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The devil is always in the details.
The NBA still plans to launch NBA Europe in the fall of 2027, but as negotiations with potential partners get serious, sticking points have emerged around players moving from the NBA to Europe and, of course, money. Specifically, the franchise fees teams will pay and the revenue distribution from the new league have led to friction, all things Joe Varden detailed at The Athletic.
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The headline-grabber was the request for a soccer-style transfer window in the new basketball league. In that proposed window, it’s not a trade of players while teams try to navigate a salary cap (like the NBA and other American sports leagues), it’s a purchase of a player’s contract — and the league’s new potential partners want to be able to purchase NBA players’ deals. Varden at The Athletic lays out this scenario.
Imagine it: A rich, powerful, proper football conglomerate overseas starts a basketball team. It picks up the phone and dials the Milwaukee Bucks, who, for the sake of argument, are having a rough season. The club says, hey, here’s a couple hundred million dollars, or whatever it may cost, how about Giannis Antetokounmpo coming to play for us in NBA Europe?
The NBA quickly and emphatically said no to this idea. Multiple times. It wants the leagues to be separate entities, and while players can jump from the NBA to Europe as free agents, the league doesn’t want that kind of in-season movement. The NBA might envision something more akin to the MLS in soccer, where some older stars from European leagues come stateside and earn paychecks for a few more years.
The kind of investors the NBA wants in Europe — powerhouse soccer programs (which the NBA also needs for the built-in fan bases), or very deep-pocketed investors such as public or sovereign wealth funds — appeared to pause at the idea of essentially investing in a minor league, as one anonymous source told Varden.
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“There are restrictions on NBA Europe teams acquiring players from the U.S. unless they’re free agents, and that obviously reduces the competitiveness of the NBA Europe project. It becomes a…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/soccer-style-player-transfer-windows-230154400.html
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Publish date : 2026-05-06 23:01:00
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