Manchester Giants

The National Basketball Performance Centre sits within Belle Vue Sports Village and holds 2,000, a fraction of what the club once needed. That contrast matters: for six seasons in the 1990s the Giants played at the Manchester Evening News Arena, and in 1995 drew 14,251 for a single game, a British attendance record that no domestic club fixture has matched since.

The original franchise dates to 1973 and spent the next three decades changing shape as often as name. A merger with Manchester United's basketball section in 1986–87 led to a rebrand as the Manchester Eagles in 1988; a second merger, with the Stockport Giants in 1989–90, produced the short-lived Olympic City Giants. Purchase by the American medical devices firm Cook Group in 1993 steadied the club and funded its best years. Under Nick Nurse, the Giants beat Derby Jets to win the BBL Trophy in 1999 and Birmingham Bullets to take the BBL Championship in 2000. Cook Group's withdrawal, against the arena's running costs, ended the franchise in 2001.

A decade passed before Graham Herstell and Jeff Jones put together a consortium and re-entered the British Basketball League for the 2012–13 season. This second Giants never matched the 1999–2000 haul, though it reached BBL Cup and Trophy finals in 2022. That run closed in August 2024, when the Sherwood Family Investment Office bought the franchise and dropped the Giants name entirely, entering the new Super League Basketball as Manchester Basketball.

Through both eras the fixture against Cheshire Phoenix carried the weight of a local rivalry, played as the North West Derby. And of the players who wore purple, white and green, one name still draws a second look on old team sheets: Craig Robinson, brother of Barack Obama.