(Original title:[Depth]Street and folk basketball fires, still waiting for commercialization test)
Basketball is back on the streets.
Since the summer of 2022, a basketball game with over 800 million viewers has come into the public eye. In the past year, the domestic basketball market seems to have been booming in folk and street competitions.
The basketball game in Taipan Village, Taijiang County, Guizhou Province, was nicknamed “Village BA” by netizens for its 10,000-strong audience and an atmosphere not inferior to the NBA.
According to public data, after Village BA became popular, more than 50 media streamed live broadcasts of the games. The live broadcast lasted more than 70 hours, and the cumulative number of viewers exceeded 800 million.
NBA China, major sports brands, and even basketball industry organizations such as Hupu have all held street basketball events, and many of them have become regular events. In the first half of 2023, Village BA will enter the new season. A series of street basketball competitions, such as Xiazhan Dongdan, the Crazy Gold Rush League hosted by Anta, and the Streetball King Tournament, have started one after another.
Some street basketball matches adopt the 3×3 competition system, and some adopt the ball fighting mode, but they are all held in public sports venues, and some even enter shopping malls. The only thing in common is that every station or even every small field, They are all very popular.
Li Yu used “get together” to describe this year’s street basketball competition.
He is 27 years old this year. He was a member of the school team in middle school and now works in a major Internet company. In the year he joined the company after graduating from undergraduate, Li Yu formed an amateur team with several colleagues in the company who liked to play basketball. They would usually find places to play “wild ball” in their respective communities or near the company.
“Wild ball” is also a kind of street basketball, where fans form temporary teams to play games, or even not games at all.
The game of street basketball does not need to be played on a regular basketball court. A flat hard field the size of half a basketball court is drawn in the city square or on the side of the street, and a basketball stand is set up to play the game.
Li Yu told Jiemian News: “There are many streetball competitions this year, not only in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but also in many second- and third-tier cities. I am from Hunan, and there are many streetball competitions in Changsha this year. Several small children have signed up to participate.”
This year’s street basketball is booming, on the one hand, the enthusiasm for participating in the game is high, on the other hand, basketball is a sport that is widely accepted. In addition to the top professional players, there are also a large number of “wild ball masters” among the people.
“These competitions also give us a place to showcase, and everyone’s enthusiasm for participation is very high,” Li Yu said.
Fans lined up to watch the next Dongdan game.
Take the Dongdan Street Ball Game held by Jordan as an example. The game has gone through eleven years and is currently one of the most well-known and mature street basketball games in China. Well-known football stars Russell Westbrook and Guo Ailun have both visited Dongdan.
In 2020, the Dongdan Streetball Game will be officially renamed as the next stop, Dongdan, and the venue and format of the event will be changed a lot. In addition to classic competition systems such as “team battles” and “big fights”, players will also be divided into four groups according to age (16-18 years old, 19-22 years old, 23-25 years old and over 25 years old) for trials. This is a fairer opportunity for players of different ages to participate and showcase.
According to the introduction of the Jordan brand, in 2023, Dongdan, the next station, will go out of Beijing and expand the schedule to Shanghai, Changsha and Guangzhou.
Jordan told Jiemian News: “Jordan has always been committed to enhancing the cohesion of the community and helping more young people with sportsmanship. ‘Xiazhan Dongdan’ is a stage for grassroots players to show themselves, and it is also a high-level arena where basketball players from all over the country gather. We We hope that through the streetball competition, more people can learn about basketball and discover more potential players.”
In addition to the street basketball games that originated in the United States, the local Guizhou Village BA has been “upgraded”.
In June of this year, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the General Administration of Sports issued a notice, deciding to organize the National Hemei Village Basketball Competition. This also means that the village BA has officially developed into a “national level” competition.
According to the arrangement of the competition, this village BA competition will be divided into three stages. In the grass-roots games from June to July, each province organizes grass-roots rural basketball games by itself. From August to September, regional competitions will be held. There are four divisions in the country: Southeast, Northeast, Northwest, and Southwest. The winning teams in each division will advance to the third stage finals. The final final will be held in Taijiang County, Guizhou Province in October.
The popularity of the event has brought considerable income to the local area. According to statistics, during the competition in 2022, Taipan Village will receive 400,000 tourists, and the comprehensive tourism income will reach 21.54 million yuan.
This year, Taipan Village has rebuilt and expanded the competition venue and increased the number of stands. The venue can accommodate more than 20,000 spectators from more than 10,000 last year. In addition, a player lounge, shower room, media reception room, etc. have been added.
Although there are frequent street basketball games in China, compared with the United States, the domestic street basketball still has a long way to go.
“It should be said that the cultural background is not deep enough?” said Wu Zhuoheng, a streetball enthusiast from Guangzhou. ‘In the eyes of many people and even insiders, it is irregular, and to put it bluntly, it is not very public.”
Wu Zhuoheng studied undergraduate in the United States for 4 years. He believes that street basketball in the United States is very mature. “Many children in the United States grew up in the streetball system. As the direction of career development, it doesn’t matter to them whether they get into a professional team or not. But in China, the cognitive gap between street basketball and professional basketball is still relatively large.”
Perhaps aware of this, many sports brands have begun to purposefully bring professional players to the streetball arena in recent years, opening up the track between streetball and professional basketball.
The airborne event held by PUMA at Fudan University in June this year not only combined street basketball and campus basketball, but also invited contracted athletes and 2022-2023 CBA Finals FMVP Zhao Jiwei.
Li Tianrong, a CBA player who plays for the Shanghai Jiushi Sharks Club, participated in Jordan’s next stop in Dongdan Shanghai. He told Jiemian News that the enthusiasm of the fans for basketball was beyond his expectations. I was really touched by being on the scene, and I am very grateful to everyone who loves basketball so much.”
Li Tianrong believes that professional basketball and street basketball are still similar in essence. “I was an amateur when I participated in the competition for the first time in 2019. Now that I have entered the professional arena, I still hope to come back and compete on the same platform with everyone. Street and professional There is no separation of families, and we can learn from each other. The core and essence is to love basketball. Chinese basketball, whether it is street or professional, is improving every year, and there are more and more exchanges with each other.”
In addition to the lack of participation of star players, domestic streetball events are also facing the problem of commercialization. And this problem, the top domestic basketball league CBA can’t get around it.
Challenged by the epidemic and market downturn in the past few years, CBA has lost a lot of attention. A series of controversies such as the withdrawal of the Xinjiang team last season and the match-fixing incident pushed the CBA to the forefront.
Looking at the list of CBA sponsors, most of them are old faces such as China Life, Li Ning, and Migu. Although the basic market is stable, there has been no major new capital inflow for a long time.
This is true for professional leagues, and the difficulty of commercialization for streetball games is self-evident.
Whether it is the next station Dongdan or the crazy gold rush league, most streetball events are led by sports brands. Although part of the income can be obtained from the sales of event peripheral products and spectator ticket sales, in terms of the largest commercial sponsorship and media copyright sales, this type of event has not made much progress, and the gap between them is not large.
At this stage, the main purpose of the competitions is to infiltrate publicity to the public rather than to make a profit.
And the village BA held in the village has little experience in this regard.
Since the competitions are all organized by villagers and villagers spontaneously, no ticket fees are charged, and the income mainly comes from surrounding industries driven by the popularity of the competition, such as tourism and catering.
According to the website of the People’s Government of Taijiang County, the tourism base built around the upgrading of the basketball court in Taipan Village is expected to drive more than 40 million yuan in consumption in catering and other industries in the Taipan Township jurisdiction.
Of course, there are also sponsors who come here especially, but the village BA obviously doesn’t want to be too hasty in this regard. Zhang Shoushuang, Secretary of the Party Branch of Taipan Village, once said in an interview: “There can be businesses on the periphery of the BA stadium in the village, but commercialization is rejected on the stadium.”
Zhang Shoushuang revealed that the village once received a sponsorship fee of 500,000 yuan, but they all rejected it.
However, commercialization is still the way to go if the event wants to last long.
When it comes to the commercialization of basketball events, the top league NBA has the most say: Relying on considerable commercial sponsorship and media copyright sales revenue, during the 2021-2022 season during the epidemic, the NBA’s annual revenue exceeded 10 billion US dollars for the first time, of which , Basketball-related revenue reached 8.9 billion US dollars, and a number of financial data have created record highs.
According to the NBA’s plan, the next media copyright sales period will start in 2025, and the NBA hopes to earn $75 billion in revenue through streaming media. At present, technology giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon are all in the bidding team for NBA streaming rights. Industry insiders estimate that the price of the final contract may exceed 100 billion U.S. dollars.
Negotiations in the United States are still continuing, and the contract in mainland China has been finalized, and the partner is Tencent Sports. The latest contract between the two parties lasts for 5 years, and Tencent pays the NBA 1.5 billion U.S. dollars (about 9 billion yuan) every year. This price is three times higher than the price of the previous contract.
Compared with last year, Village BA has started to explore in commercial sponsorship and media copyright sales. After Village BA became a “national-level” event this year, the People’s Daily broadcast the event, and platforms such as Migu, Kuaishou, and JD.com have also joined the broadcast and sponsorship lineup one after another, and the overall planning of the competition schedule has become more standardized and professional.
Chinese basketball has a solid “mass foundation”, which is the soil for the growth of public basketball. And a mature commercial operation system will provide continuous development momentum for public basketball games.
The popular basketball in 2023 is looking forward to greater progress in the future.
Li Yu said: “I hope there will be no less games next year, and more and more.”
2023-07-12 04:22:41
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