NBA Europe stopped being a thought experiment a while ago. It has a target launch date of October 2027, a 16-team structure, a list of cities, and a commissioner who keeps saying the timeline is on schedule.
What it doesn’t have yet is the EuroLeague. That gets decided, or at least clarified, on October 5.
EuroLeague club owners are meeting at Villa d’Este on Lake Como in Italy, a gathering organized by Olimpia Milano. The agenda is blunt: accept some version of the NBA’s proposal and be absorbed into NBA Europe, or reject it and push forward with the EuroLeague’s own expansion plan and a move toward permanent franchises.
What the League Would Look Like
The plan calls for 16 teams total: 12 permanent franchises plus four spots earned through competition. Those four would qualify by winning FIBA’s Basketball Champions League or through strong domestic league performance.
London, Manchester, Paris, Lyon, Madrid and Barcelona have all been named as targets for permanent slots. Rome, Milan, Munich, Berlin, Athens and Istanbul have been floated as cities of interest.
The NBA’s ideal outcome is a blend: existing EuroLeague clubs and new franchises inside one pan-European competition, with NBA branding and operational leadership, EuroLeague history and infrastructure, and FIBA providing the international framework.
The Sticking Points
EuroLeague Basketball CEO Chus Bueno has been direct about the core fear. Two competing leagues would split everything that makes European basketball valuable.
“If you have two leagues … this is going to create fragmentation of the value, institutionally but also commercially, in media rights, fan attendance.”
The second issue is control and identity. Bueno has acknowledged the NBA “can help operate things” but argued that they “should follow the local IP [brand value] of clubs because they’ve been on the ground for 100 years.”
That’s the real fight. Clubs like Real Madrid, Panathinaikos and Olimpia Milano are not startups. They have a century of history and fan bases that predate the NBA’s existence in any meaningful European sense. Being told to slot into an American-run structure is a hard sell no matter how big the check is.
Meanwhile the NBA has hardened its position. Deputy commissioner Mark Tatum reaffirmed the October 2027 launch and made clear the league is going forward with or without EuroLeague participation. An NBA Board of Governors meeting is also on the calendar, which is where the league’s owners weigh in on the project.
Does This Work?
Yes, and the reason is money and patience.
The NBA has both, and the EuroLeague has neither at the same scale. If the clubs say no on October 5, the NBA builds anyway in London, Paris, Madrid and Manchester with fresh franchises and a fraction of the history. That version is worse and slower, but it exists.
What happens next is predictable. A league with NBA money, NBA broadcast reach and NBA player-development pipelines starts pulling talent and sponsors away from the competition. Two or three EuroLeague clubs defect. Then a few more. The holdouts end up negotiating from a weaker position than they have right now.
The EuroLeague’s leverage is at its maximum on October 5 and declines every month after. Its clubs should take a deal that protects their names, their arenas and a real share of the revenue, because that offer will never be better than it is this fall.
Will they? European club sports have a long history of choosing independence over money, and the pride factor here is enormous. I’d bet on a partial deal: some clubs in, some out, and a messy first season in 2027 that sorts itself out by 2030.
October 5 is the date. Everything the NBA has said publicly suggests they’re launching either way.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
