In a sports market dominated by prophecies of doom and gloom, Europe’s top-tier club basketball property could be positioned perfectly to buck any negative trend.
Euroleague Basketball has grown significantly over the past decade, riding a wave of media rights increases across its primary markets to earn almost €100m per year in overall commercial rights revenue at the end of 2023-24.
But now that media market conditions across Europe are decidedly tougher than they once were, the competition faces a challenge to secure good results in upcoming broadcast negotiations across Turkey, Israel and Italy.
Luckily for Euroleague, it has a couple of aces up its sleeve.
A new hosting agreement for the season-ending EuroLeague Final Four is the verge of being announced, taking the competition to the Middle East for the first time in 2025. The one-year agreement is thought to be worth over €20m – multiples more than the competition earned from the 2023-24 Final Four in Berlin.
And should that prove to be a one-off windfall, the competition is hoping to replicate its media rights growth on the sponsorship side of its business – an area that remained largely untouched since the advent of Euroleague Basketball’s commercial rights joint venture with agency IMG in 2016.
Gawain Davies arrived as Euroleague Basketball’s chief commercial officer just over a year ago and has already left his mark on the competition’s brand partnerships.
New deals with payment services provider Visa and mobile phone manufacturer Motorola mark a significant departure from the slew of local deals that Euroleague once relied upon. But Davies says there is plenty of work still to be done for the competition to achieve its potential on sponsorship.
“It’s going to take us about two years to clean up our model, but that’s what we’ve been doing. At the end of last season we had four deals up for renewal and let them all go, even though they wanted to renew,” Davies explains.
“I realised when I came in just how big this property is. But the money we make from sponsorship and the type of brands we have isn’t really commensurate with what I’m seeing in terms of the scale and quality of the product.
Those four deals were all regional deals with single-market brands in the south east of Europe. Davies believes many of these agreements prevented Euroleague from attracting global brands able to pay significantly more for multi-market activation.
“A lot of the regional deals or local market deals we had were low value and in pretty major categories. Whenever you do those deals, it makes it very hard to do global category deals. If you’re taking Turkey, Greece or Spain out of the equation in a category, you’re reducing your chances of doing global business.”
The low value of these prior deals has given Davies plenty of room to grow into, and he intends to tap into the expertise of IMG to help turn potential into reality.
IMG has been heavily influential in growing Euroleague’s broadcast revenues since the beginning of the JV, but has largely been hands-off when it comes to the competition’s sponsorship offering.
As a former IMG man himself, Davies has historic relationships with many top executives at the agency, making collaboration the easier option.
“IMG are earning money from our sponsorship, so it makes sense to put them to work on it!” Davies says, half in jest. “I’ve got a good relationship with Adam [Kelly, IMG president of media] and they now have Luke Organ [IMG head of sponsorship] who I’ve known for 20 years and have done plenty of business with.”
Davies believes these relationships and a more contemporary approach to sponsorship can yield another phase of commercial growth for Euroleague, which as of this year can truly describe itself as a pan-European offering.
The Western front
At the advent of Euroleague Basketball’s joint venture with IMG, the organisation’s then-CEO and president Jordi Bertomeu set out of a vision to expand EuroLeague beyond its heartlands of Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Serbia and Lithuania. In particular, Bertomeu believed that expansion into France, Germany and the UK held the key to EuroLeague achieving its potential.
Though Bertomeu is no longer in position to see the fruits of his labour, the plan he initiated back in 2016 alongside IMG is two thirds of the way to completion. At the time of writing, Paris Basketball and Monaco sit first and second in the EuroLeague table, with Bayern Munich one win behind in fifth.
None of these teams were competing in EuroLeague prior to 2016. Paris Basketball was only founded in 2018. The change has been relatively quick in sporting terms, but has been “a marathon, not a sprint” for Alex Ferrer Kristjansson, a 20-year Euroleague Basketball veteran who is now the organisation’s chief marketing and communications officer.
“It required conviction about that being the right path to follow, but we are now seeing the results,” Ferrer Kristjansson says. “Basketball and Euroleague is growing in the strongest economies and markets in Europe. It’s a false perception that basketball is non-existent in those territories – it’s just that Euroleague was non-existent in those territories.”
Paris Basketball’s success this season may seem like it has come from nowhere, but Euroleague Basketball sees it as the culmination of years of hard work. Paris Basketball qualified for the top-tier EuroLeague by winning the second-tier EuroCup last season. They are now setting the top-tier alight in 2024-25 and bringing mainstream media coverage to the competition.
Outside of EuroLeague, basketball has seeped into the culture of both countries. Germany’s Fiba Basketball World Cup win in 2023 has the potential to be transformational for the sport, while France’s production line of NBA wunderkinds is giving inner-city kids brand new role models outside the football hegemony.
Now that EuroLeague is very much existent across Paris, Berlin, Munich and beyond, the challenge for Ferrer Kristjansson and IMG will be to convert this into media rights revenue uplifts. In particular, Germany is believed to be a target for a strong increase as a market with specialist streamers – such as Axel Springer-owned Dyn – happy to spend money on non-football rights.
Ferrer Kristjansson says France and Germany are EuroLeague’s fastest-growing markets in terms of Gen Z interest and engagement – something that has been a huge help for Davies on the sponsorship side of the business.
“We offer a truly pan-European footprint, which has been appealing to brands like Visa and Motorola,” Ferrer Kristjansson says. “Before, these conversations didn’t get too far. Now, everybody is ready to listen.”
London and beyond
Rumours around a potential EuroLeague expansion team in the Middle East continue to persist but for now, London remains the top target for Euroleague Basketball’s expansion.
The city’s London Lions team had made strong advances in recent years, reaching the semi-finals of the second-tier EuroCup in 2023-24, losing to Paris Basketball. However, the bankruptcy of team owner 777 Partners halted their progress and saw them kicked out of the EuroCup in 2024-25 due to their financial instability.
New owners Tesonet – a Lithuanian tech company and minority shareholder of EuroLeague club Žalgiris Kaunas – are rebuilding the Lions but in a far steadier fashion than 777 attempted.
“The 777 situation was unfortunate,” Ferrer Kristjansson says. “Obviously, we thought we were closer to a London team than we actually were. Now it’s about keeping an eye on how things progress with the Lions. The new ownership is building the project in a sustainable way but they have kept the ambition of joining the EuroLeague at some point.
“We would be delighted for that to be sooner rather than later, but there’s no rush. The important thing is that we get it right, so we will wait for as long as we need to: until we identify a strong and solid project in London or somewhere else in the UK.”
Davies is particularly excited about the potential of an expansion team in London – the final piece of the puzzle for him to offer brands a truly pan-European opportunity.
“Basketball brings something that other sports can’t bring: an authentic link back into lifestyle and inner city culture,” Davies says. “We are an inner-city sport and we trend younger than most other sports based on the data we have.”
He continued: “If we can bring London into the league then we will have exceptional coverage and an almost unique coverage for a single property.”
“Aside from the very biggest properties – the Fifa World Cup, the Olympic Games – there isn’t a property that will tick all the target markets and demographics for a brand. I think what Visa have seen is a tier-one property, especially in southern Europe, but with a relevance in France and Germany that is growing all the time.”
Davies and Ferrer Kristjansson will be hoping that last season’s London v Paris EuroCup semi-final is a glimpse into EuroLeague’s future. But before the competition can reach its goals, there is plenty of hard graft to be done as Euroleague Basketball readies itself for its next stage of development.
“We are only scratching the surface in getting the sponsorship and marketing teams to work together, brainstorming content and activations ideas before partnerships happen,” Ferrer Kristjansson says.
“That’s a change of mindset and a change of culture we are going through here.”