The NBA is one of America's "big four" professional sports leagues, alongside the NFL, National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. Its marquee franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers, was sold in June 2025 for $10bn—the first team in any sport to command an 11-figure price.
Jerry Buss, a chemist turned property developer, bought a package of assets headlined by the Lakers for $67.5m in 1979. Short on cash, he swapped apartment buildings for leasing rights to the Chrysler Building in New York, then exchanged those for the club and its arena. The Buss family won 11 titles in 46 years. In June 2025 the family agreed to sell their 66% stake to Mark Walter, chief executive of Guggenheim Partners, a financial firm managing nearly $350bn. Walter's holding company had already turned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team into a consistent winner with record-setting attendance.
Big-four teams have delivered a 13.1% annualised return since 1960, compared with 10.4% for the S&P 500, according to an index launched in 2024 by the University of Michigan's business school and Arctos, a private-equity firm, based on around 500 historical transactions. Franchise values have shown minimal volatility: even after the 2008-09 financial crisis, teams continued to sell at lofty valuations. The index rose 89% in the three years to March 2025.
The big four's structure makes teams far better investments than European football clubs. Every team has a permanent local monopoly or duopoly; revenue is shared between clubs; payroll limits and entering-player drafts keep salaries at around 50% of revenues while giving every team a chance to contend for a title. In European football, player costs exceed 70% of revenue and turnover swings wildly with on-field performance.
Recent tailwinds include the legalisation of sports betting, which expanded the sports audience, and the entry of institutional investors such as Qatar's sovereign wealth fund—though for now limited to passive, minority stakes. The NBA's most recent media deal is worth $77bn over 11 years, more than double the previous rate. Streaming services have proved more lucrative than cable operators, bidding fiercely for the rare genre that viewers insist on watching live.
State media began broadcasting NBA games in China in the 1980s. Around a third of the Chinese population, or 450m people, follow basketball—more than the entire population of America. In a survey conducted in 2023, around half of all Chinese internet users and 90% of Chinese basketball fans said they watched the NBA.
Yao Ming, a 2.29-metre-tall centre who played for the Houston Rockets in the 2000s, drove huge interest in the sport in China. In 2019 Daryl Morey, then the Houston Rockets' manager, voiced support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests on social media, provoking a swift backlash: Chinese state broadcasters stopped showing NBA games and sponsors pulled funding. The NBA said losses amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Games were broadcast again on China's state-run television from 2022. In October 2025 the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns played pre-season games in Macau—the first games in China involving NBA teams in six years.
Yang Hansen, a Chinese youngster drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2025, lifted the team's merchandise sales to more than ten times those of the same period the year before.
The Oklahoma City Thunder won their first big-league title in 2025. Oklahoma City has invested more than $3bn in taxpayer-funded capital projects since the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people in the city's federal building. The arena was one of the city's first such projects. The city's population has grown 50% since 1995.
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