Unlocking the potential of basketball

Last year investment firm 777 Partners announced their £7 million investment into the British Basketball League (acquiring a 45% stake) and purchasing the London Lions Basketball team. This month they appointed Aaron Radin as BBL CEO and announced that their involvement in British Basketball will extend into the hundreds of millions over the next decade as they have a big vision for UK basketball.  

As the second most played sport in the UK (after football), you would be forgiven for assuming that 777 Partners saw a thriving sports sector and decided that they wanted a bit of that lucrative pie, yet the British Basketball scene is woefully undeveloped.

Basketball is the second most played sport in the UK (after football) but despite being played by 847,800 or 11.7% of young people it receives only 1.5% of funding.

Despite being played by 847,800 or 11.7% of young people basketball receives only 1.58% of funding from Sport England a level of funding putting it at 18th place in their recent funding round. The investment stats from UK Sport are even more shocking, the Paris Olympic funding round sees 0.56% funding allocated to Basketball putting it at 24th position in the funding table. We have all seen from the success of British cycling that investment brings results, UK Sport invested 20.6m in advance of the 2012 Olympics and British Cycling has gone from strength to strength, with a further 28.8m being invested for Paris. However, after a relatively poor performance in the 2012 Olympics Team GB basketball had all of their funding cut (men and women). The GB men's recent performance in EuroBasket 2022 highlights the need for greater investment in the team, support staff and infrastructure. The players only had 3 days to practice together when all of the other teams in the tournament had at least 3 weeks of training before the tournament.

True, football is a behemoth here in the UK and overshadows all other sports but many of our European counterparts (also known for a love of football) invest in grassroots basketball, creating successful national teams and multiple NBA players. Even Latvia, with a population of 2m has Kristaps Porzingis playing for Washington Wizards in the NBA, yet the number of British players playing globally at the top level is virtually non-existent (Jeremy Sochan and OG Anunoby) considering our population of 67 million.

We wanted to understand more about why this discrepancy between funding and participation exists and what we can do about it. We reached out to Steve Bucknall, a former NBA and European League player who has dedicated his professional life to elevating the game of basketball in the UK.

“We know that only a tiny percentage of kids will make it to the professional level but using basketball as a hook for social education is a more significant benefit to our community and society. Basketball inspires our young participants to get an education and teaches them how to be productive, it changed the trajectory of my life chances, and this is a stat that the people in power need to pay more awareness to!”

Steve Bucknall, Head of Talent and Performance, Basketball England.

Supporting the grassroots of basketball was one of the reasons we created TeamSportz, as we understand the market is largely underserved despite the high participation. Investment is also key to generating success but it's equally important to understand we are driving social education while using the game of basketball an incentive to players. That perhaps is the hook to attract more investment that in turn will elevate the game of basketball as the second most-played sport in the UK.