At Taronga Zoo yesterday, against the backdrop of Sydney Harbour and the occasional squawk from a cockatoo, ESPN staged one of its most ambitious upfronts yet. It was part birthday party, marking 30 years of ESPN in Australia, and part declaration of intent. The headline: a blockbuster 11-year deal with the NBA and WNBA, cementing ESPN’s role as the undisputed Home for Hoops in the region.
Hosts Kane Pitman and Skubie Mageza, SportsCenter anchors who have become all too familiar faces to local fans, worked the crowd with personal stories and humour. But the substance was that ESPN is betting its next decade of growth in Australia on basketball.
ESPN’s Skubie Mageza
The Home Of Hoops
“This year, you’ll see up to 270 NBA games on ESPN. That’s almost four times more than on any other platform,” announced Nik Weber, commercial director, Disney Advertising. “You also have every single game of the NBA Finals exclusively on the networks, and more WNBA games than ever before.”
Die-hard fans will also have access to an unprecedented 800 NCAA games a season.
For Australian fans, that scale is unprecedented. When ESPN launched locally in 1995, NBA highlights were a novelty tucked between NFL replays. Now, basketball has become central to the network’s pitch, reflecting how the sport itself has taken root in Australian culture.
From Luc Longley’s Chicago Bulls titles in the 90s, to Andrew Bogut’s NBA championship, to today’s wave of talent like Josh Giddey and Dyson Daniels, the NBA is no longer “over there.” Australians have firmly been welcomed onto the court, and ESPN is seizing that momentum.
While the NBA deal was the showstopper, ESPN also doubled down on its local basketball footprint. Multi-year rights agreements with the NBL and WNBL mean that Australian audiences won’t just be given first-class access to the US game, but they will also have the chance to follow homegrown talent too. These leagues are two of the fastest-growing properties in Australian sport, buoyed by private investment, surging attendances, and rising youth participation.
Further solidifying the network’s commitment to basketball is the renewal of the deal between FIBA and ESPN for a further four-year period, with ESPN expanding its market coverage and reach by becoming the exclusive broadcast partner in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, building on its existing presence in Australia. This includes live coverage of every game from the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026 and the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2027. Fans will now be able to stream FIBA games live on Disney+ via the ESPN tile, making it easier than ever before to access FIBA action.
Meanwhile, Kylie Watson-Wheeler, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of The Walt Disney Company Australia and New Zealand and Head of ESPN Asia-Pacific, said: “We’re excited to continue our programming relationship with FIBA. This deal reinforces ESPN as ‘Home for Hoops’ and adds to our strong lineup of NBA, WNBA, NBL, WNBL and NCAA programming for Australian and New Zealand audiences.
“There’s some great international basketball ahead with the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026 and FIBA Basketball World Cup 2027 secured, so hoops fans can follow all the action on our ESPN network, including ESPN on Disney+, as the Australian Opals and Australian Boomers take on the world.”
Beyond the hoop headlines, ESPN remains dedicated to the slate that has made it a must-watch for sports fans for the past 30 years. The 2025 slate spans every primetime NFL matchup, Super Bowl 60 live from San Francisco, the entirety of the NHL season, and select MLB games, to name a few.
Since the announcement of its partnership with Disney+ back in March, ESPN claims it has multiplied its reach through the platform.
Sally O’Donoghue, VP & GM Disney+ ANZ, said: “Disney+ is delivering a new and incremental audience for live sport. This is not the same audience that are engaging with ESPN on other platforms. Our NBA Finals coverage was up 30% on last year. We are unlocking new fans, and they are deeply engaged, watching multiple leagues and bridging the seasons”.
Women’s Sport Front and Centre
If the NBA deal was the headline, the expansion of women’s sport was the heartbeat of ESPN’s upfronts.
The broadcaster is putting the WNBA and WNBL side by side with their men’s counterparts as core properties. Multi-year deals with both leagues mean Australian fans can follow the Opals stars on home soil and in the U.S. on one platform.
The four-year FIBA extension locks in every game of the Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026, building on the record-breaking engagement from Sydney 2022. This time, coverage expands beyond Australia and New Zealand into the Pacific Islands, giving young women in emerging basketball nations a direct line to their heroes.
But basketball wasn’t the only women’s sport in the spotlight. ESPN also announced coverage of the UEFA Women’s Champions League, with every game live on Disney+. That means Australian fans can follow Sam Kerr, Ellie Carpenter and Steph Catley on Europe’s biggest stage, just a few years after the Matildas’ effect electrified the nation.
Together, the slate positions ESPN as a driver of women’s sport across codes. Where once female athletes were confined to highlight packages, they are now the focus of prime-time rights deals, integrated marketing campaigns, and new fandom pathways through Disney+.
Advertising: New Ways to Play
For media buyers, the most significant opportunity lies in how ESPN and Disney+ plan to monetise this expanded slate. Dynamic ad insertion will arrive as early as December, with Weber calling it “an absolute game breaker… delivering targeted messages to highly engaged sports fans at the exact moment of peak attention.”
George Henshaw, Addressable Advertising Lead, explained it as “1 billion ad impressions, all in live sport, all available to transact in real time.”
Other tools include:
Disney Select: audience targeting by demographics, fandom and even streaming behaviour.
Disney’s Clean Room: privacy-safe data collaboration launching next year.
Bridge ID: programmatic identity solution, integrating with The Trade Desk and Google.
Interactive ad formats: including shoppable ads, user-choice ads, and ads on pause.
While the exact details of the new advertising plays remain undisclosed and timelines uncertain, Elliot Morton, State Sales Manager, promised: “We’re giving brands more access than ever before, turning campaigns into full-blown partnerships that fans actually care about.”
Media Buyers
On-site, B&T spoke with a number of media buyers, many of whom had positive things to say about the event, from the richness of the content slate to the scenic beauty of the location. Some even remarked it was the “best venue yet”.
View from the lawn at ESPN Upfronts Cocktail Hour
What really landed was the basketball-heavy strategy. Yelia Schnelle, senior planning director at UM, said that “audiences really flock to the code”.
“They did a good job of outlining the code growth across the total sports audience, and really bringing the fandoms to play… it’ll be interesting as part of their growth strategy, to see how they tailor that to Australian audiences”.
For Matt Kitchener, chief commercial officer at Advertising Advantage, sports broadcasting offers a broad-reaching environment for brands across a range of different categories. “Sport reaches a lot of different segments, but also gives some niche targeting with certain expat audiences that are very important to some of our clients as well”.
Women’s sport was a non-negotiable for buyers who were thrilled with the broadcaster’s renewed commitment to female codes.
“Women’s sport, especially after the Matildas effect in Australia, is just growing at the moment. I think as a value proposition against this ever-changing sort of value-based climate for players,” said Scnelle. “If you’re not also investing in women’s sport, then are you really hitting the baseline in market, and what’s expected?”
Kitchener agreed. “Female sport growth has been enormous, and our clients have really ridden that wave. It has been such an amazing opportunity to engage with a broader audience via those codes, especially via ESPN. That’s been a big appeal for a lot of our clients”.
Matt Kitchener
The Disney+ integration was also a key point that grabbed the attention of buyers. Kitchener said: “It’s made ESPN more mainstream and more accessible for brands, really exposing it to that broader audience. Female sport growth has been enormous, and our clients have really ridden that wave”.
For Schnelle, the platform, with a “rich cult following in storytelling”, provides a great base. When asked if the addition makes ESPN a more appealing media partner, Schnelle responded with an adamant “abso-f*cking-lutely”.
The most significant point of contention came when talking about the new ad offerings. While all media buyers were excited about the premise, the lack of detailed information and timelines made it challenging to explore the potential it could offer their clients fully.
Kitchener was most excited about the prospect of Disney ID. “Being able to unlock that rich data that they probably have access to is going to help create a more targeted environment for our clients”.
Overall, by locking down the NBA and WNBA until the mid-2030s, investing in women’s and local basketball, and harnessing Disney+ scale and ad tech, ESPN is making huge moves across Australia. With more clarity over new ad offerings, buyers were optimistic that there is enormous potential for this platform to continue to grow into 2026 and beyond.
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