Major leagues around the world are starting their seasons soon and we will provide extensive coverage here again. Since our audience primarily comes from a North American sports background, we will explain some of the differences and basic structure common in the competitions that we cover. Our articles during the course of the season will also try to be accessible as possible to newcomers to following these leagues.
In North American sports, professional sports traditionally occupy one of four portions of the sports landscape, although that is changing, and one way of thinking of how sports work most places overseas is that the same entity covers all four portions. School sports tend to provide local pride and introduce children to sports, youth club sports are meant to give children a more competitive environment, trying to develop to a level that will allow them to play above the school sports level in the future, college sports are the ones where the fans form lifelong connections to a team based on shared experience, and professional sports are meant to be the highest level that can be afforded while also providing entertainment that draws young fans into wanting to play. While there are other countries that have similar structures, many countries have clubs that provide the introduction to sports in schools, sign the most promising youngsters to their youth teams, and try to have the strongest professional team within league rules and budget while establishing loyalty to the club in the community and for some clubs, across the country or world.
Domestic Leagues
Most of the basketball world operates on the one league-one country principle whereby a league includes teams from one country and is not looking to go beyond that point. Some leagues are owned by the teams or a third-party, but a common setup is that the national basketball federation or some other government entity controls the league and administers it. In that respect, instead of the league having its own goals or agenda, a lot of competitions are based around interested teams letting the organizer know that they want to participate and then the organizer determines who should play in the top division and any other lower level competitions. Some countries with larger numbers of teams have multiple levels that are connected with results of the previous season deciding which teams teams move up or down tiers. As was the case last season, we will more extensively cover domestic leagues in Australia, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Turkey than those in other countries.
In many countries, clubs also operate multiple youth teams that compete in the appropriate age-restricted competitions. In some countries, teams below the senior team are entered into the same overall pyramid, sometimes even in the same league in countries with fewer teams. Rules depend on the place, but that often allows youngers players to play for the main team when there is space while giving them the chance to get more minutes at a lower level. Some teams can also park extra foreign players with their reserve teams, giving them a player that they can move up quickly if they have a need for another experienced player in the middle of the season.
International Club Competitions
Besides competitions involving only teams from one country, there are a number of competitions that involve teams from multiple countries at the same time. FIBA, which is the world governing body of basketball, operates several such competitions, inviting teams from around the area in question to enter and then determining how many and which teams should participate or have to enter qualifying tournaments. The most famous is EuroLeague, for the top teams in Europe, with the EuroCup offering a second-tier competition on the continent. Africa also has its own continental club championship that is growing in prominence. There is also a long-running club championship in South America that FIBA is using as the base for expanding to the entire Americas. There is currently no FIBA-operated competition in Asia. We cover all of these competitions over the course of the year.
There are also a variety of non-FIBA competitions that feature teams from multiple countries. Some of them are the result of agreements between leagues or federations that ensure that the top teams of each country involved can participate. Others are their own entities that invite teams to participate each season. While we do not cover any of these competitions on their own, notable events in any such competition that are formal and not exhibitions will be mentioned in our weekly World of Basketball columns.
Roster Restrictions
Most competitions around the world allow teams to dress twelve players per game. There are often also other roster restrictions besides the size or payroll restrictions that are commonly in place in North American professional sports. Most competitions have some kind of limit on player nationalities, sometimes only allowing a limited number of players not holding the same nationality as the team or of the region or international agreement in place in the teams’ locations.
FIBA Europe has changed the rules for its two club competitions over the years, but currently only allows teams to dress two players who do not hold nationality from any of the countries that fall under their umbrella, a pretty similar rule to their competitions on other continents. So many players were obtaining citizenship from European countries that their latest rule limited recently naturalized players to one before they also count against the two player limit. Some clubs’ full rosters do not meet either FIBA or local rules so they do not field the same lineups in both competitions.
Different leagues also have different rules in terms of how many and when roster changes can be made over the course of the season. Some leagues have rules on playoff eligibility while others not only allow for new signings before the playoffs, but also in the middle of the postseason. A few leagues, prominently including South Korea and Puerto Rico, make some players enter a draft before being allowed into the league, but usually free agent players can sign a contract with any team. Players under contract, even fully amateur ones, cannot leap from team to team or country to country without ending their previous contract and having their registration for their new team transferred with national or international approval. Teams are allowed to loan a player to another team with the player’s permission, usually a higher level team loaning a young player under contract for multiple seasons to a weaker team for a season for more playing time to aid development. There are also a variety of rules when it comes to players being able to play for a main team and its reserve or youth teams in the same season.
National Team Competitions
There is occasional confusion about whether a competition is a club competition as discussed above or one involving national teams. Just like FIBA runs international club competitions, the international governing body also runs national team competitions. In order to harmonize schedules as much as possible with so many different organizations around the world, full tournaments are played during the summer when possible while there are windows in February and November each year that are reserved for national team play, usually for qualifying games. The Olympics and World Cup are the events for open to the top teams around the world during the even years, with the bulk of the qualification coming from the continental tournaments for Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe held during the even years. Qualification formats for those tournaments vary.
Obviously, national team means that the players on the team all have the nationality of the country of the team, or in the case of national teams not representing fully independent entities, must have sufficiently demonstrable ties to that area. FIBA has an additional restriction that only one player who is considered naturalized can dress for a team in a competitive game or be named to a twelve player roster in a tournament. While they have granted exceptions in the past, the general criteria for avoiding any issues in this regard is either being born in the country or having a document that clearly establishes that the player actively claimed and possessed citizenship before the age of 16, often via a passport. Even for countries that consider individuals citizens at birth based on their heritage, if the player was born elsewhere, affirmative proof that the link was officially established before that cutoff is key. Granting a switch in national team affiliation is also rare, but generally more easily granted if the player has only participated in youth national team play instead of having represented a senior national team.
There are also national team competitions that are not conducted by FIBA. They can range from exhibition tournaments, especially for preparation for FIBA tournaments, to regional competitions to invitationals to events in multi-sport games modeled after the Olympics. On the FIBA level, there is no requirement for players in their sanctioned leagues to participate in these events outside of them occurring during the window for FIBA events, but some national federations do take the teams for these events very seriously. We do not cover non-FIBA events unless they have FIBA event implications.
FIBA also has youth national competitions with the global tournaments at the U17 level in even years and at the U19 level in odd years. As a result, most continents have qualification for those tournaments in the preceding years at the U16 and U18 levels, although some regions have multi-stage qualification as early as the U14 and U16 levels, three years before the final tournament. Europe’s most prestigious youth competition is the U20 age group, but there are no global implications. We do not cover youth competitions specifically, but we do reference them in the context of the WNBA Draft.
Myths
It’s All the Same
Now that the basics of basketball around the world have been described, there are still several myths that are commonplace. One of them is that overseas basketball is one giant homogenous entity, often just referred to as FIBA. FIBA is the world’s governing body, but it mostly just handles national team play, several club competitions, and any matters involving multiple national federations and is far from the strongest sports authority. Even individual leagues are not often organized in the way that a North American sports league would be and that results in massive quality differences across the board. In most leagues, the strongest team is several orders of magnitude stronger than the weakest teams and many teams never have championship aspirations, even years from now. Just like college or high school teams can have vastly different levels of play even if they are in the same structure, overseas quality can vary greatly and thus players there can range from WNBA-level to well below that, including players who work full time jobs outside of basketball. Unlike North American professional sports, where the perception is that staying on the same team for an entire career is a major goal, that is generally not the case around the world, especially for foreign players. As a result, many contracts are one-year deals and, outside of the strongest teams, the goal for foreign players is to play so well that they impress a better-paying team for the next season and if they do not live up to that expectation, the team will often take a chance that the next foreign player that they sign will perform better.
Popularity
One of the enduring narratives about comparing the WNBA and overseas leagues is that the WNBA is unpopular while those leagues are extremely popular and successful in those countries. While there are many teams around the world with a large number of devoted fans, they are more in the region of comparable to popular WNBA teams. Many of the strongest teams in the world have attendances that would draw massive criticism if they were numbers for a WNBA team, even before taking into account the prices paid for those tickets. When it comes to revenue due to fan interest, the WNBA is in a much strong position due to its broadcast deals and ticket prices, especially at the more premium levels. There are some teams that have at times had expenses that exceed what are believed to be the ranges for a WNBA team, but the funds for those are generally provided with little to no discernible economic benefits to the funder.
Equality
It is obvious that there are massive disparities between the WNBA and NBA when it comes to salaries and season length, but part of the popularity narrative has been that this distinction does not exist overseas. While the difference may not be as large, mostly due to no men’s basketball league coming close to the economic power of the NBA, it still does exist. Due to the way that sports work in many countries, there are often clubs that field both men’s and women’s basketball teams. There are exceptions, but at the highest levels, the men’s team gets a higher budget. Even in countries where women’s basketball is more prominent on the global stage than men’s basketball, the best men’s teams have more resources. Longer seasons and more games are also common on men’s side and top league sizes are often larger and lower divisions are more organized as there are generally more professional and semi-pro teams.
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