What’s at stake for LA28?

Plenty. The Olympic Games Los Angeles 2028 will be the third time 3×3 basketball has featured at the Olympics, though for this occasion the field has expanded from eight teams per gender at Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, to 12 in Los Angeles — meaning more nations than ever have a realistic path to the Olympic stage.

The USA are already qualified as hosts. The Netherlands’ women’s team and Spain’s men have also secured places in the Olympic Qualifying Tournament pathway after their performances at the Champions Cup in Bangkok earlier this year. But for the majority of the field in Warsaw, the road to LA28 runs right through this tournament, and here’s how.

FIBA (the International Basketball Federation) operates a dedicated 24-month Federation Ranking cycle running until December 2027, which will determine five of the 11 available qualifying spots per gender for LA28. Those five spots are not simply awarded to the five highest-ranked nations globally. Instead, they are distributed regionally — one each to the top-ranked federation in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, and two to Asia-Pacific, with at least one of those reserved for an Asian nation. 

That ranking is built from the points each player earns at every FIBA-endorsed event based on how far their team advances, whether they win games before the time limit, and their own personal performance stats. A nation’s Federation Ranking is then calculated by adding up the individual points of its top 25 ranked players. The World Cup sits at the very top of that competition network, meaning the points on offer in Warsaw are the most valuable of the entire season.

In short, the stronger a country’s player pool performs across the circuit, the higher it climbs and the closer it gets to LA28.