For years, WNBA gamers performed overseas throughout their low season as a strategy to complement their low salaries. The necessity to compete year-round was seen as a draw back in the sport, requiring gamers to spend their time in abroad markets and push their our bodies, and limiting their capability to construct sturdy private manufacturers and achieve sponsorship alternatives in the U.S. year-round.
As we speak, the calculation has modified. The newest instance is Azzi Fudd, the No. 1 draft decide of 2026 and now a star on the Dallas Wings. She’s the newest participant to hitch Project B, Fortune is the first to report. Project B is an international males’s and girls’s basketball league being constructed by a former Fb exec, the cofounder of Skype, and suggested by LeBron James’ enterprise accomplice Maverick Carter. In early 2025, Bloomberg reported that Project B was searching for to boost as a lot as $5 billion as it really works to make basketball the prime global sport—forward of soccer. Cofounder Grady Burnett says that quantity was a “little excessive” and the league has accomplished its capital increase; he declined to verify how a lot funding the league has raised.
Project B hasn’t began play but, however is planning to debut in January Formulation 1-inspired “grand prix-style” basketball for males’s and girls’s gamers in six cities, together with Tokyo and Valencia, Spain. The mannequin is that underutilized arenas can pay Project B to convey international stars to their cities, permitting the league to construct an asset-light enterprise. “It’s placing athletes on a global stage, connecting with followers in all elements of the world,” Burnett says. Like the home 3-on-3 league Unequalled, which has additionally emerged as an low season opportunity for ladies’s gamers, it gives gamers fairness in the enterprise.
For Fudd, international play was interesting. As an elite school athlete, the 23-year-old has been busy coaching stateside for many of her life and is happy by the opportunity to journey. “I need to have the ability to broaden my expertise and go exterior of simply America,” she informed Fortune. Her dad, Tim Fudd, performed basketball overseas and he or she grew up listening to tales from him and different gamers about their experiences in different nations.
For the proper participant, international play will also be a enterprise opportunity. Fudd traveled with Steph Curry to Chongqing, China final summer season, and followers approached her with copies of Slam journal, photographs to signal, and customized Labubus. “People who find themselves followers of me throughout the world—I’m so removed from house, in a nation I’ve by no means been to, and folks cheer for me, give me presents, and welcome me with open arms—it was such an unreal expertise,” she remembers. “It opened my eyes to simply how way more is on the market and the way basketball can open the doorways to a lot.”
It’s additionally a totally different calculation for a post-NIL participant like Fudd, who got here into her skilled profession with greater than 800,000 followers on Instagram and a comparable following on TikTok. She already has main sponsorships in the U.S., like a cope with the hair coloration model Madison Reed. She’s not constructing a private model in the U.S. from scratch in her first yr, like gamers of earlier generations. The extra opportunity for her now’s constructing her fandom overseas; for the Chinese language market, she’s getting on the TikTok-like platforms Douyin and Rednote.
“What’s unimaginable now’s that gamers have that possibility—they’ll go if they need, they don’t should, they’ll keep if they need. It’s not compelled,” Fudd says.
In the meantime, the WNBA and NBA are each turning into extra international themselves. With this yr’s increased salaries after its new collective-bargaining settlement, the WNBA is attracting extra gamers from exterior the U.S.; in the NBA, an international participant has gained MVP for the previous eight seasons. Burnett appears to be like to soccer, which has a number of leagues that convey in greater than $1 billion in income; he sees an opportunity to construct the similar aggressive panorama in basketball.
Project B confronted some controversy attributable to stories it was funded by Saudi cash, a hot-button concern in sports activities. Burnett says the league accepted no Saudi capital; it labored with the Saudi Public Funding Fund-owned leisure vendor Sela, however he says that partnership is not lively.
Different gamers who’ve signed on to Project B embody Nneka Ogwumike, Alyssa Thomas, Kelsey Mitchell, and Jewell Loyd. The league hasn’t introduced any males’s gamers but—and the males’s league is poised to be extra disruptive to the NBA, the place the low season is brief and the league would battle. Burnett has framed its technique as “extending the careers of established gamers” from the NBA.
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