Why Taking College Basketball to Dubai Is a Mistake for the Sport

On Thursday, college basketball insider extraordinaire Jon Rothstein reported the news just about nobody wanted to hear:

“Sources: The Royal Palm Invitational -- a new early season tournament in college basketball -- will debut in Dubai in November of 2026. Multiple power conference teams are expected to be involved.”

It’s as if the shadowy figures who finance these things followed fans’ beleaguered discourse all Thanksgiving week about the lack of juice at the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas, and then asked themselves, “What if we did a Players Era in the Las Vegas of the Middle East?”

Reasons abound for not staging a college basketball event in a desert metropolis a 13-hour flight away from New York. The one reason you’d favor such a thing is simple. As the saying goes, “The answer is money. What was your question?”

But too many neutral-site games and tournaments pull the sport away from the campuses and fans they’re supposed to represent.

Think about this: Say Dubai gets eight teams to come next year. They’re going to need ample time on either end of the journey to recover, i.e., not play games at home. The Players Era has vowed to balloon to 32 teams and spread their games across three weeks. Supposedly, the teams to win their groups in each of the first two weeks would go back to Vegas for actual Feast Week. There’s more scheduling nightmares -- gotta keep this week blocked off, just in case!

Every single season, you hear gripes about the lack of high-powered matchups early on, when high-majors usually choose to schedule East Nowhere Tech before going to Vegas or the Bahamas. But gander at the schedule from this week alone...

• No. 15 Florida at No. 4 Duke
  No. 5 UConn at No. 21 Kansas
  No. 16 North Carolina at No. 18 Kentucky
  No. 10 Iowa State at No. 1 Purdue
  No. 4 Duke at No. 7 Michigan State
  No. 20 Auburn at No. 2 Arizona
  Georgetown at No. 16 North Carolina

Some of these were arranged as part of the ACC/SEC Challenge, others by the coaches and schools themselves. All of the above examples were played, or will be played, at campus sites.

What the larger discussion about Vegas and Dubai has missed is that a ballroom in the Bahamas isn’t a much better venue to play this sport. (All due respect to the Battle 4 Atlantis, but it was only launched in 2011 and has a fraction of the history of something like the Maui Invitational.) It’s best suited for venues packed with out-of-their-mind students like Cameron Indoor and Allen Fieldhouse, because that’s what’ll get the next generations of fans invested long-term.

If you’re growing up now and you’re consuming sports on TikTok, watching Nate Ament run the floor in a mostly empty Vegas venue, are you going to become a long-term fan? Or to even put it more cynically, a long-term consumer?

When La Liga reached an agreement to bring one (1) regular-season match between Barcelona and Villarreal to Miami, the reason was, again, money. And the players, coaches and supporters created such an uproar over moving a Spanish game out of Spain that La Liga actually caved.

Unfortunately, a similar change of heart isn’t coming to America. The NCAA put forth the feeblest response to the potential NIL rule-skirting the Players Era initially presented in its debut in 2024. Now Players Era-style mega-tournaments are taking over and going global, following the money.

Enjoy Duke and Michigan State on Saturday afternoon if you can. If they play again in 2026, it’s more likely to be for a crowd of 250 Emiratis, not a return game in Durham.