The Denver Nuggets basketball team last week published a video from a recent trip to Sombor, Serbia. Gathered beside a barn, people clapped to folk music as they greeted a tall man riding in on the back of a horse-drawn cart.

It was the quasi-official reception for Nuggets’ centre Nikola Joki?, who last week became the fourth foreign-born player to win the US National Basketball Association’s most valuable player award multiple times. This year, for the first time since the league has announced MVP finalists, all three contenders were born outside the US. The award has gone to an international player for each of the past four years.

The success of international basketball players is the result of a multi-decade effort by the NBA and other American professional sports leagues to export their products and build their fan bases as effectively as global football.