European teams vs the NBA

[hoosierdaddy34]

Since we are all about post after post of how great foreign players and systems are these days and how crappy the US is.

Let’s flip this on its head…all the European countries have a bigger population than the US. And they obviously love basketball.

Why haven’t any of the European professional teams reached a level that they can compete with the NBA teams? Why do all great foreign players feel it necessary to come here to prove themselves?

Why has European basketball failed to keep their own players? Why do European players view their own leagues as a substandard product that they need the US so badly?

Discuss…

[BadWolf]

€€€

[Mickey8]

The USA have the greatest concentration of talent , the best coaching system, the greatest athletes, infrastructure, finance etc, and that will never change. But the World always had lots of individual talent and now that talent is dominating the league. Its the evolution of the basketball.

[Jasen777]

Not all European countries are into basketball that much.

That the best European players come to the NBA prevents them from having an NBA level team. With the uneven European structure, without players leaving you'd probably have a team like Madrid paring Luka with a Giannis or a Jokic and being able to compete with NBA teams.

[hoosierdaddy34]

Not all European countries are into basketball that much.

That the best European players come to the NBA prevents them from having an NBA level team. With the uneven European structure, without players leaving you'd probably have a team like Madrid paring Luka with a Giannis or a Jokic and being able to compete with NBA teams.

This is pretty much my point. And Europe has the financial base to make this happen…so why isn’t it?

[theforumblue]

their talent pool is apparently dispersed due to the unimaginable number of alternate professional sports leagues available to young athletes.

[hoosierdaddy34]

Apex mountain for popularity of professional basketball is maybe the top 8 US teams, and then 6 European teams, probably 4 Asian teams and maybe Sydney, Mexico City…Rio? All in one big global champions league. Players would have freedom to sign wherever…no salary cap like soccer. Mexico City wants to offer LeBron $125 million a year to go there? So be it. If you achieve that then you have a massive worldwide audience and you are exponentially growing your financial base. But you can never achieve that if players are constantly flocking to the US. Other leagues and teams have to build themselves up to the NBA’s level to force those mergers and consolidation. At some point in time European teams have to pay up to keep players and society has to pressure them to stay in Europe in order to truly grow the game. The game has to become bigger than the nba.

[_jin]

The financial gap is just too big and will never close. Just for perspective, Wemby is gonna make 50 times more as a rookie than he did last season, and as much as the whole Monaco team in French league, which has a payroll five times higher than the average in the league (which is €2M/year). Football/soccer is just too huge in Europe and takes most of the sports money.

[Bodiroga13]

The answer is simple: Football (You call it soccer).

The whole Europe loves football. This is Europe's sport. Young athletes learn to play football because all the money goes to football. All the talent, all the attention.

As a Greek, i know that Greeks love basketball but they love football even more. Serbs love basketball for sure, Lithuanians, Turks. Spanish of course (Even them love football more than basketball). Maybe Italy a bit. That's it.

Unfortunately, Europeans don't love basketball, therefore European rich people throw their money into football in order to gain from it.
Because most of European owners who throw a lot of money into basketball, they literally have losses. I bet that noone believes that there are millionaires who intentionally lose money due to a sport. It's unthinkable from a capitalistic point of view.
Yet, it's true.

[hoosierdaddy34]

The financial gap is just too big and will never close. Just for perspective, Wemby is gonna make 50 times more as a rookie than he did last season, and as much as the whole Monaco team in French league, which has a payroll five times higher than the average in the league (which is €2M/year). Football/soccer is just too huge in Europe and takes most of the sports money.

This is why in my talking about a champions league above…it’s probably limited to only the largest cities in the world, cities that have the massive financial base it would take. Admittedly whether it be Morocco or Memphis or Oklahoma City or Auckland or Nice…you are probably relegated to a smaller regional league as you wouldn’t have the financials to be able to compete.

[Nuntius]

Let’s flip this on its head…all the European countries have a bigger population than the US. And they obviously love basketball.

Because we don't love basketball. Or, to be more precise, we do love basketball, we just do not love it nearly as much as we love association football. The only country in which basketball is the most popular sport is Lithuania. That's it. A single country with a population of less than 3 million. Even in the basketball-crazy Balkans, football is many times more popular than basketball is.

[hoosierdaddy34]

The answer is simple: Football (You call it soccer).

The whole Europe loves football. This is Europe's sport. Young athletes learn to play football because all the money goes to football. All the talent, all the attention.

As a Greek, i know that Greeks love basketball but they love football even more. Serbs love basketball for sure, Lithuanians, Turks. Spanish of course (Even them love football more than basketball). Maybe Italy a bit. That's it.

Unfortunately, Europeans don't love basketball, therefore European rich people throw their money into football in order to gain from it.
Because most of European owners who throw a lot of money into basketball, they literally have losses. I bet that noone believes that there are millionaires who intentionally lose money due to a sport. It's unthinkable from a capitalistic point of view.
Yet, it's true.

And the US has the behemoth that is the NFL. It also has MLB to compete with for entertainment dollars. It’s no different here in the US but the nba is still very successful. There is room everywhere for multiple large sports.

[SunsLyf3]

Since we are all about post after post of how great foreign players and systems are these days and how crappy the US is.

Let’s flip this on its head…all the European countries have a bigger population than the US. And they obviously love basketball.

Why haven’t any of the European professional teams reached a level that they can compete with the NBA teams? Why do all great foreign players feel it necessary to come here to prove themselves?

Why has European basketball failed to keep their own players? Why do European players view their own leagues as a substandard product that they need the US so badly?

Discuss…

They love basketball but love soccer 10x more. That's the main money maker on a global scale.

Real Madrid could definitely compete at an NBA level though. Likely at/or better than at LEAST 1/3 of the league.

[Bodiroga13]

The answer is simple: Football (You call it soccer).

The whole Europe loves football. This is Europe's sport. Young athletes learn to play football because all the money goes to football. All the talent, all the attention.

As a Greek, i know that Greeks love basketball but they love football even more. Serbs love basketball for sure, Lithuanians, Turks. Spanish of course (Even them love football more than basketball). Maybe Italy a bit. That's it.

Unfortunately, Europeans don't love basketball, therefore European rich people throw their money into football in order to gain from it.
Because most of European owners who throw a lot of money into basketball, they literally have losses. I bet that noone believes that there are millionaires who intentionally lose money due to a sport. It's unthinkable from a capitalistic point of view.
Yet, it's true.

And the US has the behemoth that is the NFL. It also has MLB to compete with for entertainment dollars. It’s no different here in the US but the nba is still very successful. There is room everywhere for multiple large sports.

Of course there is this room you've mentioned, as long as there is craving and love for a sport. But as i said, Europeans don't like basketball. Germans, English, Belgians, French, Scandinavians, Austrians etc. They don't give a ****.

Unfortunately for us European basketball fans, USA is basketball, Mecca of Basketball, an unbeatable force.
It's not so bad though, because we love NBA too! (Our only problem are the late hours, some of us lose sleep in order to watch our NBA teams)

[Mickey8]

The financial gap is just too big and will never close. Just for perspective, Wemby is gonna make 50 times more as a rookie than he did last season, and as much as the whole Monaco team in French league, which has a payroll five times higher than the average in the league (which is €2M/year). Football/soccer is just too huge in Europe and takes most of the sports money.

Its not just the financial gap. They have the best athletes mostly the black players which are predisposed for the game of the basketball combine all that with the great coaching system and the tradition its hard to overcome that. USA have all the financial advantages yet they can't make the jump in soccer.

[lambchop]

€€€

This. The idea of a player earning 8 million per year would already be totally absurd. There are also other basketball related perks of playing in the US, like big arenas for every game, every team has huge training facilities etc.

In Europe a lot of professional teams don't have weight rooms so their players end up lifting at local gyms.

The fame can't be compared either. In Europe even domestic NBA players can walk around without getting noticed.

Anyway, foreign players aren't superior to American hoopers. Imo we're just at a stage where US players simply aren't as obsessed as Kobe, LBJ, Curry etc. That's why the younger generation is good but not great. There is no "system" that can produce those guys.

Take someone like prime Harden. Dude was a fantastic player. Now give him Kobe's level of obsession or lebron's desire to know all of his opponent's plays better than his opponents. He would would have been THAT much better.

The US will be "back" (never really left tbh) when another absolute basketball crazy player comes around.

[hoosierdaddy34]

The financial gap is just too big and will never close. Just for perspective, Wemby is gonna make 50 times more as a rookie than he did last season, and as much as the whole Monaco team in French league, which has a payroll five times higher than the average in the league (which is €2M/year). Football/soccer is just too huge in Europe and takes most of the sports money.

Its not just the financial gap. They have the best athletes mostly the black players which are predisposed for the game of the basketball combine all that with the great coaching system and the tradition its hard to overcome that. USA have all the financial advantages yet they can't make the jump in soccer.

US doesn’t care about soccer. The NFL is the dominant figure in the room. Also you have MLB to compete with. Soccer is growing here but the vast majority of great athletes go to the other 3 sports.

But I would argue that basketball in the US has more competition for the best athletes than Europe does with just soccer.

[Sgt Major]

Football.

[UcanUwill]

Basketball is not popular enough in Europe to be a business, even biggest clubs are losing money, its not an investment, it is rather city and town symbols that gets a lot of its fundings from municipality. Football obviously is much much more popular, thats is why Real Madrid can spend 100 Mil on one guy, while their basketball team is there basically just for the love of the game. Basketball is comparable to Handball and Hockey in popularity, who exactly loves basketball in Europe beside few countries? You are just making stuff up man.

[Nuntius]

The answer is simple: Football (You call it soccer).

The whole Europe loves football. This is Europe's sport. Young athletes learn to play football because all the money goes to football. All the talent, all the attention.

As a Greek, i know that Greeks love basketball but they love football even more. Serbs love basketball for sure, Lithuanians, Turks. Spanish of course (Even them love football more than basketball). Maybe Italy a bit. That's it.

Unfortunately, Europeans don't love basketball, therefore European rich people throw their money into football in order to gain from it.
Because most of European owners who throw a lot of money into basketball, they literally have losses. I bet that noone believes that there are millionaires who intentionally lose money due to a sport. It's unthinkable from a capitalistic point of view.
Yet, it's true.

And the US has the behemoth that is the NFL. It also has MLB to compete with for entertainment dollars. It’s no different here in the US but the nba is still very successful. There is room everywhere for multiple large sports.

Have you seen the salaries that footballers make? Seriously, take a look -> https://squaremile.com/sport/highest-paid-football-players/

Cristiano Ronaldo signed a contract with Al Nassr (a Saudi Arabian team) this past December that is going to pay him 200 million dollars a year. In two years, Cristiano Ronaldo would have made almost as much money as LeBron James made throughout his entire NBA career and LeBron is the NBA's highest earner.

PSG was paying a combined 248 million dollars a year to Mbappe and Messi. Throw in another 68.5 millions to Neymar and they were paying over 300 million dollars a year for 3 players (a team has to field 11 players).

And while those players I mentioned are kind of exceptions and the rest of the European football stars are paid similar money as NBA players do, take a look at what basketball players make in Europe -> https://www.eurohoops.net/en/trademarks/1396808/the-top10-euroleague-contracts-salaries-2022-23/

Nikola Mirotic, the highest-paid player in the EuroLeague, is making 5 million dollars a year. Yep, just 5 million. Wanna know who makes 5 million in the NBA? Mason Plumlee and Jalen Smith. The difference in salaries between the two leagues are absolutely massive.

And, now, let's compare it with association football salaries, shall we?

The player who makes exactly 5 million per year in the English Premier League is Jared Bowen of West Ham -> https://www.spotrac.com/epl/rankings/

As far as yearly salaries are concerned, he's ranked 90th in the league. And that dude is getting as much as the EuroLeague's highest-paid player. And it's not like 2023 just happened to be a year when players weren't paid a lot in the EuroLeague. No, Mirotic's deal is one of the biggest that the EuroLeague has ever seen.

If an athlete can play both football and basketball over here, he will always choose football. It is simply much, much, much more profitable than basketball. He'd have to be an absolute basketball junkie to still choose basketball and, well, most of us aren't absolute basketball junkies. In the US, on the other hand, whether you play in the NBA, the NFL or the MLB, you can acquire generational wealth. You cannot acquire generational wealth in Europe by playing basketball. That's only reserved for football.