The Evolution of Governance in the Australian National Basketball League, 1979–2013

Robert Macdonald and Rick Burton ()
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Rick Burton: Syracuse University

A chapter in The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim, 2015, pp 207-232 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The Australian National Basketball League (NBL) first tipped off in 1979, as the product of far-sighted club officials and Basketball Australia (national governing body) administrators who desired national club competition in a sport that was to boom as part of a global social trend. By the early 1990s, basketball was Australia’s fourth most popular spectator sport behind Australian football, rugby league and cricket. Yet the NBL was struggling soon thereafter and today it rarely rises above the level of niche spectator sport, in spite of high grassroots basketball participation and strong national teams. We review the evolution of NBL governance, especially the creation of a league competition organiser controlled by the NBL clubs and Basketball Australia in 1989; the merger of that entity, NBL Management Limited, and Basketball Australia in 2009, followed by the subsequent 2013 ‘de-merger’ and formation of a new competition organiser, NBL Pty Ltd, owned by the NBL clubs and private investors. Along the way, the NBL has experienced regular cycles of expansion and contraction. More than 30 clubs came and went in 35 seasons. The current eight-club competition includes a challenging mix of large- and very small-market clubs, private owners and public ­membership-based entities. Continual financial instability and power struggles between Basketball Australia and the NBL club owners/managers have resulted in a failure to devise a governance model that was a long-term, stable, efficient and profitable agreement between either the NBL clubs themselves, or between the NBL competition organiser and Basketball Australia.

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Rugby League; Governance Reform; National Basketball Association; National League (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:semchp:978-3-319-10037-1_12

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-10037-1_12

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