Basketball is one of the world’s most significant and culturally influential sports. It is a traditional Olympic discipline, a pillar of the American professional sport landscape, and in many European countries it stands as the second most popular team sport after football. To highlight the importance of basketball, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 21 December World Basketball Day. Yet despite its global reach, rich history, and economic importance, basketball remains strikingly under-researched.
This gap is especially surprising given the prevalence of governance, economic, regulatory, and organisational debates that dominate the global basketball landscape. Basketball has been a ‘pioneer’ in the evolution and transformation of sport in the last decades. For example, the creation of the Euroleague in 2000 stands as one of the earliest successful examples of a major breakaway competition, foreshadowing discussions that football has only recently begun to confront.
Today, basketball is undergoing profound transformation. Recent developments include the governance crisis in British basketball, internal tensions within the Euroleague, the proposed NBA–FIBA European joint venture, the expansion of Euroleague teams to include a team from Dubai, the expansion of 3×3 in selected African countries and 5×5 in the Philippines, and the rapid professionalisation of women’s basketball through the commercialisation of the WNBA and innovative events like Unrivaled.
This important crossroads also raises wider questions about European (and global) sport models. The former CEO of Euroleague Basketball, Paulius Motiejunas, recently said:
European basketball today stands at a crossroads. Its growth and increasing value naturally attract external interest. The responsibility is to ensure this growth remains rooted in our culture, traditions, and collective model, rather than becoming a tool for external control or short-term financial gains that do not revert into further investment in European basketball. Protecting European basketball is not about resisting change; it is about shaping it wisely, from within, and with unity.
All these highlight the need for rigorous, interdisciplinary academic engagement with the sport’s governance, economics, policy, and social impact.
At Loughborough University, Portsmouth University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Sport Magglingen, we believe the time is right to bring together researchers and practitioners to establish a critical mass of expertise: a Basketball Collective. This call for expressions of interest and papers seeks to organise an inaugural gathering at Loughborough University, a global leader in sport research, to map existingscholarship, foster collaboration, and set the foundations for a long-term, interdisciplinary basketball research community.
Objectives of the Workshop
The event has three core aims:
- To build a research community for academics and practitioners interested in basketball.
- To take stock of existing research, identifying current themes, gaps, and opportunities for future work.
- To initiate a sustained collective, beginning with this workshop and potentially culminating in future publications.
Call for Contributions
We invite colleagues working on basketball—or those who wish to begin doing so—to submit proposals for an oral presentation in the workshop in any area of the social sciences, broadly defined. Equally, if you would like to take part without presenting, please submit your interest.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Governance, regulation, and organisational politics
- League structures, competitive balance, and labour markets
- Economics and finance of clubs, leagues, and competitions
- Policy, participation, and community development
- Social value, inclusion, and wellbeing
- Gender, race, identity, and cultural narratives
- Media, digital engagement, and fan cultures
- Historical or institutional perspectives on basketball governance
- Sustainability of basketball clubs, leagues and competitions
- The use of AI technologies in basketball club settings
- Basketball mega events
- Career development and athlete
We welcome both established research and early-stage or exploratory ideas ranging from traditional academic to applied industry-based projects.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract (2,700 characters maximum) outlining:
- Context and rationale
- Research aims or guiding questions
- Methodology (completed or proposed)
- Expected or intended findings
- Relevance to basketball and the workshop themes
Next Steps
Depending on the volume and nature of submissions, we will design a workshop format to maximise discussion and collaboration. Our aspiration is to host an in-person event at Loughborough University (with online participation options if needed), followed by the development of a collective publication drawing on workshop contributions if possible.
We launch this initiative out of both scholarly conviction and genuine passion for the sport. The future of the Basketball Collective will depend on the interest and quality of contributions we receive, and we hope you will join us in shaping this emerging field.
Event information
The format of the inaugural event of this Basketball Collective will depend on the number and themes of the proposals we receive, but we anticipate this to be a one-day workshop type of event to be hosted at Loughborough University East Midlands Campus.
We propose two possible dates: Friday 8th May or Monday 6th July. Please state your preference when submitting your abstract.
Attendance will be free of charge and some food and refreshments will be provided, but participants will need to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.
Submit your abstracts and expressions of interest using this form
no later than 15th March 2026.
The ‘starting 4’ founders of the Basketball Collective (in alphabetical order):
Dr MATHEW DOWLING, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at Loughborough University (UK).
Dr BORJA GARCÍA, Reader in Sport Policy and Governance at Loughborough University (UK)
Dr MICHAEL MRKONJIC, Vice Rector Research & Development andHead of Sports Economics at the Swiss FederalInstitute of Sport Magglingen (Switzerland).
Dr CHRISTINA PHILIPPOU, Associate Professor in Accounting and Sport Finance at Portsmouth University (UK).
