On October 6, the owners of the EuroLeague’s 13 shareholder clubs met in Cernobbio, Italy, and turned down a formal NBA offer to merge into a single European operation. Two days later the NBA and FIBA released a joint statement saying they remain committed to launching a new professional league in Europe, and on Friday Adam Silver told CNBC that he still expects to work something out with the EuroLeague. As of October 11 no amended offer has been reported, and the shareholder clubs have agreed to move forward with converting their licenses into franchises and to continue the process of expanding the league.
Most of the coverage reads this as a contest of leverage, a question of who needs whom more and who will blink first. That reading is reasonable, and it misses what the two sides are actually bargaining over. Underneath the structure and the governance, they are negotiating over two different stories about European basketball, and a valuation is the place where those stories are given a price.
Two stories, two kinds of capital
The NBA’s story is one of potential. George Aivazoglou, its managing director for Europe and the Middle East, told the Leaders Week conference in London that there is a “serious value gap” for European basketball, adding that the NBA does not think the sport is reaching its potential. Silver has called NBA Europe a “once and forever opportunity” to be the NBA team in London, Paris or Madrid, and told CNBC the league has received bids of “many hundreds of millions of dollars” from European clubs, soccer brands and wealthy individuals for its twelve permanent places. Behind that sits a global brand and a track record elsewhere, with Reuters reporting that viewership of January’s Orlando Magic and Memphis Grizzlies game in London was up 90% on the last NBA game played there in 2019.
The EuroLeague’s story is one of proof. Its own figures for the 2025-26 regular season, which are self-reported, show a record 3.25 million spectators in arenas and, across the first 25 rounds, 122.8 million global TV viewers, up 82% on the same stretch of the season before. The competition traces its lineage to the European Champions Cup of 1958, and its 13 shareholder clubs hold licenses that are being converted into franchises which, according to Front Office Sports, would give them permanent places without an expansion fee.
One side projects what European basketball could become, the other points to what it has already built, and neither claim can be settled with a spreadsheet, since both are claims about the future resting on different kinds of evidence. According to Front Office Sports, the EuroLeague is seeking a valuation of around $3 billion and the NBA’s offer came in well below it, although Reuters said it could not confirm the terms of the offer. A figure can be taken apart line by line, while a story that has taken hold tends to be accepted before it is examined and often sets the terms on which the figures are read, which may be why so much of the language on both sides is about the future. I saw the same pattern in “$11 Million to $12.5 Billion,” where what the Lakers are worth turned out to depend far more on what had been built around the team than on what it had won.
What a permanent place changes
The franchise model both sides are moving toward changes what a club’s identity is for. A license for a fixed number of years is a right to take part, and what it is worth depends mostly on the competition around it. A permanent place is an asset that can be priced, sold and passed on, and its value rests on the one thing the structure cannot supply, which is what the club behind it stands for. A club that knows what it means to its city and its supporters, and can make someone who has never been inside its arena feel that, holds something no structure can give it, while a club that has never needed to explain itself beyond its own supporters holds the same history with less to show for it in a valuation conversation.
In my research on how EuroLeague clubs express their identity, how well a club can put that across to people outside its own city is a pattern worth watching. The principle is simple enough to state without any of the detail, since the work of putting what is already real into a form that people who have never been there can feel is the work that turns history into value.
What 2000 shows
European basketball has been here before, and the last time is instructive less for who won than for what decided it. In 2000, leading clubs backed by the ULEB league association created Euroleague Basketball and launched their own top competition, while FIBA, which had run the competition since 1958, renamed its version the SuproLeague. FIBA had used the “EuroLeague” name since 1996 but had never trademarked it, which left it with no legal recourse when the clubs started a new competition under the same name. The 2000-01 season produced two European champions, and the two sides then agreed a unified competition for the following season, run by Euroleague Basketball, with FIBA agreeing it would no longer organize Europe’s top competition. The league made the point about its name again in 2025, when it dropped Turkish Airlines as naming partner and became simply the EuroLeague.
That was an identity asset deciding a dispute in plain view, a name one side had built and never protected, carried forward by the clubs that had made it mean something. I wrote in “Visibility Without Clarity Has a Cost” about how identity has to be clear before anything built on it can be defended, and the 2000 split shows the same thing at the scale of a continent. The parallel should not be pushed too far, because the NBA is not FIBA and brings capital, a global brand and a long-term plan, and FIBA, which stepped back in 2001, is today the NBA’s partner in NBA Europe, so the roles are not a simple repeat. It shows which kinds of assets decided the last dispute, which were a name, the clubs that carried it, and the story people already associated with both.
What it means for clubs now
Whichever way the negotiation goes, whether a deal, a counter-proposal from the EuroLeague, which has been reported as likely in the coming weeks, or two competing leagues, the clubs face the same question, which is what they are worth to someone who has never been in their arena. ESPN reports that several EuroLeague members are seriously interested in joining NBA Europe, and Barcelona has said the clubs would reconsider an amended offer, so no club can assume it will be priced by the league it sits in today. A structure can give a club a place but cannot tell its story for it, and the clubs that can already say what they stand for, what their city means to them and why a supporter across the continent should care will be in the strongest position in any version of the outcome. That preparation takes time, and it is cheaper to do before a valuation conversation than during one.
The story either side can tell
European basketball has not become less valuable because of this dispute, and the figures from both sides point to a growing audience. What the dispute has made visible is how much of that value depends on a story and on who is able to tell it. For the NBA, the story is what European basketball could become, and for the EuroLeague it is what the clubs have already built over decades. A deal, if there is one, will be struck somewhere between the two, and the clubs that can tell both parts of that story, where they come from and where they are going, will not have to wait for anyone else to tell it for them.
