By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
On Monday (7/4), the EuroLeague Board has a meeting that may end up being one of the more pivotal in the history of the competition, with some of the biggest issues to date on the table.
Of course, the future of European basketball will be among those issues, since this is the board’s first meeting after the official announcement of FIBA and the NBA about their decision to explore a European league.
However, no matter what will happen tomorrow and no matter how much each side works to protect its interests, the point remains that a new division in European basketball can be catastrophic for both sides.
And no matter how solid of a business plan you may have, since we are talking about sports, ultimately everything will be decided by fans’ interest.
This is the most important variable since professional sports rely on their audience, either in the arena or on the screen, to be successful. There’s no denying that the NBA is the biggest worldwide basketball brand, and also there’s no denying that the EuroLeague is head above heels the biggest league in Europe for a quarter of a century.
However, make no mistake about European fans. They will, as even Adam Silver has pointed out in his press conference speaking about football fanbases, follow their clubs no matter what, and club loyalty – not franchise – is the premium currency in European sports.
You will rarely find big numbers of fans that are loyal to a league brand or even to an athlete, like what happens in the US. This is by far the biggest mentality difference in professional sports between Europe and the US, and the relatively small percentage that is interested in the sport in general seems to be opposed to the NBA-created league, which makes sense because they consider themselves basketball purists, and many of them simply hate the on-court product of the NBA.
Just look at the most vocal reactions under the FIBA Instagram post about the new league, and you get the point.
So, creating new clubs in strong markets is a logical plan. Adding in the new league the few basketball clubs that are not in the EuroLeague but have a big fan base and basketball potential can also help.
However, nothing can work miracles if, in the end, EuroLeague keeps most, if not all, of the big clubs and NBA Europe ends up using just the brand and not having a strong footing in the existing European basketball elite.
And while you can’t deny the hugely successful financial numbers of the NBA, projects like the G League, BAL, the NBA Academies, and even the WNBA, in the best case, just break even.
Of course, breaking even is not achieved by many top European basketball clubs, so it would be silly to dismiss the NBA’s marketing and financial expertise.
Still, the experiment of the NFL Europe failed, as Emmet Ryan of BallinEurope explains, because “NFL fans in Europe cared for the NFL, not a secondary imitation”.
Emmet, a good friend of mine, is probably the best to interpret this, since he is Irish and resides in Dublin, hardly a European basketball hotbet. Because of this, he can really understand how hard it is to create basketball interest in the UK or places where basketball is an afterthought.
This creates a huge question. Yes, there’s a tremendous level of tribalism in European football, and clubs like, for example, Manchester City, are global brands with vast fanbases.
However, who can answer whether their fanbase will also support a basketball team in countries and markets where basketball is not mainstream and, despite its potential, doesn’t currently have a big fanbase?
I guess if we end up having two rival leagues like it happened back in 2000 with the EuroLeague and the Suproleague, we will soon find out.