PLATFORM: THE WORLD is divided in to two groups of people - fans of The Wireand the rest. If you don't know about the Baltimore-based television show, you are missing a treat: it might just be the best thing I've ever seen on television. And The Wireis why basketball is going to become the only truly global sport

When we're among civilians, we Wirenerds have a set of code words, like freemasons, that let fellow worshippers know they're among friends. Slip the name Stringer Bell into a conversation and you'll soon see what popularity really is.

The odd thing about the show, which has completed its fifth season, is its distribution. I, like most fans, get my fix through DVD box sets, gorging on two or three episodes at a time.

It was largely ignored by broadcasters both here and in Britain, but was so good that word was passed around online until the old media started running stories on it. This week, the box sets for series 1,2 and 3 occupy the top three spots on Amazon UK.

It has been called a 50-episode screen novel, so complex are the plots and well drawn the characters. This is the story of modern America which builds a picture of a post-industrial society, making great personal drama from big themes like urban decay, drug dependency and police corruption.

The kids in the "projects", the grim inner-city housing estates that form the backdrop to the series, escape the drudgery and danger of every day life through drugs and basketball. The game is a common reference point: the game of the streets.

On Sunday, some of that dirty glamour is in London, when the NBA, America's basketball league, holds a game between Miami Heat and the New Jersey Jets. Beyond that, a European league is soon to be announced. Details are sketchy, but potentially include the setting up of teams in Istanbul, Berlin, Madrid and Moscow.

Recently, I visited the organisation's international headquarters, in Hammersmith, west London, a part of town estate agents refer to as "up and coming". It isn't quite Notting Hill, where the bankers and lawyers have moved in trying to buy themselves some vicarious cool, and it lacks Kensington's cachet, where the boutiques pitch their prices at passing Russian oligarchs.

Chip away at Hammersmith's veneer of respectability though and very quickly you find the influence of the game. In the park across from the office, kids shoot hoops, one on one. They're a mix of white middle-class dilettantes and black and mixed-race kids from the local estate, for whom the NBA is as every bit as authentic a cultural reference point as football and rap music.

The growth of the league has been a sporting phenomenon.

Since commissioner David Stern, a New York lawyer, took over in 1994, the profits earned by the league and its team franchises have risen 500 per cent. That same year, Michael Jordan first stepped on to a pro court and a modern sports marketing saga began. Nike's Air Jordan line is still, nearly a quarter of a century later, its best-selling shoe line, each one carrying the subliminal message of NBA cool.

Television viewers in more than 200 countries now have access to the New York Knicks, the LA Lakers and the Chicago Bulls. One reason for this growth has been a clever exploitation of the sport's countercultural image.

The Wire, Entourageand films like the Basketball Diaries, all align the game with negative aspects of American life, but Stern is savvy enough to know that the benefits of this outweigh the costs of losing a few jittery sponsors.

Compare this to FIFA's control freakery - witness the film Goal, a risible attempt at putting soccer on to the big screen.

Goalwas a film made by sports administrators, and it showed. It detailed a young boy's rise from the backstreets to become a star of Newcastle's first team, the choice of club driven by Adidas, whose product was plastered over every scene.

It showed that the NBA knows what FIFA chooses to ignore: every sports fan can spot a faker. It's a rule that is not only a good test of the sporting experience, it works on television too.

"The NBA knows what FIFA chooses to ignore: every sports fan can spot a faker