A new basketball league is coming to Europe. NBA commissioner Adam Silver provided a little more clarity on Wednesday.
Speaking with reporters ahead of the 2026 NBA Finals, Silver confirmed the NBA is on track for its European subsidiary to launch next year and will soon stop accepting bids from interested teams:
“We are very much on schedule. It is our hope and anticipation that that league will launch in the 2027-28 season in Europe. We are on track. Final bids from franchises are due at the end of the month in June. As has been reported, we’ve seen record interest and we’re very excited about the ongoing opportunity and working closely with FIBA, our federation.”
Silver later said the league will “presumably” be in position to award franchises in the fall. When asked how the new league would be structured, he laid out a vision that features 16 teams, with some existing teams and some newly created, some permanent and some using a promotion/relegation system.
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The involvement of EuroLeague, the current top competition in Europe, remains to be seen:
“What we’re planning to launch with, essentially, is a 16-team league. 12 permanent franchises and then the ability for, frankly, any club in Europe to play in those remaining slots. A modified open league or a modified closed league, depending on how you want to look at it. That’s the structure that we’re talking to these potential franchises about.
Some are existing franchises that play in Europe and then there’s groups who are coming together and want to launch teams in cities that don’t have top-level basketball right now. In terms of EuroLeague, negotiations are ongoing with them. It’s our hope that we can find a way to integrate these operations with. the EuroLeague, but we will move forward either way.
It has previously been reported that the NBA is targeting the cities of Rome and Milan in Italy, London and Manchester in England, Paris and Lyon in France, Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Munich and Berlin in Germany as well as Athens in Greece and Istanbul in Turkey.
The NBA is coming to Europe. There are still plenty of unanswered questions.
(RICCARDO MILANI via Getty Images)
One major question remaining is how much the NBA’s own players can be involved. Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Dončić bought a stake in Italy’s Vanoli Cremona last month, with the intention to relocate the team to Rome and compete to represent the capital city in NBA Europe.
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NBA players are forbidden from owning any stake in one of the league’s teams, but it’s a grayer area with NBA Europe teams, which will likely have a different body of players. Silver couldn’t provide an answer on how that will work:
“In terms of whether it’s Luka Doncic or other players owning teams, that has not been resolved yet. That’s an issue we have to work through with our players association. I’ll just add I think part of the determination will be what the basketball relationship will be betwen these teams in — call it NBA Europe — and the NBA.
“That obviously could complicate things if current NBA players were owners, so those are some of the factors that we’ll be looking at.”
The whole enterprise doesn’t sound too different from the infamous European Super League that attempted to break away from the existing soccer structure in 2021. That proposed league featured 15 permanent teams, composed of the largest clubs in Europe, and a rotating cast of five teams fortunate enough to be promoted from the rest of the pack.
In this case, the NBA will apparently either join forces with EuroLeague or create a competition that threatens to supplant it, likely with EuroLeague’s top teams or whichever bidder is willing to pony up for a slot.
