Government Petition

Done.

11,064 at the last count ... Govt should have responded after 10,000 ...but hav'nt 

If gets to 100,000 apparently it gets mentioned in Parliament ... we can only hope

£1M is what Sir Rodney Walker requested.
Having heard the grant that 5th tier football recently got for the government I'm thinking he should have asked for more.
Maybe he thought there'd be better chance of getting something if he went low... better to ask for £1M and get it, than ask for £5M and get nothing.

I can’t find any reference regarding what the BBL would do with the £1m, has it been publicised anywhere?

Is it to enable the games to be played behind closed doors - compensating the clubs for lack of income? Or to keep the clubs ticking over until the league can start with fans?

Sorry for the questions - appreciate the answers might not be in the public domain. Signed the petition anyway.

One issue the BBL may have to overcome if it is to obtain government funding is how many livelihoods are actually lost if the BBL doesn’t exist?

The majority of money paid to players will be to oversees players - cant see them being high on the list of the British govts priorities

How many FT staff are employed by the clubs? I get the impression they rely heavily on volunteers? Individual clubs will differ but there probably aren’t many people’s livelihoods at stake here.

The BBL is basically a private club with 11 members, cynically I can’t see the govt rushing to its aid. And the NBL with its university teams and generally less professional setups could face the same issue.

As a basketball fan hopefully I’m wrong but at some point the government is going to start prioritising the saving of those industries that have the biggest economic impact on the population. I struggle to see where basketball fits into this. Choices have to be made as their isn’t an endless supply of magical money trees.

It's 80-90 percent full-time, although there's an argument again government propping up untenable businesses. It's the two regional divisions that have no place being considered either elite or fully pro

Think it’s fair to say that eagles are most definitely an outlier in terms of its community outreach work - but didn’t you point out recently that the Arena and ECF are financially independent of (or at least not reliant on) the Eagles BBL team?

This brings me back to what the BBL would actually do with the money they’ve asked for? If it’s mainly to put on the games behind closed doors, employing a couple of dozen or so Americans and entertaining a few hundred fans a week on YouTube (very simplistic way of looking at it I know) then it’s probably not going to be seen as a great use of public money. Unfortunately football is always going to be treated preferentially as it is the National sport and is firmly planted in the public psyche. Basically it’s a vote winner. Even at Conference level.

If the cash is to ensure the work of the ECF and similar (does any other BBL teams community activities come close to this) continues then its a different argument. Don’t charitable works have other pots of monies available to them?

Thanks for taking the time to reply Dave

Sooner (rather than later) the crowds have to be let back in, in as safe a way as possible.

Daily Telegraph article

Professional basketball will resume in Britain this month after the sport’s leaders were given sufficient reassurances by Government that it would receive a coronavirus bail-out.
Telegraph Sport has been told ministers have made it clear to the game that they are looking to support it, four months after they rejected an application from the British Basketball League for a £1 million rescue loan amid fears clubs were on the brink of going bust.
An announcement that the BBL will resume behind closed doors on October 30 is planned on Friday on the basis of reassurances received this week from the Government.
Basketball last month submitted a whole-sport application for a bail-out worth up to £4m, the bulk based on losses BBL clubs expected to make if forced to play an entire season behind closed doors.
How much of that it could expect to receive was unclear on Thursday night, including what proportion of it would be in grants and in loans.
But, as with other sports bodies who have submitted emergency funding applications, any figure was expected to be limited to underwriting lost gate receipts.
As revealed by Telegraph Sport, football’s National League last month became the first sports body the Government agreed to bail out following the latter’s decision to scrap the planned October 1 return of crowds in the sector.
It did so in order to allow the competition to begin on Saturday and stop North and South division clubs withdrawing from the FA Cup.
The BBL saw its own need for such a pledge as almost as urgent given the concerns that some clubs were close to going under.
Telegraph Sport revealed in June that the Government had rejected an application by the BBL for a £1 million rescue loan, £15 million less than it handed rugby league to stop it collapsing.
The BBL had asked ministers to reconsider, stressing basketball’s popularity within the UK’s black and ethnic minority communities.
The league wrote to the Government in April asking for more than £2 million but revised that figure down after benefiting from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and other state aid.
The Government handed an emergency loan to rugby league in May after it emerged the sport was on the brink of collapse a year out from England hosting the World Cup.
The BBL and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport declined to comment.

It is great news about the bail out. I hope it is not just BBL but also at least the top level NBL too?

I agree with guyinternet that football will always be seen differently for the reasons he mentions. There is no real benefit anymore to the Premier League propping up the lower part of the pyramid. They are not obliged to. Just like Amazon are not obliged to help out every small retail business struggling at the moment either. The Premier League is a world of its own. It barely even relies on the lower leagues to develop talent for it anymore. They use their academy systems to hoover up every scrap of talent they can around the world like great big fishing trawlers!

I think one thing is clear is that elite sport without crowds is a different proposition and ultimately not quite as fun to watch on TV. There are examples of where in the arts audiences are being allowed in now in the sort of numbers that would massively help a lot of sports including basketball.

I think the Royal Albert Hall has an event coming up where the audience will be around 40ish% of normal. Even 33% at football stadiums would be a massive help and of course the same for other sports like ours too.

I imagine there will be an expectation that clubs will bring in aome PPV money, and some costs reduced as well. And they'll knock vat off

And i won't start spending the cash till it arrives

Now confirmed www.bbl.org.uk/new-start-date-for-2020-21-season-following-assurance-of-support-from-dcms/