By Johnny Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net
The NBA plans to begin naming winning bidders for 12 permanent teams in a new top-tier European League in the next 60 to 90 days. Deputy commissioner Mark Tatum revealed the rapid timeline in an interview with CNBC Sport, while keeping the 16-team league, widely referred to as NBA Europe, firmly on track for a debut at the top of the 2027–28 winter club schedule and confirming many structural details previously reported by Eurohoops.
Bids for the franchises are due at the end of June, and the league is actively searching for ‘great operators’ willing to invest heavily in state-of-the-art venues. Infrastructure remains a key hurdle, as Tatum noted, there are currently only ‘two to three world-class’ arenas across the entire continent. To bridge this gap, the league is looking outside traditional boundaries.
“We’re on a very, very quick timeline here,” mentioned the 56-year-old executive. “We’re going to identify the right partners in the right cities.”
“We’re talking not only existing basketball teams in the ecosystem, but we’re talking to soccer teams that currently don’t have basketball teams that are interested, and we’re also talking to individuals and other entities who don’t have a basketball team but want to invest in a basketball team,” he added.
This intersection with football ownership was highlighted by Italian veteran Danilo Gallinari, who confirmed his potential involvement in the project during an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport.
“Through the NBA, I got in touch with RedBird, one of the entities interested in bringing an NBA Europe franchise to Milan,” he noted, referencing the fund that owns AC Milan. “I’ve been trying for months to figure out how I could be involved in this project, which I think could be amazing. My role is yet to be defined, but I would like to be more than a passive investor. I want my voice to be heard.”
The commercial upside driving this interest is massive. While Tatum estimates that Europe boasts 300 million basketball fans, the sport currently captures ‘less than 1% of the commercial market share there’. Global media networks are already moving to capture this untapped revenue.
“There has been an incredible amount of inbound interest on taking those games and distributing them not only throughout Europe but globally,” he said. “We have no doubt that it will create some global interest, and therefore, media partners are very interested in carrying that content.”
The 12 new permanent teams will be located in Rome, Milan, London, Manchester, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Athens, and Istanbul. They’ll be joined by four rotating clubs available via the Basketball Champions League and season-ending qualifying tournaments in Europe.
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