LeBron And Durant’s New League Would Make Teen Hoopers Shareholders

 A new league backed by LeBron James and Kevin Durant wants to pay the best teenage basketball players in America and give them a piece of the business. The Futures Basketball League announced on Tuesday, Nov. 10, that it will launch in April 2027 with 120 of the nation’s top under-18 boys' prospects on 12 regional teams, with players earning NIL money they can take in cash, league equity, or both.

The league’s founding partners include LRMR Ventures, run by James and Maverick Carter, and Boardroom Sports Holdings, run by Durant and Rich Kleiman, along with team owners Derrick Rose, Paolo Banchero, and Gary Vaynerchuk, ESPN’s Ben Strauss reported. The price to buy a team has been $6 million, and owners also get equity in the league.

How The Money Works

The league will not say how much players will make. Rose told ESPN the amounts could be “life-changing.” Players come from the high school classes of 2028 through 2031, which means some of them are freshmen. They will be contracted and paid by the league, not by the 12 teams, and the deals are structured as NIL income rather than salary so players can keep their high school and college eligibility, according to Sports Business Journal. The league’s chairman and co-founder, Jason Stein, told SBJ the deals will run through the College Sports Commission to check fair market value, Youth Sports Business Report noted.

Players remain free to sign their own NIL deals, including with footwear companies, the league said in its launch release. The season runs April through August across 10 event weekends, ending with a national championship, and the league says games will be streamed or shown on national TV. No sponsor or media deal has been announced yet.

Stein’s pitch is blunt. “The top 150 basketball players under 18 in the country play on over 200 different teams in seven different leagues in the spring and summer season,” he told ESPN. “And it’s not fair they don’t get fair value for their NIL, and they don’t get professional coaching structure -- so this needs to exist.”

The Sneaker Question

That spring and summer window is exactly where the shoe companies live. The best prospects currently play on travel circuits run by Nike, adidas, Under Armour, New Balance and Puma, MaxPreps reported, and Nike’s EYBL has been the top stage for elite prospects since 2010, per Marca. James and Durant are two of Nike’s biggest signature athletes, which makes this a league co-backed by Nike stars that competes for the same players as Nike’s own circuit.

“It’s great they want to pay the kids, but the question is always what the sneaker companies are going to do,” Sonny Vaccaro, the former sneaker promoter and longtime amateurism critic, told ESPN. Stein said he has had productive conversations with those companies and plans to work with them.

History is not on the league’s side. ESPN noted that Overtime Elite first required players to give up their high school and college eligibility before changing those rules, and the NBA’s Jr. NBA league landed a TV deal but aired for only two years.

Paying Kids Or Owning Them?

Here is the part worth arguing about. For decades, grown men made money off grassroots basketball while the teenagers on the court got shoes, travel, and exposure. Paying those players is overdue. Stein even framed it as financial education, telling SBJ athletes should learn to manage a smaller amount of money young than to meet it for the first time in a multimillion-dollar college deal. Rose told ESPN he is meeting with Northern Trust to build a financial literacy program for his Chicago team.

But equity changes the relationship. A 14-year-old who takes his pay in league shares is no longer just a player. He becomes an investor in the same company that sets his schedule, sells his games to TV and counts on his name to attract sponsors. If the league succeeds, those shares could be worth far more than cash. If it ends up like the Jr. NBA, they may be worth very little. Either way, a teenager and his parents are being asked to make a venture-capital bet.

Tom Farrey of the Aspen Institute told ESPN that today’s youth system is “commercializing and monetizing them at every stage without any adherence to athletic or child development principles.” The Futures League says it is the fix for that. It is also, by design, a business that sells teams for $6 million and needs those kids to be the product. Both things can be true, and the details of the first contracts will show which one matters more.

The league says it has already signed prospects in all four classes and will name its first players in the coming weeks.