Basketball is widely popular in the U.S. In almost any neighborhood you could find a basketball hoop above someones garage or in their driveway. There are courts everyehere in parks, gyms, schools, recreation centers etc.. I know basketball is pretty big in the Baltic countries but what about the rest of Europe? Would it be odd to see a kid walking down the street dribbling a basketball? Where does basketball fit in to European sports culture, if at all?
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It’s fairly popular in Finland, you wouldn’t be surprised to see somebody walking with a basketball. But not super popular.
My friends and I used to frequent this one outdoor court in the summertime in our city, and when the wether was good you could bet on being able to get at least a 4-on-4 game going on with random guys. There would always be some people there.
There was a jump in popularity like 3 or 4 years ago. Call that the Markkanen effect or whatever. In the mid 2010s that court was frequented by more or less just people you knew, but then in the late 2010s you’d start to see more and more new faces. And you’d see a lot more kids or younger people.
Not very popular, maybe somewhere between top 5-10 in team sports.
Lithuania is probably the only European country where it is the most popular sport. Serbia and Latvia are close second.
cities often got their teams, neighborhood’s got courts (though i hardly ever seen anyone playing on them) and it’s one of the games you play at school (but not very popular; usually falls behind football, vollayball, handball and floorball). Some time ago (~20 years ago) it used to be among one of the bigger sports, not so much today.
Here’s few main tabs on couple sport portals to give some perspective what is popular:
– [onet.pl](https://sport.onet.pl/): football / ski jumps / tenis / volleyball / handball / F1 / boxing / MMA / esports
– [sport.pl](https://www.sport.pl/sport-hp/0,0.html): football / national teams / volleyball / tenis / basketball / motor sports / winter sports / esport
– [sport WP](https://sportowefakty.wp.pl/): football / speedway / volleyball / martial arts / handball / basketball / tenis / motor sports / winter sports / athletics / esports / futsal
– [interia](https://sport.interia.pl/): football / winter sports / tenis / martial arts / volleyball / speedway / F1 / basketball / mountain sports
– [Polsat sport](https://www.polsatsport.pl/): Beijing 22 / 2022 FIFA World Cup / football / volleyball / boxing / MMA / tenis / winter sports / basketball
Estonia does not really do high-level basketball, but it is a very popular and common sport played at schools and as a hobby. You see hoops in gyms, schools, in some neighbourhoods between apartment buildings, in private houses people with kids often have one in their back yard etc.
Not really. It’s fun enough to play in PE, and we do have a pretty common school ground game called Tyr (bull) derived from it. But people mostly join football (soccer for any American plebs :P) or handball clubs here, and you don’t see much basketball on the media side either. We do occasionally see a story, if a Dane does something notable, and I’m sure you can find it on some dedicated sports channel, but it is nowhere nearly as prevelant as football and handball (which is usually available on public service channels)
It’s pretty popular in the Balkans, especially in Serbia and Greece.
In Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is 2nd most popular team sport to play.
All outside sport playgrounds have a hoop to play.
It’s rare in general but in some spots it’s surprisingly more popular for some reason. Not really main stream any where tho.
It’s pretty much just a “PE” sport that most of us have had to try in school. There are hoops available in most schools and a lot of public areas, and some people might have a hoop over their garage, but it’s generally just seen as a pastime for kids here. As a professional sport it’s nowhere to be seen outside of niche communities. Mainstream media never covers any games or players here either, so that’s all completely unknown for most Norwegian.
There are hoops for streetball in some neighbourhoods, and it is kinda popular to play in PE or as a hobby. There is a professional league with 10 teams, but it’s not a “Breitensport”, a sport played and followed by a large part of the population. It’s hardly ever broadcasted on the national tv stations.
Of the 10 top-league teams, 6 are from French-speaking parts (and not even important cities), two from the Italian one and two from the German-speaking part. So I guess it’s more popular in western Switzerland. Maybe people are taller there.
I’d say it’s the most popular sport behind football, I think it’s decreased a bit in the past few years as some of the most famous Spanish players retire but the NBA is by far the most popular US league here, Liga ACB is one of the best leagues in the world too and international tournaments (the Olympics or the FIBA World Cup) are often really popular
as for playing it we also have courts everywhere, it’s really common for parks or schools to have at least a football field and one or two basketball courts, I don’t think it’s as widespread as football (as in, it’s less common for children to be enrolled in a basketball team formally when compared to football) but it’s still one of the most popular sports that you’d play for fun
It’s the fourth largest ballsport in the country After football, Handball and Volleyball
1. Football
2. Icehockey
3. Handball
4. Floorball
5. Various skiing sports
Professional basketball is pretty niche but kids do play it. Every school gym has hoops and in my middle and high school we had basketball as an extracurricular activity.
Hoops in driveways are not a common sight but in the city of Vienna there are numerous soccer cages (metal cages on squares for kids to play soccer in) and those will often have hoops as well. It’s not totally uncommon to see a kid walking around with a baskatball.
Since we have an Austrian in the NBA (Jakob Poeltl) our public broadcaster and some newspapers report on how he’s doing and a little bit of other NBA news (not in great detail). NBA games are not televised because they’d be on in the middle of the night here and not enough people would watch.
In Austria not very popular. On TV, it’s just a niche sport. But of course it is still part of every physical education class in schools. I think it was even more popular when kids played outside more often. You hardly see basketball hoops on house walls anymore. I had my own basketball hoop as a kid in the early 2000s. It wasn’t that unusual back then.
It’s not even in the top 10. We played it in PE sometimes, but that’s about it.
very niche sport, I think in last popularity survey it was somewhere around 15th place. There are hoops here and there but you will hardly see people using them.
There is nice modern field with lights for evenings and nights in at almost Prague downtown, open for public with no entry fees or whatever but if you see people playing basketbal there it is usually foreigners living here. Most of the time people use it for some other sports.
Well known for sure, the rules kind of explain themselves. Throw ball in hoop. It is easy to have a basketball court set out in school gyms and leisure centres, they often have them sharing a 5-a-side football court. We played it in school but I don’t see much interest in it outside that unless people had a real talent for it. Merch is quite popular but that is more for fashion (same with all the American sports). The odd player may be well known as a celebrity. It has interest above the level baseball but that gets muddled as we have rounders.
Pretty popular, it must be the second or third most played sport together with volleyball.
It was bigger when I was a kid tho, our national team was good and we had some strong teams who would do well on European championship, while nowadays we kinda suck.
Most medium towns have 1 or 2 courts and you see basketball hoops around, but it would be odd to see a kid dribbling a ball in the street
(Italy)
It used to be more popular but kind of got smaller, right now football is first, rugby is big even more in the south west, handball used to be a bit lower but with the popularity of our national team it got a lot more fans, the national team of Basketball is only featured for the euro and the olympics tbh.
First time I came across it was in high school, since I was too lazy to run around and play football, basketball was perfect choice(I prefer using hands during sport). I used to play with group of my school mates who were really into hip-hop and everything around it.