Op-ed: Transforming UK Basketball

Kevin Routledge, Chairman of the Leicester Riders and a Director of The Basketball League (BBL), the professional men’s basketball league in the UK, unveils the strategy behind transfotming the landscspe of the sport following the league’s landmark £7m investment, secured from Miami-based private equity firm, 777 Partners LLC.

Unlike other investments of this type globally in professional sporting assets, the BBL’s plans for use of the investment, dubbed Project Rebound, go far beyond the professional league and its (currently) ten clubs. The investment targets include the grassroots and community basketball, a digital transformation of the sport and its assets, and the development of the national teams for both men’s and women’s basketball.

The plans are as daunting as they are ambitious and will require an unprecedented alignment in the various governing bodies and entities, including the government funding agencies, that are currently involved in the sport.

The sport of basketball has a barely noticed but huge footprint at the grass roots level and in education in the country and is at the heart of the most disadvantaged communities, with unique characteristics that can, with thought and investment, address a wide range of current societal challenges.

It can justifiably claim to be the second most played team sport – in the UK, in Europe, in the USA and globally – but translating that to thriving commercial enterprises in the UK has proved elusive, with many false dawns.

The historic reality is those investments have been piecemeal and uncoordinated, whether, for example, in individual BBL clubs in the 1990s or in the GB national team in the run-up to London Olympics.

This time the BBL and 777 are determined to do it differently, and there is no aspect or level of the sport that has escaped its attention, notwithstanding the potential logistical and organisational challenges. The initial £7m in funding is expected to act as a catalyst to much larger scale investments further into the plan, as resources are recruited and developed, and detailed local, regional and national barriers are understood, challenged and overcome.

For example, none of the many reviews of British basketball over the decades, and how it suffers in comparison to its major European equivalents, never mind the USA, has overlooked the challenge posed by lack of basic, affordable infrastructure to play the game, from grassroots to national league level. Popularity within an education environment suffers in translating to post education, due to availability and costs factors that make the sport literally very difficult to play – when the essence of the sport is so simple – a couple of players, a ball, a basket and some limited space.

The BBL through sheer ingenuity and determination has cracked the challenge with local purpose-built basketball facilities in Leicester and Newcastle, and now the 777 investment will be utilised to translate that model nationally working with local partners, and a variety of capital investors. Those facilities can then be used to turbo-charge community engagement that is already a strong feature of under resourced clubs in the BBL and WBBL. These initiatives will be delivered under the recently launched BBL Inspires programme, which has already established an on-line presence through a health, well-being, and training and employment platform.

Basketball in the UK also has unique challenges and opportunities in regards the basketball player pathway. Rather than a simple ‘club vs country (NGB)’ competition for the youth, typical of other UK team sports, potential basketball players in the UK have a myriad of opportunities – from BBL or National League Club Academies, to the ever expanding multi-billion-dollar US college basketball system that is now aggressively recruiting top young male and female players internationally, to ambitious European Basketball Club Academies, like Real Madrid, that are expanding their recruiting tentacles overseas.

What suits individual players, and their development, of course varies, but the BBL investment will seek to bring minimum standards to all the BBL Academies and to build an infrastructure of partners in the UK colleges and universities, and in US and overseas, to make the whole process more efficient and effective for the young player. That will have a benefit of forming a lifelong connection with the players, to aid their interest of their long-term involvement in the British game, just one element in BBL’s newly launched BBL Supports programme, that will aim to build the human infrastructure of the sport.

BBL and 777 recognise that their ambitions exceed their formal areas of responsibility and control and thus engaging with the Home Nation NGBs, and the British Basketball Federation, the lead NGB recognised by the internal governing body, FIBA, and formalising partnerships are priority tasks in the post Rebound Close 120 Day Plan, as well as, for example, getting their support to the build of a sport-wide digital infrastructure, critical to BBL’s commercial strategy.

The need to build sustainable professional clubs that cover the full breath of the UK is high on the agenda of the BBL’s 120 Day Plan. This includes new franchises in basketball hotspots like Birmingham and Liverpool. Those franchises in turn will need investment and support and Project Rebound’s plans include access to both potential basketball Club investors and working with local partners and infrastructure, as well as expertise and technical and administrative support at BBL HQ to aid clubs in building their own necessary commercial and technical infrastructure.

No aspect of the sport of basketball in the UK will be left untouched by BBL’s Project Rebound, which promises a revolution for all stakeholders and potential stakeholders of the game.

Kevin Routledge is a Director of the BBL and Chairman of the Leicester Riders, the current BBL Championship winners. A former player with the Loughborough All Stars, he has been involved in British Basketball continuously for the last 48 years. He was BBL Chairman from 1988 to 2002, a former Director of Basketball England, and involved in establishing the BBL in 1987 and the WBBL in 2014. He was instrumental in funding, building and operating the first purpose-built basketball arena in the BBL at the Morningside Arena, Leicester, which opened in January 2016. He is also a Director of the Arena and Trustee of two basketball charities, the Leicester Riders Foundation and the Basketball Foundation. He led the initiative to secure external investment in the BBL.