The NBA plans to name winning bidders for 12 permanent European teams in the next 60 to 90 days, Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum said in an exclusive CNBC interview.
The European league remains on track to debut in October 2027, he said.
The 12 new 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 to any FIBA-affiliated team in Europe on an annual basis depending on performance. FIBA is the sport's international governing body in Europe.
Bids for teams are due at the end of June, Tatum told CNBC Sport. The league is looking for "great operators" who will invest in new stadiums, said Tatum, who added there are only "two to three world-class" basketball arenas in all of Europe.
"We're on a very, very quick timeline here," Tatum said. "We're going to identify the right partners in the right cities, and we're going to take as much time as we need in order to identify those right partners. 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."
Tatum noted basketball is the second-most popular sport in Europe but gets "less than 1% of the commercial market share there." He estimated Europe has about 300 million basketball fans.
The NBA is considering how to intermingle NBA Europe teams with its existing North American teams. In the short term, NBA Europe teams could play U.S.- and Canada-based teams in the preseason, said Tatum. Then, over time, teams across the two leagues could meet up in the Emirates Cup – the midseason tournament that the league debuted in 2023.
NBA officials are having "a ton" of conversations with potential media partners for NBA Europe, including "some of the big global streaming partners," Tatum said. The value of the league will be in its global interest, even though it's based in Europe, he said.
"There has been an incredible amount of inbound interest on taking those games and distributing them not only throughout Europe but globally," Tatum said. "We have no doubt that it will create some global interest, and therefore media partners are very interested in carrying that content."
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Tatum also pitched investors on the NBA's Basketball Africa League. While the league has been operating for six seasons, the NBA has only recently begun selling individual teams to investors.
The BAL currently contributes $250 million in GDP to the African continent, Tatum said, estimating that could grow to $5.4 billion by 2034.
"Eleven of the top 20 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa, and Africa is expected to account for more than 40% of the world's youth in the next five years," said Tatum. "So, what I would say to those investors is, 'What a great market opportunity.' Basketball is now turning into a business and creating jobs and economic growth, and now it's the opportunity to get in at the ground level and take advantage of that growth."
