The World Cup’s exciting future?

MELBOURNE (Paulo Kennedy's View from Downunder) - I have a confession to make. When I saw the FIBA press release titled 'Executive Committee approves bidding process for FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023' I only had one thought - boring.

Thankfully, I overcame my instincts, clicked on the link and had a read, because lurking behind the dull headline was a pretty exciting initiative from FIBA.

I'm sure for many people who've followed international basketball for many years, one of the pervading images is of empty stadiums whenever the host nation (or Lithuania) weren't involved.

Of course, FIBA noticed this too and developed the new home-and-away FIBA Basketball World Cup qualifying format, meaning there will always be home fans in the stands making noise and showing the world plenty of people care about hoops.

The FIBA EuroBasket took a positive step in that direction last year too by having Germany, Latvia, Croatia and France co-host the tournament. With four groups of six teams, it meant there was a home team in one of every three group games.

It's a concept I'd love to see trialled in Asia-Pacific too, with plenty of countries like China, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines within reasonably proximity and with the means to host a group.

And it's an idea FIBA has now embraced for the World Cup, announcing this week the 2023 event could be hosted by multiple countries if the bids warrant such a direction. Why not have World Cup hosting hype in as many countries as possible?

The conventional thinking will most likely be to follow the FIBA EuroBasket model and have four proximal countries host the event so that logistics are as simple as possible for both competitors and fans.

However, the new FIBA calendar presents an opportunity to be truly creative with how the FIBA Basketball World Cup is scheduled. For those not familiar with the new calendar, have a look at this:

During the qualification phase there are 'windows' in club seasons for international games in November, February, June/July and September. In a World Cup year, the qualifiers finish in the February window, and the June/July slot is left dormant.

With the 32-team format FIBA has adopted for the main event, featuring eight groups of four playing off in the group stage, there is an opportunity to use the June/July window to truly take the World Cup to the world.

The ideal situation - be it in 2023, 2027 or later - is to have eight countries hosting the first round of the FIBA Basketball World Cup during the June/July window, where all four teams play each other once and the top two from each pool progress to the final 16 in the September window.

At a time of the year where other sports are quiet, this is the chance to have rolling coverage across multiple time zones while creating World Cup fever in eight different locations.

This format would mean some of the host venues would have to be organised with less notice than is customary, but the reality is the logistics for a four-team group featuring only three days of games does not need a lot of time.

That brevity should encourage countries without the capability or finance to host a full-blown global tournament to still bring FIBA's flagship event to their shores and help generate more interest in the broader international game. Almost any country hosting qualifiers will have the capacity to host a World Cup group.

Australia and New Zealand are two classic examples of this. Neither is likely to seriously bid for the World Cup as it stands, but both countries get ‘major event fever’ no matter what the sport they are hosting, and the shorter option could mean basketball gets its time in the sun Downunder.

In a relatively short period of time FIBA has gone from empty stadiums to home-and-away qualifiers to shared hosting of tournaments, delivering international basketball into fans’ laps. It has been a bright period for the governing body and sets up a bright future for the sport.

Splitting the two stages of the World Cup is the next step, and one that will put basketball ahead of the planet's other major sports in terms of access to the elite level around the globe.

I hope FIBA are brave enough to seriously consider that step, recent history suggests they are capable of delivering it.

Paulo Kennedy

FIBA

FIBA's columnists write on a wide range of topics relating to basketball that are of interest to them. The opinions they express are their own and in no way reflect those of FIBA.

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