From an outsider’s perspective, British basketball has never had it so good. It is firmly established as the second most popular participation team sport in the country with more than 1.5 million people playing at least twice a month. In December 2024, the sport received a combined £4,475,000 in two grants by UK Sport and Sport England for the next four years, three times the amount it received during the previous Olympic cycle.
There has also been good news on court, with Great Britain’s women qualifying for this summer’s European Championship thanks to a resounding win against Denmark this month, while the men will join them if they win one of their two remaining qualifiers against the Netherlands and Czech Republic next week.
Scratch the surface, however, and the sport is facing a governance crisis, which several people involved in the game have described as a civil war.
Problems have bedevilled the professional game for years but reached crisis point last year. Before its futile pursuit of Everton football club, 777 Partners bought a 45% stake in the British Basketball League (BBL) and a controlling interest in the London Lions, champions for the past two years. The Miami‑based investment company, which also bought stakes in several elite football clubs including Sevilla, Genoa and Vasco da Gama, was frequently late in making its contractual payments to the BBL.
When 777 Partners was liquidated last year, the BBL collapsed with it. A new competition, Super League Basketball (SLB), featuring nine professional clubs, was set up. It is controlled by Premier Basketball Ltd, a consortium led by Sarah Backovic, the director of Sheffield Sharks, with a plan for it to run the league for three years.
Meanwhile, the British Basketball Federation (BBF), the game’s UK governing body, announced a tender process to find partners for a new men’s professional league. Last month the tender process concluded with an American consortium of Marshall Glickman, Chris Dillavou and Arjun Metre named as preferred bidders.
But the clubs are deeply unhappy with BBF’s handling of the tender and are threatening to set up their own league. They have sent a dossier of their concerns to the BBF board and the government, and officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have pledged to investigate. The clubs’ concerns have also been raised with UK Sport and Sport England, which control the funding of the elite and recreational sport respectively. Sources at several clubs said that the BBF is refusing to share details of the Glickman group offer and the group has yet to demonstrate proof of funds. As a result the new league, which is due to be fully operational this summer, does not have any clubs or venues.
“Over the past few months Super League Basketball has repeatedly and privately communicated concerns with the British Basketball Federation regarding the legality of the tender application process to run the men’s professional league in Great Britain,” a SLB spokesperson said.
“Following a lack of substantive responses, all nine Super League Basketball clubs took the difficult decision not to participate in the process. Super League Basketball welcomes further third-party investigation into the legality of the British Basketball Federation’s tender process, and will continue to engage with all necessary stakeholders to safeguard the future of basketball in Great Britain.”
The BBF has, meanwhile, promised the clubs a meeting with all members of the Glickman group and the opportunity to question them on their financial backgrounds and other business links, although a date has not been set for this summit.
The issue was discussed at a meeting of the public accounts committee in Westminster last week with DCMS officials. The Labour MP Clive Betts, whose constituency includes the home of the Sheffield Sharks, raised concerns about the tender process and claimed that the financial uncertainty surrounding the sport could lead to clubs defaulting on the Covid loans granted by government. The nine clubs received loan packages worth a total of £3m during the pandemic, although seven have already been repaid in full.
“The way the department has allowed the British Basketball Federation to basically franchise out the running of the league has now put at risk the loans that you’re owed from some clubs,” Betts said. “Indeed, I understand that Leicester and Newcastle may now be signalling that they’re going to have difficulty repaying the loans because of the worsened financial situation in basketball. I’ve asked questions about this, but you seem quite content with this franchising out to people who have got no history of running a sport before.”
Two senior officials from the DCMS told Betts that it was not the government’s role to intervene in the commercial operations of a sport. “There’s a clear rule that if governance is not properly done in line with the [Sport England] code, then that’s a difficulty,” Polly Payne, director general of policy at the DCMS, said. “But they would not get involved in very detailed commercial negotiations.”
The BBF declined to comment when contacted and cited a verbal agreement with SLB that neither would make public statements at this stage, but is understood to stand by the rigour of the tender.
One possible explanation for what has grown into an existential dispute is the BBF’s apparent belief that SLB would itself launch a bid to operate the licence, which resulted in it being shut out of the process. In an interview with the HoopsFix podcast published last September, the interim SLB chair, Vaughn Millette, indicated such a bid was imminent, saying: “I think we’re the only ones who could possibly win it, but we just have to respect that process.” But it failed to materialise. The BBF told the BBC last month it believed SLB would bid to become the long-term licensee and so deemed it inappropriate “to be closely involved in defining the proposed terms and assessment criteria”.
A BBF board meeting took place on Wednesday evening to discuss its next steps but, with positions on both sides seemingly entrenched, there is little hope of a speedy resolution.
While the mood was lightened somewhat by reports from New York that the NBA would like to stage matches in Manchester from 2026 in addition to London, the sport’s priority is ensuring there is a functioning domestic league in place later this year.
