How does the NBA achieve a business territory of 10 billion US dollars?

The 2024-2025 NBA Finals officially kicked off on June 6. If the NBA media content is compared to a sports program that has been serialized for decades, then the 79th season of this program will also come to an end. According to Forbes data, the NBA's annual revenue in the 2022-2023 season has exceeded the 10 billion US dollars mark, becoming the third 10 billion league after the NFL and MLB. In the view of the film and television industry, the NBA's 10 billion business territory is essentially a revolution in the reconstruction of the sports industry value chain - it has made the paradigm breakthrough in the triple dimension to upgrade basketball competition into a global cultural consumption symbol: dislocated competition among the four major leagues

The four major sports leagues in the United States are fiercely competitive. Although it seems that each monopolizes different sports events, the essential logic is to compete for the audience's time. The NFL is like an unshakable mountain, accounting for more than half of the ratings of the United States' sports, but other leagues still find a way out through differentiation: MLB relies on history to deeply connect family audiences, and although young people are lost, it is still the first choice for middle-class families to have fun; the NHL sticks to the regional market and has a deep foundation in Canada and northern states; while the NBA has stabilized its domestic market in the United States through its own differentiated "three tricks".

First of all, the NBA focuses on deep binding with cities. Due to its small schedule, player mobility and helmet culture, the NFL prefers a large-scale periodic urban collective carnival. As a symbol of the city's spiritual core, it is slightly less than that of the NBA, and NBA teams have a long-term and deeply bound cultural symbiosis with the cities they represent.

For example, the Boston Celtics pushed the ancient European Celtics to the forefront, and their team logo design paid tribute to the Irish community in the city; the Detroit Pistons "Bad Kids Legion" is famous for its tough defense and physical confrontation, reflecting the iron-blooded spirit of the workers in the Auto City who are not afraid of confrontation and relying on hard power to play out in dilemma; the San Antonio Spurs are adjacent to the "San Antonio United Base", and the Spurs are also famous for their "team basketball" that emphasizes discipline, selfless sharing, and rigorous tactics, reflecting the pragmatic style of Texans. Team culture reflects urban culture, which makes the NBA not only a sports event, but also an indispensable and extremely dynamic important part of the American urban cultural ecology. Even in the context of globalization and intensified star flow, this deep connection rooted in the blood of the city is still one of the sources of competitiveness and charm of the NBA in the core of the United States.

The NBA games are more entertaining. Each team in the NFL regular season has a total of 16 "life-and-death battles" that are often tense, while in contrast, each team in the NBA has a intensive schedule and game intensity of 82 games, which are often ridiculed as "exhibition matches" with small-scale plays.

Although the schedule and results are not manipulated, the NBA is good at adding fuel to the outside world through media means, and has entertainment companies and global social media matrices to create "plots" and shape characters. For example, star James is portrayed as a black man who lost his father and was raised by his mother when he was young, realized his dreams by relying on his physical talent, and returned home in glory to repay the community after he was rich. He left Ohio to go to the wealthy Miami, which was portrayed as a "traitor" by the media, and then returned to his hometown and gained glory for the city as it was about to be eliminated. This lost person created a topic of conversation for fans around the world. At the same time, the NBA has improved the viewing of the game through revisions of rules. For example, the 24-second rule setting in the early years was to improve the smoothness of the game, and the introduction of slam dunk movements also enhanced the entertainment effect of the game. In recent years, the NBA has also kept pace with the trend of the times and innovated visual effects through technological means. For example, VR multi-view live broadcast allows viewers to observe the offense and defense details of stars at 360 degrees, and use "holographic projection live broadcast" to reconstruct the space so that the audience can gain a new visual experience and sensory pleasure. Once again, the NBA is good at absorbing local teenagers, African ethnic groups and women. The proportion of African and Latino fans in the NBA is significantly higher than that of other leagues. Most American stars are black athletes from poor families. Therefore, the NBA has created a "black-skinned adult fairy tale" that "I use my hands to break the house's bare walls"; the new generation of teenagers pursue mavericks but have not yet left their idol worship. The NBA continues to launch new idols to adapt to their needs. When the symbolic value of idols is grafted on plastic foam and fiber fabrics, those low-cost plastic shoes and plastic clothes have achieved amazing sales; the NBA also pays attention to the female group. In order to be politically correct and obtain the income of female customers, the league began to pay attention to the development of the WNBA as early as the last century, emphasizing the technical beauty and female power of the women's basketball team, and emphasizing the differentiated way of playing with the men's league.

International: The media matrix captures the global market

In terms of expanding the communication territory, the NBA has established a communication pattern across Asia, Europe and Africa, and its international influence is currently the first among the four major leagues. The NBA focuses on the international market, especially the Chinese market. It can be said that the three stages of the NBA entering the Chinese market have finally shaped the current NBA's communication pattern in China. In the 1990s, then NBA president David Stern, who was then the president of the NBA, proposed to provide free broadcast signals to introduce NBA events to CCTV, forming the first stage with TV media as the core, laying the early foundation for the NBA in the Chinese market; with the innovation of Internet technology, Tencent won the exclusive digital media broadcasting rights for the 2015-2020 season for US$500 million, marking the second stage of the NBA's official entry into the streaming era. The rise of short video platforms has further changed the content consumption model. In 2021, Kuaishou and the NBA reached a strategic cooperation to become its official short video platform. Encouraging the production of UGC content is the third stage..

This historical evolution has led to the current pattern of layered operation in the Chinese market in the NBA, forming differentiated coverage - Tencent locks in core fans through self-made content, while Kuaishou uses UGC content to penetrate the sinking market, CCTV5 radiates to traditional middle-aged and elderly viewers, forming a multi-dimensional matrix of "long video platform + short video community + traditional TV", covering the full-chain needs from core fans to pan-sports users. Although negative events have been experienced, the emotional connections built in the early years through free broadcasting, implantation of cultural symbols such as "Spring Festival", "China Game", "Chinese Character Jersey", and activities such as Star China Tour have not yet dissipated.

In the European market, the NBA held preseason games in London, Paris and Berlin for the first time in 2025. The league plans to pilot the "dual home system" to allow European teams to have 10 regular season "local home games". In recent years, we have also expanded our audience by cultivating European stars as a fulcrum, focusing on cultivating newcomers such as Jokic from Serbia, Antetokounmpo from Greece, Doncic from Slovenia, Embiid from France and Vinbanyama. In this way, the NBA actively shaped a model of success for European audiences and immigrants. Antetokounmpo was a poor young man in the same room with four siblings in Greece, and in the United States, he became a highly anticipated champion star through personal struggles. Social media's hype marketing of star character and story has made the teenagers who are eager to realize their dreams believe that poor people from foreign countries can also become guests of the US president after some efforts. The American Dream welcomes people from all over the world.

In addition, the NBA is also actively advancing to Africa. In 2003, the NBA and FIBA ​​continued to hold the "Basketball Without Borders" training camp in Africa, covering many countries such as South Africa, Senegal, Egypt and other countries; in 2019, the NBA announced that it would jointly build the African Basketball League BAL with the FIBA; in 2021, the NBA established NBA Africa company in Africa, and even invited Obama as a founding investor, which greatly enhanced the global popularity and political credibility of the NBA Africa program. The NBA's layout in Africa fully reflects the investment strategy of not putting eggs in one basket and the long-term vision of making small profits for the big fortune.

Brand: Value extraction of the entire industrial chain

The NBA has taken commerciality as its ultimate pursuit from beginning to end, and through various institutional structures and media means, it has exhausted the profits of each link and taken into its pocket. Public data shows that among the NBA's revenue, of course, the first is the ticket revenue brought by more than 1,300 games per year. In order to maximize value, the intense game still puts pressure on many players' bodies. The second is media copyright income, mainly including national broadcast income, local broadcast income and international broadcast income. It is reported that Tencent has reached a contract renewal with the NBA and will continue to be the "NBA's exclusive official partner of China Digital Media" and will continue to cooperate in the NBA in depth until 2027; in July last year, the NBA also reached a new broadcast agreement with ESPN's parent companies Disney, NBC Universal and Amazon. The contract amount is US$77 billion in 2011, with an average annual increase of US$7 billion, demonstrating the bargaining power of NBA content distribution.

The third is advertising and sponsorship income. First of all, the naming costs of the stadium such as "Toyota Center" and "Chatcomm Center". Staples Arena renamed to the cryptocurrency website "Crypto.com Hall" cost 700 million US dollars; secondly, the advertising revenue on the stadium's advertising sponsorship and patched advertising on the jersey, as well as the advertising revenue on the suspension of midfield time and official social platforms, etc., which fully reflects the NBA's advertising philosophy that makes every area and every second of the space, which is similar to the advertising implantation in variety shows.

NBA has taken commerciality as its ultimate pursuit from beginning to end, and through various institutional structures and media means, it has exhausted the profits of every link and bought them. Public data shows that among the NBA's revenue, of course, the first is the ticket revenue brought by more than 1,300 games per year. In order to maximize value, the intense game still puts pressure on many players' bodies. The second is media copyright income, mainly including national broadcast income, local broadcast income and international broadcast income. It is reported that Tencent has reached a contract renewal with the NBA and will continue to be the "NBA's exclusive official partner of China Digital Media" and will continue to cooperate in the NBA in depth until 2027; in July last year, the NBA also reached a new broadcast agreement with ESPN's parent companies Disney, NBC Universal and Amazon. The contract amount is US$77 billion in 2011, with an average annual increase of US$7 billion, demonstrating the bargaining power of NBA content distribution. The third is advertising and sponsorship income. First of all, the naming costs of the stadium such as "Toyota Center" and "Chatcomm Center". Staples Arena renamed to the cryptocurrency website "Crypto.com Hall" cost 700 million US dollars; secondly, the advertising revenue on the stadium's advertising sponsorship and patched advertising on the jersey, as well as the advertising revenue on the suspension of midfield time and official social platforms, etc., which fully reflects the NBA's advertising philosophy that makes every area and every second of the space, which is similar to the advertising implantation in variety shows.

In this era where content is king and narratively driven, the NBA is no longer a sporting event, it is more like a super reality show spanning 79 seasons, including the rise of heroes, the showdown of old enemies, the battle for glory, the change of times and the curtain call of youth. It can be said that the reason why the NBA has become a 10 billion-dollar super league is not just the charm of basketball competition, but it is well aware of how to "tell a story that is constantly updated", how to attract global users to participate with cultural resonance, and how to maximize value from local roots, global expansion, and then industrial closed loop. This combination of content power, brand power and commercialization power provides a paradigm template for the global sports industry.

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Author | Ran Zhiwen

Editor-in-chief | Peng Kan

Executive Editor | Liu Cuicui

Typesetting | Yu Jiaxin