Newcastle Eagles

Basketball in Newcastle upon Tyne did not start with a purpose-built arena or a wealthy backer; it started in 1976 as EPAB Sunderland, a club that changed its name and its home more than once before Sir John Hall's Newcastle Sporting Group bought it, renamed it the Newcastle Comets in 1995, and turned it into the Newcastle Eagles a year later. For years the club played without a home built for it; that changed in January 2019, when the Eagles moved into what is now the Vertu Motors Arena, a 2,800-seat venue.

The rivalry with the Caledonia Gladiators carries the weight of a cross-border fixture, while the contest with the Leicester Riders has sharpened more recently into one of the league's fiercer meetings. Domestic success has been matched, at times, in Europe: in 2025 the Eagles reached the final of the European North Basketball League, finishing runners-up to CSO Voluntari, the same year they lifted the inaugural Super League Basketball Trophy. A women's team has represented the club since 2018, formed after Team Northumbria folded, and an academy pipeline has fed the senior side with players who came through the club's own ranks rather than arriving from elsewhere.

No name is tied to the Eagles more than Darius Defoe's. Across 22 seasons at the club he won 28 British titles, a haul no other player in the country's basketball history has matched, a record built not in one golden run but match by match, season after season, for a club that kept finding ways to win them.