NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum speaks during the second round of the 2019 NBA Draft at the Barclays Center on June 20, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.Sarah Stier | Getty ImagesThe NBA plans to begin naming winning bidders for 12 permanent European teams in the next 60 to 90 days, Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum said in an exclusive CNBC interview. The European league remains on track to debut in October 2027, he said. The 12 new teams will be located in Rome, Milan, London, Manchester, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Athens and Istanbul. They’ll be joined by four rotating clubs available to any FIBA-affiliated team in Europe on an annual basis depending on performance. FIBA is the sport’s international governing body in Europe.Bids for teams are due at the end of June, Tatum told CNBC Sport. The league is looking for “great operators” who will invest in new stadiums, said Tatum, who added there are only “two to three world-class” basketball arenas in all of Europe.”We’re on a very, very quick timeline here,” Tatum said. “We’re going to identify the right partners in the right cities, and we’re going to take as much time as we need in order to identify those right partners. We’re talking not only existing basketball teams in the ecosystem, but we’re talking to soccer teams that currently don’t have basketball teams that are interested, and we’re also talking to individuals and other entities who don’t have a basketball team but want to invest in a basketball team.”Tatum noted basketball is the second-most popular sport in Europe but gets “less than 1% of the commercial market share there.” He estimated Europe has about 300 million basketball fans.The NBA is considering how to intermingle NBA Europe teams with its existing North American teams. In the short term, NBA Europe teams could play teams based in the U.S. and Canada in the preseason, Tatum said. Then, over time, teams across the two leagues co …
