Sportico - Brunson’s China Brand-Builder Paves a Silk Road for NBA Stars

Justin Birnbaum, June 26, 2026

East Goes Global has thrived on helping athletes, teams and leagues grow—and monetize—their overseas fanbases, and it doesn’t expect those opportunities to disappear anytime soon.

During the New York Knicks’ championship run in June, the franchise’s star point guard took a moment out from dismantling Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs to send well wishes to a specific group of his fans watching from far away. “To all the high school students taking the Gaokao, don’t be nervous,” Jalen Brunson said on social media, referencing the grueling, multi-day college entrance exam in China. “This may be a big test for you so far, but it will not be the biggest test of your life.”

Brunson, who played a pair of preseason games in Shanghai and Shenzhen with the Dallas Mavericks in 2018, certainly isn’t the first American-born NBA player to appeal to fans in the Far East. Knicks alumnus Stephon Marbury spent nine seasons playing in the Chinese Basketball Association and became so beloved that the city of Beijing dedicated a museum in his honor. Kobe Bryant’s annual summer tours made him a cultural icon across the Pacific, while Dwyane Wade, Jimmy Butler and Klay Thompson all signed sneaker deals with Chinese apparel companies. Stephen Curry has followed suit, joining Li-Ning earlier this month.

As the NBA’s largest market outside North America, players have long recognized the commercial opportunity that awaits them in China, especially for those with sneakers to sell. But entering the region is easier said than done, considering the country’s language barrier, cultural differences and the restriction and censorship of major Western platforms, like Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. The league’s relationship with China was also strained for several years after former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey posted a tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters in 2019.

That’s where international marketing company East Goes Global has thrived. The firm helps athletes, teams and leagues grow—and eventually cash in on—their overseas fanbases, with organizing tours and activations, facilitating sponsorships, local social media accounts and region-specific content. Thus far, East Goes Global’s focus has primarily been China, though it’s done work in other markets like Japan, South Korea and Latin America, and it doesn’t expect those types of opportunities to dissipate anytime soon.

“These leagues, these teams, these players, they’re not going to grow their next 10 million fans domestically,” Andrew Spalter, the company’s founder and CEO, said. “We’re pretty tapped out here.”

Spalter first came to that realization eight years ago. In 2018, while working in music management, he watched firsthand as popstar Jessie J appeared in a Chinese singing competition on TV, which she ended up winning. Across the four-and-a-half months she spent in Changsha, a central-south Chinese city similar in population to Manhattan, Spalter recalls, “No one was running her socials, doing brand deals, kind of connecting her with that space.”

So he started East Goes Global, which was relatively cheap to get up and running, with “just me and a laptop with the roof over my head,” he said. Spalter later raised a friends-and-family funding round of about $800,000 going into 2022 to give his closest supporters a stake in his success.

While it was entertainment-focused at first, the company progressively expanded into sports, with NBA players going out to China and soccer players venturing into other markets. But it wasn’t until the company started specializing in social media and brand development, particularly in the Far East, that it started to take off.

East Goes Global now has 38 employees, with many of its hires native to or fluent in the language of the markets the company is trying to penetrate. (Neither Spalter nor his brother, Matthew, the company’s chief operating officer, speak Chinese.) The company works with around 60 clients, about evenly split between sports and entertainment, and it manages roughly 700 social channels for them.

That includes Brunson, whose representatives at CAA brought on East Goes Global to build his online presence in China. Over the past two years, the Knicks star’s audience grew from zero to 1.3 million followers collectively across Chinese social media outlets Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, RedNote, WeChat and Kuaishou. Those accounts generated more than 55 million impressions over a 14-day period starting on June 1. By comparison, Brunson has about 2.4 million followers between Instagram and X.

While East Goes Global produced the video of Brunson wishing students good luck on the Gaokao exam, the account it appeared on in the U.S. wasn’t one the company manages, according to its director of sports, Frank Zhang.

East Goes Global also works with fellow Knick Josh Hart, building his Chinese socials to nearly 200,000 followers from scratch, and Basketball Hall of Famer Tracy McGrady, for whom the company will support an upcoming summer tour and plans to launch WeChat channels. Beyond individuals, the company’s clients include the NBA and roughly a quarter of the league’s teams—the Knicks, the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks are listed on its website.

“They scale their influence, their overall fandom in the market, and they’re actually reaching their fans who are dying to engage with them,” Matthew Spalter said of his clients. “They increase their popularity, which makes them more commercially viable in that market specifically, but also globally. And in doing so, we’re able to also potentially solicit partnership opportunities for them.”

That’s exactly what East Goes Global did for the New Orleans Pelicans, helping the NBA franchise secure a multiyear, multimillion-dollar sponsorship with Chinese-owned seafood restaurant chain Fiery Crab. While the company has largely functioned on monthly retainers for its marketing services, starting at about $3,000 for influencers, $5,000 for athletes and between $7,500 and $10,000 for professional teams, Matthew Spalter said it has invested heavily in standing up its partnerships arm since the start of last year.

To date, that vertical has closed $4 million worth of deals from international brands—which East Goes Global takes a commission on—with about $20 million more in its pipeline right now. The company anticipates reaching $6 million in total revenue across all areas of its business for 2026.

The Spalter brothers see even more room grow, expanding their work in other markets like Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

“We really see a big, big, big opportunity in the fact that we’ve cracked that China code,” Andrew Spalter said. “I’m very confident in saying that.”