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Singapore’s government has joined a Macau casino operator and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in backing a new $5bn basketball competition that will seek to shake up the status quo in one of the world’s most popular sports.
The Asian city-state, Hong Kong-listed Galaxy Entertainment and Sela, an events business owned by the Riyadh-based Public Investment Fund, have signed on as partners alongside Swiss bank UBS to a new venture being spearheaded by Maverick Carter, business partner of basketball superstar LeBron James, and executives including a co-founder of Skype.
The plan is to create an international basketball circuit with six men’s teams and six women’s teams competing in eight host cities. Macau and Singapore have already been enlisted as hosts, and organisers are in talks with cities in Europe to join them.
The project, which does not yet have a name or launch date, is aiming to reshape the global game by offering top players an alternative to the dominant National Basketball Association, while bringing elite talent closer to the sport’s extensive Asian fan base.
Dominant sporting leagues and governing bodies across the world — from athletics and sailing to football and golf — have increasingly come under pressure from upstart rivals. The trend, which many in the industry expect to continue, has been fuelled by changing viewing habits, legal challenges and the arrival of a new breed of investors.
Alongside Carter, others involved include Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice and former Facebook executive Grady Burnett, while tech investor Byron Deeter, New York-based fund SC Holdings and VC firm Quiet Capital are part of an ongoing capital raising. Sela and Galaxy have both joined the capital raise, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Singapore’s ministry of culture, community and sport said it was “exploring the terms of the arrangement, and will assess the issue of investment at the appropriate time”. Edwin Tong, community, culture and youth minister in the city-state that is a possible headquarters for the competition, said he welcomed “the opportunity for a strategic partnership with this new league, including as a key venue for their events”.
Sela, which runs sporting events in Saudi Arabia and is the main sponsor of Saudi-owned English Premier League club Newcastle United, predicted “an electrifying new era” for basketball.
Those behind the new competition describe it as basketball’s answer to Formula One, with teams crossing the globe for two-week long showcase tournaments in each of the host cities.
One of the goals is to combine Europe’s deep pool of playing talent — a European has won the NBA’s most valuable player award five times in the past six years — with the many millions of basketball fans in Asia.
“When it comes to global basketball, the opportunity is massive,” said Deeter. “There’s a huge untapped market — millions of fans outside of the US who are eager for us to grow the sport at the elite level.”
The project is likely to draw comparisons with LIV, a Saudi-backed project designed to disrupt the golf establishment by luring top players from the PGA Tour with bumper salaries. LIV’s arrival opened up a bitter divide across golf and sparked a series of expensive legal battles, before a tentative peace deal was reached in the summer of 2023.
The men’s version of the start-up basketball competition is envisaged as a full-time endeavour, so participating teams would compete for talent with the NBA. Players will be offered equity in the new league, while organisers hope a compressed season with a greatly reduced travel schedule will also add to its appeal.
As in many sports, basketball’s fandom is increasingly driven by interest in top players rather than loyalty to teams, so tempting a few big names to join a new competition has the potential to cause significant disruption to the sport’s long standing set-up.
However, the NBA’s 11-year media rights deals worth $76bn agreed last year give it increased financial firepower to see off any threat, while ambitious start-up leagues in other sports have often struggled to gain traction. The NBA has also been making its own push to grow its international audience by hosting games overseas.
In December it announced a “multiyear” partnership with Sands China, one of Galaxy’s rival Macau casino operators, to bring pre-season games to the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
Additional reporting by Owen Walker in Singapore.
