Key Takeaways:
- A video-first digital strategy can turn content into a powerful growth engine, increasing audience engagement across social media and owned platforms.
- Personalization, better content discovery, and year-round storytelling can turn passive viewers into active fans and deepen their relationship with a league.
- AI-powered content creation makes digital strategies scalable, helping rights holders produce and distribute the formats fans want across every relevant platform.
European basketball has lost some talented prospects to college basketball in the NIL era. Egor Dëmin, Kasparis Jakučionis, Aday Mara, Hannes Steinbach, these are just some of the names that left their respective European clubs to join Division 1 colleges, where athletes are either compensated directly by the school they play for or through third-party endorsement deals, and gain greater visibility with NBA scouts.
This past summer, though, European basketball was able to get one prospect back.
In July, Spanish point guard Mario Saint-Supery, nicknamed El Principito (The Little Prince), left Gonzaga to sign a four-year contract with EuroLeague club Valencia Basket. “The Little Prince will make the Roig Arena his new palace,” said the club in a press release, adding that Saint-Supery would “continue his development at a high competitive level.”
The EuroLeague, which will hold its first ever SuperCup starting on Sept. 18, is not only the highest level of competition outside the NBA. It’s also one of the most popular leagues in European sports, in large part due to its investment in premium content experiences.
Building Digital Momentum
The 2025-26 season was another digital high point. Determined to enhance both the user experience and the breadth of its content offering, the EuroLeague recorded unprecedented audience growth and engagement on social media and owned platforms.
Social media:
In 2021, the EuroLeague committed to a video-first content strategy. Five years later, its social media ecosystem is one of the fastest-growing digital properties in European sport:
- During the 2025-26 season, the EuroLeague’s social media content generated 2.27 billion video views, a 49% year-over-year increase.
- Looking at the evolution over the past five years, video views increased by 1,184% between 2021 (176.81 million) and 2026 (2.27 billion).
- Total engagement with EuroLeague content increased from 24.73 million to 118.57 million over the last five seasons – a 379% increase.
Owned platforms:
By improving content discovery and personalization, and providing more localized, diverse, and year-round content, the EuroLeague created a more dynamic digital environment, resulting in:
- A 23% increase in subscribers to EuroLeague.TV, the league’s streaming service, compared to the 2024-25 season.
- 12.3 million active users on the league’s official website, a 47% year-over-year increase.
Creating a New Digital Home
With such results, the EuroLeague could have rested on its laurels. Instead, it unveiled EuroLeague Basketball+. Expected to launch during the 2026-27 season, EuroLeague Basketball+ will be the organization’s flagship digital product and the central destination for European club basketball. The idea is to combine competitions, content, technology, and commercial opportunities in a one platform, creating the sport’s new digital home.
“EuroLeague Basketball+ is designed to bring the entire basketball ecosystem together,” said Marta Álvarez Escudé, the league’s chief digital and technology officer. “It aims to grow our audiences, offering fans a single destination to access a wide range of content, products, and experiences centered around the sport we all love.”
What EuroLeague Basketball+ is trying to do is solve one of the biggest challenges in the sports industry: turning a viewer into an active fan. Doing that, say EuroLeague executives, requires an ecosystem that can deliver the most important asset a sports organization has: audience intelligence data.
“Having digital platforms and databases allows us to understand our audience very well and anticipate what they want and need,” said Álvarez Escudé. “Our interaction with fans will be supported by far more data points, which can help us understand what drives a person to go from being passive to active and create content that is dynamic, adapted, and personalized.”
The Tech Behind the Strategy
The EuroLeague’s success shows how a modern digital strategy can turn content into a growth engine. A video-first approach across social and owned platforms, combined with an emphasis on discovery, personalization, and content that keeps fans engaged year-round, creates more opportunities to attract, engage, and deepen relationships with fans – transforming a league from a competition they watch into a sport they actively follow.
Executing that strategy at scale requires the right tech. AI-powered content creation platforms can instantly turn live footage into highlights, clips, personality-led stories, and other formats, then distribute them across platforms. The result is a virtuous cycle: better content grows the EuroLeague’s audience and profile, making it easier to attract prospects like Saint-Supery, who makes magic on the court, which in turn drives more content, and so on and so on and so on.
Actionable Insights:
- Build a video-first strategy across social and owned platforms, using highlights, personality-led stories, and other formats to create year-round engagement.
- Use audience data to personalize content discovery and tailor what you deliver to different fans, turning passive viewers into active followers.
- Automate content creation and distribution with AI, transforming live footage into platform-ready formats that expand reach and deepen relationships with fans.
