, Clint Capela (Atlanta Hawks) from Geneva, who has been stagnating for a long time. Some of the biggest stars grew up on the old continent: Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece, Milwaukee Bucks) and Nikola Jokic (Serbia, Denver Nuggets) were already champions and were the first Europeans since Dirk Nowitzki to be named the league’s most valuable player in 2007.
The Slovenian Luka Doncic performs miracles almost every evening in Dallas. And the 20-year-old Frenchman Victor Wembanyama from the San Antonio Spurs is considered the biggest promise since LeBron James, the 39-year-old grand seigneur of the Los Angeles Lakers, who is now the oldest professional in the league.
The entertainment is also good off the courts – “Twitter Gate” in Philadelphia
The number of TV consumers in Europe is increasing every year, even though most games take place in the middle of the night. It doesn’t stop Jokic disciples in Belgrade and Wembanyama supporters in Paris from seeing their idols play live.
The league is taking this trend into account in several ways. It hosts games in Europe and Mexico. It sends stars to Asia as part of a media tour and runs a development league in Africa. In preparation, NBA teams played test games against Australian representatives. New NBA shops have just opened in Berlin, Paris, Johannesburg, Melbourne and Abu Dhabi.
The NBA benefits from the fact that its stars can be easily marketed; They resonate with the young Instagram generation and speak the same language as their followers. In addition: the entertainment is excellent. On the parquet – and also next to it.
One of the most bizarre stories in recent years comes from Philadelphia, where a general manager’s partner used a Twitter account under a false name to positively influence public opinion about her husband. When someone made fun of Bryan Colangelo’s very large shirt collars, she angrily wrote that they were “normal collars” and that they should look for another topic. When the fake account was uncovered by a journalist, Colangelo soon lost his job.
There are many such episodes, not all of them amusing. Ja Morant, the Memphis Grizzlies’ poster boy, was suspended for 25 games in the fall for not brandishing a weapon for the first time in an Instagram video. That was bad for the image of the league and also for the Grizzlies. But it was another story that the scene could feast on and which filled the comment columns; The NBA sometimes seems like Hollywood popcorn cinema incarnate.
LeBron James earns $80 million a year from equipment and sponsorship contracts alone
It’s entertainment that’s worth a lot of money. In the 2022/23 season, the league generated more than $10 billion in sales for the first time. Player wages are constantly rising; there are now players with an annual salary of more than $50 million. Even supplementary players sometimes earn more than 10 million. The Miami Heat coach received a contract extension worth $100 million over eight years this week.
There is no end to the gold rush in sight – on the contrary: the upcoming new marketing contract will result in the salary cap being raised significantly. In the medium term, 80 million per season is no longer a utopia. For comparison: Michael Jordan, who retired in 2003, earned a total of $86 million in ten years.
The income that the big names earn from sponsorship and equipment contracts is not included. Last year, LeBron James earned 80 million from this alone. In 2015, he signed a lifetime shoe deal with Nike that will pay him around a billion.
The NBA has long been big business. But unlike European football, parity is guaranteed, which makes the league very attractive. The quality of the games is usually excellent, they are full of speed, dunks and seemingly impossible three-point throws. The visit of the Cavaliers and the Nets to Paris offers a wider audience the opportunity to see this for themselves once again.