When Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund launched LIV a little more than three years ago, professional golf was ripe for disruption. International players dominated the sport while many of the PGA Tour’s top pros, like Phil Mickelson, griped about various systemic issues. In the intervening years, LIV has hardly been a roaring success—it suffered reputational setbacks, was criticized as a sportswashing apparatus of the Saudi government, and its losses have to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nevertheless, LIV has been formidable enough that PIF has convinced the PGA Tour to sell it a minority stake, pending regulatory approval. This dynamic has led to conjecture about the next sport that could see a LIV-style competitor. Many sports media executives and investors suspected that tennis was a natural possibility, given the international diversity among its top players. By a similar logic, others have pointed to professional basketball, especially considering that so many of the sport’s top young stars hail from outside America—Victor Wembanyama, 21, is from France; Luka Dončić, still only 25, is from Slovenia; perennial M.V.P. Nikola Jokić, 29, is from Serbia; and fellow former world champ and M.V.P. Giannis Antetokounmpo, 30, is from Greece. Is there a world, fanciful investors have wondered, where you could convince Wemby to move to his native France for more than the $14 million per year he currently makes on a rookie contract in Texas? Proponents of the latter theory got a boost last night when Bloomberg reported that LeBron James’s business partner, Maverick Carter, was advising a group of investors hoping to raise $5 billion to form an international basketball league. The would-be league’s backers, according to Bloomberg, include Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, former Facebook executive Grady Burnett, and investment firm SC Holdings (and its co-founders, Jason Stein and Daniel Haimovic). UBS and Evercore have reportedly been hired to find the money. This is an unusual crew of individuals and investors for this sort of project, which explains why Carter appears as the face of the deal. The story, of course, raised all sorts of fascinating questions. Would LeBron be involved? (No, according to multiple knowledgeable sources.) And would this entity be more akin to LIV or, well, UFL? Would this newfangled league really be able to disrupt an organization that just signed an 11-year, $76 billion media deal and already has a large and growing international audience? Sources close to the group balked when I floated the LIV comparison. They also pushed back on any comparison to the UFL, the spring football league that acts as a feeder to the NFL. Instead, they described a slightly more modest global basketball league that would mimic the Formula One schedule, with games played in eight cities. Six men’s teams and six women’s teams would play round-robin tournaments in each location, over two weeks, with a champion crowned at the end of each stop. In other words, the group is not looking to run a traditional basketball league, like the NBA or the EuroLeague, which many had assumed given the fundraising goal. Instead, they want to attract a global audience outside of North America, and the best way to do that, it would seem, would be to entice the biggest international stars to participate. Very basic details still need to be ironed out, including when the league plans to launch, and when it would schedule the games. Would it compete with the NBA from October through June, or play in the offseason? Indeed, it’s all so incredibly murky at the moment. All that’s clear is that its success—like that of any sports league—will come down to the media deals it’s able to sign. And we are living in an age when live sports content is not only supporting the linear bundle but also increasingly the engine of streaming growth. And you can laugh—as many do—but nontraditional sports (like bull riding or a YouTube star pummeling a former heavyweight champ or golf indoors) are increasingly successful in this environment. The other factor motivating leagues to work with the large-cap streamers is their global reach. Ever since David Stern’s earliest days, he knew that the NBA’s largest total addressable market existed overseas. But it’s a big world out there, and there may be room for a fringe competitor as well.