MIES (Switzerland) – The first window of the 2027 FIBA Basketball World Cup Qualifiers delivered must-see hoops across the globe. Amazing scenarios, buzzer-beaters, upsets, furious comebacks, drama and records were broken. It was November Madness!
How popular was this window with fans?
Attendance was already impressive in the arenas, but even more stunning were the record-breaking digital numbers. Fan engagement across the entire social media landscape was through the roof, and the Qualifiers’ website metrics also reached all-time highs.
Fan engagement and social media growth reached unprecedented levels for the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers during the November 2025 Window 1. There were 19.4 million engagements Window 1, more than double the 7.7 million of the same window for the last World Cup Qualifiers cycle.
Visibility also surged, as there were 868 million impressions – twice as many as the 445 million from four years ago. Video consumption followed the same upward trend, with the 215 million video views almost doubled the 116 million from the November window for the 2023 World Cup, underlining the continued growth in global fan interest across digital platforms.
The start of the Qualifiers also delivered exceptional growth across the event websites. This window more than tripled with 1.26 million users – 3.3 times what the November 2021 window had ahead of the 2023 World Cup. Sessions nearly tripled, reaching 1.79 million, while pageviews more than tripled to 5.75 million.
The introduction of a new website ecosystem, featuring faster performance, improved user experience and enhanced design, significantly enhanced the digital experience compared to the previous cycle. November 2025 Window 1 expanded language offerings compared to the previous cycle, adding Arabic - the World Cup host Qatar’s official language - as well as Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Spanish to better serve global audiences.
Fan engagement also benefited from the significant growth in FIBA’s social media reach achieved since 2021. Strong momentum following the highly successful Continental Cups in 2025 further helped drive increased interest and traffic.
Another way to see the surge in interest was through fans’ appetite for editorial content. This was the best World Cup Qualifiers window ever for editorial pageviews, with 750,000, while the entirety of the last World Cup Qualifiers generated 1.5 million. As a result, the figure for Window 1 represented 50 percent of the entire qualifiers cycle for the 2023 World Cup.
Those numbers from the first window of the 2027 World Cup Qualifiers continued the trend of basketball’s global growth, offering audiences new ways to watch and engage.
FIBA