LeBron & NBA China: Controversy & Complications

“Basketball is not just a sport, but also a bridge that unites us.” Signed: Lebron James. Or almost. People’s Daily, organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published an article in Mandarin at the beginning of the week with the signature of the largest basketball player in business. Without his knowledge. At the bottom of the text, reference is made to Lebron James as an author, but in small, as in the Capestro contracts, it is specified that the player was interviewed, and the article was adapted by a People’s Daily journalist.

Lebron was in China for one of those visits that the great athletes by contract, piloted by the sponsors, in the markets where there is more interest. The occasion was of the important ones: it is the Forever King Tour, at the twentieth anniversary of the first lap of Lebron with Nike in Asia. The Los Angeles Lakers star crossed the country, was in Shanghai and Chengdu, took some photos, signed autographs on shoes and tank tops and released interviews. Certainly at the beginning of the week everything would have expected to find his name at the bottom of an article on the People’s Daily. In the following days all the sources that spoke with the international press, including the player’s entourage, confirmed that those words were really pronounced by Lebron, but he never sent an article to the newspaper, this is certain.

It seemed a diplomatic case could be born, instead they were all very accommodating, no line of tension, no fracture. The relationships between the United States and China are already jeopardized by Donald Trump, it will not be basketball to shatter them.

According to some observers, come William Zheng del South China Morning Postthe publication of the article to James by the newspaper “could indicate the desire for Chinese leadership to make use of US sports icons to promote cultural and commercial exchanges at a time when bilateral relationships are quite tense, mostly because of Donald Trump”.

Hence the crucial phrase, really pronounced by Lebron, on basketball as a bridge that combines peoples and cultures and continents. Which is exactly what NBA and Nike would also like, the two companies that pay the player to exploit the public image.

China is the second most populous country in the world, it is a very tempting market for American basketball, with about three hundred million practitioners and a turnover around four and a half billion dollars. This is why Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns will face each other on the next month for two preseason matches in Macao, the Chinese region with autonomous administration, on 10 and 12 October. In reality they will be the first two games of the NBA on Chinese soil for six years now. 2019 was a difficult year for relations between the League and Beijing. The triggering cause is an apparently smaller episode which, however, caused economic and political chain damage.

October 2019. In Shanghai there are the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets. In a moment of free time, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, decides to tweet in solidarity with Hong Kong demonstrators: «Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong ». Lightning and saette. Chinese politics always looks motionless, then it starts like an alligator when there is a blow to launch. In a short time it happens of everything, in a dizzying escalation: immediate criticisms of the NBA rains from the party; The Chinese basketball federation suspends any relationship with the Houston franchise; The Chinese government prohibits the transmission of NBA matches to all the country’s television broadcasters.

The NBA is taken on the counterattack. It is the most progressive among the American professional leagues, but has too many interests to defend in a market like the Chinese one. First try to support Morey’s “freedom of expression”, words of commissioner Adam Silver. Then he changes nuance and defines the tweet of Morey “deplorable” and guilty of having “deeply offended” his “friends and fans in China”. Lebron himself is among the first to speak, he defines Morey “uninformed” and “not aware of the situation”. Here it should be specified that Lebron is part of the wake of the American sports giants, historically willing to spend themselves in public to defend civil rights under attack. But he also knows how to be a businessman with the right hair on the stomach. As moreover, the number one of the NBA Adam Silver is. Without going too much for the subtle, it can be said that for both, Lebron and Silver, the Latin proverb is worth Money doesn’t smell.

Since its creation in 1946, the NBA has imposed itself both as a symbol of America and as a global brand. But it would take a long time before the NBA realized that China represented A new Eldorado. In the first excursions in the Asian markets, the NBA mainly looked at Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the most developed and westernized economies of the region.

The communist China at the end of the 1980s had just started following American basketball. The CCTV transmitted some extracts of the matches, the rare and widest themselves that arrived in Europe. So millions of Chinese could meet Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon: the first semide of basketball seen on Chinese screens.

The turning point would only arrive in 2002. Yao Ming, twenty -one years and 229 centimeters in height, was called with the first absolute choice of the Draft: the second Chinese basketball player in the United States after Wang Zhizhi, who arrived a year earlier. But Yao Ming promised much that he was much more important, on parquet and business. With its arrival, the NBA was no longer only an American television product exported abroad, but a brand to be incorporated into the Chinese market itself.

That year the NBA would have doubled the number of matches transmitted to China, all local brands would have sought a way to create commercial partnerships with the League, also helped by Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The economic growth of the NBA brand in China was so vertical that in 2007 it would open a separate division in the area, to conduct economic negotiations in total autonomy.

With a gold mine in the hands, the NBA several times has closed a eye on the dark sides of Chinese politics in order to maintain good relationships with Beijing. A recent episode concerns Enes Kanter, an athlete born in Zurich, but Turkish passport, then stateless, then American. Today at the registry it is called Enes Freedom. In 2021 Kanter had discovered the human drama of the Uiguri of Xinjiang, a western and Muslim region of China. From that moment every occasion was good to criticize the Chinese government, from on social networks to the games in which he took the field with political messages written by shoes.

The countermeasures of the NBA, however officially attributable to his protests, were immediate: Kanter’s minutage on the pitch fell to the beaten, then a transfer to the Houston Rockets, finally the termination of the contract. Since then, Kanter has never played in America anymore. There was no more space for him: in some cases the wedding ball is lighter than the billions that make it bounce.

At the time, after theaffair Morey, it was too important to try to save the face, for the American League. Returning to work at full speed with the Chinese market was the primary objective. In the last three years, scrive ReutersCCTV has gradually returned to transmit the NBA matches as before, and Chinese companies have signed new agreements with the League.

In the meantime, the NBA has tried to branch its interests in all continents, looking in particular in the Middle East – as almost all sports do. There is an increasingly close link with the United Arab Emirates – it is seen that autocracies are the greatest – and performances have been played in Abu Dhabi for several years. The NBA Cup itself, born in 2023, is now sponsored by Emirates Airlines. But, after the Morey case, the NBA has lost wagons of money: almost four hundred million dollars only in 2020 for the breakdown of relations with China. Then the Pandemia and Lockdown worsened the situation.

With the League, all the presidents of the thirty deductibles have also lost large investments. In May 2022, ESPN listed The shaded multimilionary agreements: the total amount to over ten billion dollars of investments.

To get back on track, in 2023 the NBA appointed a Chinese manager for the first time for its branch in the country. It is Michael but, veteran of sports marketing, graduated from Columbia University in New York, but above all the son of a former director of the CCTV, the Chinese state television network. A strategic decision. «Part of our mission is to improve people’s lives through basketball. Use this sport to open the doors to create a dialogue between companies, “said Commissioner Adam Silver A Le Monde Nel 2023recognizing that in one way or another, net of values ​​and the flagoded progressiveness, the NBA as a company must “be profitable to continue existing”. And doing business with China is the best way to keep the accounts in place, even if you have to be at the game of the Beijing regime.