Cover Supported by titans like Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai and basketball legend Yao Ming, the league aims to elevate campus sports into a major commercial force. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
Supported by titans like Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai and basketball legend Yao Ming, the league aims to elevate campus sports into a major commercial force. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
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With backing from NBA titans and basketball royalty, the founder of the Asian University Basketball League is turning regional campus rivalries into a continent-wide obsession
There is a version of Asian sport that doesn’t yet exist, and Jay Li has spent the last two years trying to build it.
The Asian University Basketball League (AUBL) is not a modest project. It is backed by Joe Tsai, the Alibaba co-founder who owns the Brooklyn Nets; Chinese basketball legend Yao Ming; Marc Lasry, the former Milwaukee Bucks co-owner; and David Blitzer, co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers. In April, the league closed a Series A round led by Tsai’s family office, Blue Pool Capital. The pitch is enormous, yet significant in its simplicity: build Asia’s version of March Madness, the tribal, campus-first basketball culture America never had to manufacture because it simply grew that way.
Above Returning to Hangzhou for its second tournament, the league leverages a passionate local fanbase that previously drew over 29,000 stadium spectators and 65 million livestream viewers.
This month brings the project’s second real test. AUBL returns to Hangzhou August 2–9, with 12 university teams from Greater China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines and Australia. It follows a debut tournament in the city last August that drew more than 29,000 live fans and over 65 million livestream views, numbers that turned heads in a region where college sport has never had a stage of its own.
The idea did not arrive as a single flash of inspiration; it came, Li says, out of years of conversation with people who already believed college basketball had a role to play in Asia. “In Asia, education is highly valued, but the collegiate sports space is still fragmented,” he says. “There are strong programmes in different markets, but no real pan-regional platform bringing them together. That felt like a clear gap—and college seemed like the missing link.”
The insider’s outsider view
Above Tapping into fierce university pride and deep-seated student rivalries across Asia, the league is cultivating a passionate, continent-wide basketball culture. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
Tapping into fierce university pride and deep-seated student rivalries across Asia, the league is cultivating a passionate, continent-wide basketball culture. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
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Li’s route to founding AUBL is unusual. He started his career in global media and partnerships, at NBA headquarters in New York, before moving to the Chinese Basketball Association as special assistant to president Yao Ming, and later heading its strategic development division.
Few people building a sports property in Asia have seen both establishments from the inside. “The NBA showed me the power of commercialisation, professionalism and scale,” Li says. “The CBA taught me how important localisation is, and how strategies have to be adapted to fit each market, culture and audience.” Just as valuable, he adds, were the relationships with decision-makers who would later become AUBL’s earliest believers.
His perspective proved persuasive. When Li approached Tsai, Lasry, Blitzer and Yao, the response was fast—a seed round from Blue Pool Capital in 2025, followed less than a year later by a Series A with all four names attached, plus Hong Kong’s Nan Fung Group and venture firm HSG. “The pitch was simple,” Li says. “We are building Asia’s answer to March Madness, the Ivy League and the NCAA.” What made that worth investing in, he insists, was the timing and a belief that “AUBL could become a foundational platform for the next generation of players, fans and partners.”
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Building tribalism from nothing
Above The tournament in Hangzhou brings together elite university teams from Greater China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines and Australia. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
The tournament in Hangzhou brings together elite university teams from Greater China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines and Australia. (Photo: courtesy of Asian University Basketball League)
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The hardest part of AUBL’s ambitious plans isn’t logistics or funding, it’s culture. March Madness works in America because it is inherited: decades of alumni identity and campus rivalry nobody had to invent. Conventional wisdom says Asia has none of that scaffolding.
But Li disagrees, saying he has seen the evidence firsthand. “I attended Korea University vs Yonsei last year,” he says, referring to a match between two long-time Seoul-based universities with a decades-long sporting rivalry. “The atmosphere was incredible—the kind of energy you would expect from a major rivalry like UNC vs Duke. In China, Peking University vs Tsinghua also carries that same pride, like Harvard vs Yale.” AUBL’s job, as he sees it, is as much about recognising rivalries that already exist as manufacturing new cross-border ones; he points to last year’s Tsinghua-NCCU final as the template. But he is equally clear the league can’t simply copy the American model: Asia’s youth culture, he notes, is shaped as much by K-pop, anime and fashion as it is by sport.
Hangzhou’s return as host was carefully considered. ”The local pro team made the last two CBA finals, and we experienced the passion firsthand at AUBL 2025,” Li explains. There’s a scheduling logic too—"a natural gap in the global sports calendar in early August after the World Cup period”—and a commercial one, with more than 25 broadcast partners now carrying the tournament internationally.
What comes next
The August tournament is only the first phase. A 16-team home-and-away season follows, running from late November to April 2027—a format the league hopes will mirror the NCAA’s regular season, culminating in its own version of a Final Four.
Success in five years, Li says, means AUBL becoming “a meaningful and profitable sports property with a fast-growing fanbase”, where teams carry local identity but pull supporters from well beyond their home markets. “We want people to talk about AUBL the way they talk about the NCAA in the US.” The ultimate marker of success would be personal as much as commercial: “We would love to see an AUBL athlete make it to the NBA.”
AUBL is headquartered in Hong Kong because, Li says, “Hong Kong means a lot to me personally. It is a natural connector between markets, and a great place to build something with regional ambition.” The Asian University Basketball Challenge the 2024 test event that preceded AUBL itself, started here. “This is where the journey began, and I feel a strong responsibility to give back to the basketball community.”
Whether it works won’t be decided in Hangzhou this August but over the seasons that follow, when teenagers in Manila or Hong Kong, Seoul or Beijing end up caring, unprompted, whether their university wins.
Pete Laverick is a sports and lifestyle journalist for Tatler Hong Kong. A former professional rugby player, he brings an athlete’s perspective to his coverage of the city’s sports and fitness scene. A committed fitness enthusiast, Pete is always testing something new—from Hyrox to marathons and triathlons—writing with the first-hand insight of someone who has lived at the top level of sport. He also has a standing invitation from Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeannie Buss to watch the Lakers at the Crypto.com Arena if he makes it to California.
