The Overseas Basketball Market is Expanding

My rookie year overseas, I signed a contract that paid me decent money, and I remember thinking I had made it. Then I got to the gym and the weight room was a rack of dumbbells that stopped at forty pounds and a bench somebody had clearly found on the side of a road. The trainer wrapped my ankle before my first game and I watched him do it and realized he had no idea what he was doing. That was the level I lived in for a good chunk of my career. In the middle and below, where the money is enough to live on but nobody is spending a fortune on you.

I bring that up because there is a number floating around European basketball right now that I cannot stop thinking about. A group in London led by a tech executive is reportedly putting together a bid worth around £740 million to own an NBA Europe franchise. That is not a typo. Almost a billion dollars for one team, in a league that has not played a single game yet. NBA Europe is targeting twelve permanent franchises plus four qualifying spots for fall 2027, and the NBA has called it possibly the largest influx of capital European basketball has ever seen.

And at the same time, on basically the same timeline, EuroLeague is expanding from twenty teams to twenty-four. So it is not one giant showing up in the neighborhood. It is the whole top of European basketball getting bigger at once.

When the top of the market gets richer, it does not just create rich jobs at the top. EuroLeague clubs go pull the best players out of EuroCup. EuroCup clubs replace them by pulling from the strong domestic leagues. Those domestic leagues pull from wherever they can find bodies. Every level reaches down and grabs from the level below it, and if you are sitting in that middle tier where I spent most of my career, you either get pulled up or you get squeezed out by somebody more experienced sliding down into your spot.

That trickle is your career. The roster math happening two and three levels below the headlines is the thing that decides whether you have a job in 2027.

So I am going to ask you the same question I wish somebody had asked me when I was twenty-four and thought a decent paycheck meant I had arrived. Do you actually know where you fit right now? Do you know which level you belong to, which clubs are stable, which ones are about to lose players to the level above them and go shopping? Because the athletes who start tracking that movement now are going to be standing in the right place when the money lands. The ones who wait until 2027 to look up are going to be competing against a deeper and more expensive field than overseas basketball has ever had, and a lot of them are going to lose spots they assumed were theirs.

We are going to break this down together over the coming months. Ownership, stability, roster hierarchy, where the openings actually are. This is the shit nobody explained to me, and I had to learn it the hard way with a forty-pound dumbbell and a trainer who learned first aid off a fucking cereal box.

With OverseasX, you’ll never have to walk this journey alone.