IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/semchp/978-3-319-10037-1_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

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

In: The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim

Author

Listed:
  • Robert D. Macdonald

    (University of Melbourne)

  • Rick Burton

    (Syracuse University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert D. Macdonald & Rick Burton, 2015. "The Evolution of Governance in the Australian National Basketball League, 1979–2013," Sports Economics, Management, and Policy, in: Young Hoon Lee & Rodney Fort (ed.), The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim, edition 127, pages 207-232, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:semchp:978-3-319-10037-1_12
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-10037-1_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:semchp:978-3-319-10037-1_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.