If you wanted a single statistic to capture how thoroughly the NBA has globalised, it would be this: a player born outside the United States has now won the league’s Most Valuable Player award in eight consecutive seasons. The last American-born winner was James Harden in 2017-18. Since then, the trophy has belonged to Giannis Antetokounmpo of Greece (twice), Nikola Jokic of Serbia (three times), Cameroon-born Joel Embiid, and Canada’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who this season claimed his second straight MVP after leading the Oklahoma City Thunder to 64 wins. The best basketball league in the world is increasingly powered by players who learned the game somewhere else.
The depth of the trend goes well beyond the trophy cabinet. The NBA opened the 2025-26 season with a record 135 international players from a record-tying 43 countries across six continents, and every one of the league’s 30 teams featured at least one international player. The roster-level numbers tell a story of sustained growth rather than a one-off spike: opening-night rosters have featured at least 100 international players for 12 straight seasons, and at least 120 for five straight.
Where the talent comes from
Canada leads the way, with 23 players making it the most-represented country outside the United States for the 12th consecutive season, headlined by Gilgeous-Alexander himself. Europe accounts for a record 71 players, including a record 19 from France and a record four from the United Kingdom, while Australia matched its record with 13. Germany and Serbia round out the most-represented nations. At the team level, the Atlanta Hawks opened the season with a record-tying 10 international players on their roster.
The pipeline behind those numbers has been decades in the making. The Dream Team’s appearance at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics is usually credited with igniting global interest, and pioneers such as Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili proved international players could be franchise cornerstones rather than curiosities. What changed in the past decade is that international players stopped being complementary pieces and started being the very best players in the league. Jokic, a second-round pick from Sombor, Serbia, became a three-time MVP and is routinely described as the most skilled big man ever. Antetokounmpo went from a skinny teenager playing in Greece’s second division to a two-time MVP and champion. Luka Doncic arrived from Slovenia as a EuroLeague MVP at 19 and led the NBA in scoring volume among its elite.
The Wembanyama era arrives
And then there is Victor Wembanyama. The 7-foot-plus Frenchman entered the league in 2023 as the most hyped prospect in a generation, and the 2025-26 season was his coronation. He became the youngest Defensive Player of the Year in NBA history at 22, and the first unanimous winner of the award, after leading the league with 3.1 blocks per game. More remarkably, he carried the San Antonio Spurs, a 62-win, second-seeded team, to the NBA Finals in his very first playoff appearance, collecting Western Conference Finals MVP honours along the way. He was also an MVP finalist alongside Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokic, meaning the entire top of the league’s individual hierarchy this season was international. The Finals matchup against New York is among the storylines we break down in our look at the NBA season’s biggest narratives.
Why globalisation accelerated
Several forces converged. European club academies professionalised youth development, producing players with elite skill and tactical education by their late teens. The NBA invested directly in development abroad, through Basketball Without Borders camps, the NBA Academies and the Basketball Africa League. Scouting became genuinely global as video and data made it impossible for talent to hide; the same analytical infrastructure reshaping on-court strategy, described in how analytics changed shot selection, also transformed international scouting. And success bred success: every Jokic or Giannis story makes the next federation, club and family believe the path is real.
The commercial implications are enormous. International stars give the NBA authentic local heroes in dozens of markets, from Paris to Belgrade to Toronto, turbocharging the league’s overseas media and merchandising business. It is a textbook case of the dynamic we explore in how sports teams build global digital audiences: a French teenager streaming Spurs games at 3am is exactly the kind of fan modern leagues are built to capture. Fan identity itself is changing in the process, a theme that runs through global fan culture in football as much as basketball.
None of this means American basketball is in decline; the United States still produces far more NBA players than any other country, and stars such as Cooper Flagg suggest the domestic pipeline remains formidable. But the monopoly is over. The likeliest future is the one already visible: a league where the MVP conversation is conducted in half a dozen accents, where the number one draft pick is as likely to come from Lyon or Melbourne as from Los Angeles, and where “international player” stops being a category worth counting at all, because it simply describes the league itself. The 2025-26 season, with a Canadian MVP, a French Defensive Player of the Year carrying his team to the Finals, and a Serbian centre still among the very best players alive, may one day be remembered as the moment that future stopped being a prediction and became the plain description of professional basketball. The game America invented now belongs to everyone, and the league is far better for it.
