(FORTUNE Magazine) – Forget about going to Disneyland. Now that the NBA season is over, basketball's big stars are headed for more exotic locales: Shaquille O'Neal to South Korea, Karl Malone to Hong Kong, Allen Iverson to Chile, and all the Chicago Bulls--including chief luminary Michael Jordan--to France.

Deployed by global sponsors Coca-Cola, Reebok, and McDonald's, these well-paid traveling salesmen will hawk soda, sneakers, burgers, and basketball to legions of mostly young fans. That they are recognized from Santiago to Seoul says a lot about the soaring worldwide appeal of hoops--and about the marketing juggernaut known as the NBA. After watching their favorite stars swoop in and slam-dunk on their local TV stations, fans of the league now cheer the mate in Latin America, the trofsla in Iceland, and the smash in France. Care to guess the most popular basketball team in China? Why, it's the "Red Oxen" from Chicago, of course.

Indeed, the NBA of the 1990s has emerged as the first truly global sports league. Games are televised everywhere, global sponsors have signed up, and the league with its partners sold nearly $500 million of NBA-licensed basketballs, backboards, T-shirts, and caps outside the U.S. last year. Think of the league as a global entertainment company, the sports version of Disney or MTV, and you'll realize that NBA Commissioner David Stern has spent the past decade or so developing a powerful worldwide brand. "David Stern is certainly the best brand manager in sports--and he's one of the best brand managers in any business today," says David Greene, senior vice president for worldwide marketing at McDonald's.

Like the NBA, every major U.S. sports league has tried to go global--with decidedly mixed results. The NFL launched the European-based World League in 1991 with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., after a burst of interest in American football in places like Britain. (William "The Refrigerator" Perry of the Chicago Bears was briefly a sensation with the Brits.) But the World League has become a financial drain, losing as much as $100 million since its inception, suspending play for a couple of years, and struggling to find TV audiences and sponsors. If anything, the NFL's popularity has waned in Europe and Japan.

Major league Baseball, meanwhile, has so many domestic woes--above all, the absence of a strong commissioner--that club owners have been unable to focus on the global game. Baseball's overseas expansion plans were also slowed for a time by a misplaced emphasis on Europe.

Both the NFL and Major League Baseball are now refocusing. Don Garber, the new managing director of NFL International, says the World League, along with grassroots programs to teach kids about football, needs time to build a fan base. "Much of our success in the 1980s was driven by the fashion and fad of the game, as Europe was attaching itself to all things American," Garber says. "Now our challenge is to move away from people wanting to watch our games or wear our merchandise because they thought it was cool, and get them to be fans because they love the game."

As for baseball, Tim Brosnan, who runs MLB International, now wants to exploit the game's popularity in Asia and Latin America by showcasing foreign-born players like Dodger pitchers Hideo Nomo of Japan and Chan Ho Park of Korea. "It's all about hero worship," he says. Shoe companies like Reebok, which took heavy hitters Frank Thomas and Cecil Fielder to Asia last winter, are lending a hand. "If you go into Korea, Japan, and some parts of Latin America, the fan base is huge and some of the fans are fanatical," says Bill Betancourt, Reebok's international marketing director. Indeed, U.S. baseball gets even higher TV ratings than the NBA in Japan.

Every league is seeking growth--an imperative now that corporations are buying up sports teams and feeling pressures to deliver shareholder returns. For the NBA, which sells out most games and has seen its domestic licensing revenues flatten recently, that means building an export business. Says Stern: "There are just so many seats in an arena and so many hours of television programming, period. The domestic business is becoming mature. That's why we're moving internationally."

That makes sense. It just doesn't make much money--not yet, anyway. NBA executives won't talk specifics about the bottom line, but insiders estimate that the league generates nearly $30 million in TV rights fees, another $25 million from its share of licensing sales, and $6 million more from global advertising and sponsorships. That's a pittance compared with the league's $1.5 billion in overall revenues. What's more, to bring in those dollars from abroad the league has constructed an expensive infrastructure, from its first-class TV production facility in Secaucus, N.J., to an international staff of 105 people. That's twice as many people as ran the entire league back in the early 1980s.

Still, the NBA's global popularity is undeniable--partly because the league enjoys huge natural advantages over its rivals. It's selling a sport, basketball, that's played nearly everywhere and easily understood. (Try explaining the nickel defense to a Swede.) Pro and amateur leagues have been thriving for years in Europe and Asia, and basketball has been an Olympic sport since 1936. The U.S. "Dream Team" in 1992 was a worldwide sensation, sparking even greater interest in pro basketball in the U.S.

By then the groundwork had been laid for the NBA's global growth. Two men deserve much of the credit: Stern and Michael Jordan, with a big assist from Nike. Like the NBA, Nike had set out to conquer the world in the 1980s, using TV as a primary weapon; its commercials turned Jordan into a worldwide celebrity, known not just for his gravity-defying skills but also for his winning personality and competitive zeal. "Jordan is on the scale of a Pele," says Georges Eddy, the voice of NBA basketball on Canal Plus, a French TV network. "To me, there was Pele, there was Jordan, and that's it."

In China, which has its own professional basketball leagues, boys on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai wear Bulls gear because they want to be like Mike. "People want to see the best," says Weiping Zhang, a former player for the Chinese Olympic team who now broadcasts NBA games on China Central TV. "Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley--everybody knows them, and also Rodman." A survey of 28,000 teenagers in 45 countries by Darcy Masius Benton & Bowles, the global advertising agency, found that Jordan was the world's favorite athlete by far, finishing well ahead of tennis player Andre Agassi, Olympic track star Carl Lewis, and soccer great Diego Maradona.

Stern's contributions have been no less vital. He became commissioner in 1984, the year Jordan entered the league, and he immediately saw signs that the game could be exported. An Italian TV executive visited him, seeking more games to telecast. The Chinese national team toured the United States. And McDonald's agreed to sponsor a tournament featuring top professional teams from around the world, including the reigning NBA champ. Broad historical forces were coming into play too: the collapse of communism and growth of market economies, the globalization of American consumer companies, and a worldwide television revolution that created new cable and satellite channels hungry for content. The latest development: the growth of the global Internet, where the NBA's official site, NBA.com, offers programming in Spanish, French, and Italian--and draws 35% of its traffic from outside the U.S.

To exploit the new territories, Stern and the NBA rolled out a marketing machine that's been fine-tuned for a decade in the U.S. Television programming leads the way--not just broadcasts of games but an array of NBA-produced programs, mostly targeted at kids and teenagers, that promote the league and its players. Two weekly programs, a highlights show called NBA Action and a teen show called NBA Jam that features music, fashion, and player profiles, are produced solely for the international marketplace.

Even in countries where the league does no other business, the NBA sells TV rights to local broadcasters. Revenues are often tiny--$10,350 for the season from Mongolia, $22,500 from Namibia, $52,375 from Kuwait--but Stern still figures he's getting a good deal because today's TV games create the fan base of tomorrow. "That's the beauty of television," Stern says. "Other brands have to buy their way on through advertising. Our core product is a two-hour commercial that someone pays us to run." In a few countries, including Spain, France, Mexico, and Japan, the NBA collects $1 million or more in rights fees from broadcast, cable, or satellite networks.

If history is any guide, those numbers should climb substantially as media competition intensifies. Look what's happened to cable television in the U.S. since 1979, when the NBA first sold its cable rights for $400,000 a year. The league now gets $90 million, and will command far more when the deal is renegotiated next year. Globally, there's no reason why the TV market can't grow that big or bigger.

Once television has pried open a market, the NBA and its partners move in with an array of live events, attractions, and grassroots activities. The Bulls, for instance, will go to Paris in October to play teams from Spain, Greece, Argentina, Italy, and France in this year's McDonald's Championship, which will be telecast worldwide--and promoted in 500 McDonald's restaurants in France. McDonald's and the NBA also sponsor a program called 2Ball that teaches basic basketball skills to thousands of kids outside the U.S. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, targets basketball-crazed teenagers by putting NBA and team logos on Sprite soft drink cans sold in 30 countries. "We're using the NBA and their players to help sell Sprite, but at the same time it does a lot of good for the NBA," says Scott McCume, director of worldwide sports for Coca-Cola.

This global hypefest has drawn criticism from those who say that the world's kids don't need more fast food, sugared drinks, and sports from America. Stern offers no apologies, saying he has to compete for the entertainment dollar with everyone from the local soccer club to Disney. "We have no defense when our critics say we're marketing a lot," he says. Besides, the promotional onslaught works. Basketball ranked as the most popular sport among teens, ahead even of soccer, in the DMB&B global survey. (U.S. football finished ninth, baseball tenth.) More important, international sales of NBA-licensed merchandise climbed by 22% last year.

One more factor has driven the NBA's global growth, as a glance at almost any team roster reveals: the presence of foreign-born players in the league. The Bulls, while led by Jordan and Scottie Pippen, rely heavily on Toni Kukoc, the Croatian forward and former European player of the year, and Luc Longley, their center from Melbourne, Australia. Such players attract intensive media coverage back home, as do Georghe Muresan in Romania, Arvydas Sabonis in Lithuania, and Detlef Shrempf in Germany.

Imagine, then, the impact in China if a promising 18-year-old, 7-foot-1 center named Wong Zhizhi, who played for that country's 1996 Olympic team, develops into an NBA star. Basketball's popularity is already exploding in China, one of the very few nations where the NBA gives away its TV programming because Stern is determined to make inroads there. Nearly all of China's 250 million TV households get the NBA Action highlights show and a game of the week on Saturday mornings; this year China Central TV broadcast the NBA All-Star game live for the first time. Winning the loyalty of two billion Chinese won't be a kou qui--a slam-dunk--but Stern is, well, bullish. "The upside is tremendous," he says. Can ping-pong survive an NBA invasion? Stay tuned.