World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC)

Governance and History

The WBSC was created on 14 April 2013, when the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) and the International Softball Federation (ISF) merged under the leadership of IBAF President Riccardo Fraccari and ISF President Don Porter. The consolidation was driven by the campaign to restore baseball and softball to the Olympic programme, and the merged confederation received IOC recognition in the same year. Baseball and softball returned at Tokyo 2020 and are confirmed for Los Angeles 2028. WBSC is a not-for-profit association governed by a Congress of more than 140 national member federations, which elects the President, Secretary General and Executive Board. Riccardo Fraccari has served as President since 2013, and the late-2024 Congress was reported to have elected Beng Choo Low as the first woman Secretary General.

Business Model

WBSC is not a betting operator and does not offer consumer gambling products. Its role in the iGaming chain is upstream: it owns the official rights to international baseball and softball competitions and monetises them through media, sponsorship, merchandising and, since 2024, an exclusive official-data and live-streaming partnership with FeedConstruct. Under that deal, FeedConstruct distributes WBSC's official real-time data and video feeds to licensed betting operators, giving bookmakers a reliable official-data product for baseball and softball markets. WBSC also organises and sells rights around its own world championship events, and its Olympic connection gives it a multi-year event rhythm tied to the IOC cycle.

Event Portfolio

The federation's flagship property is the WBSC Premier12, a quadrennial tournament contested by the world's top 12 baseball nations; the 2024 edition was won by Japan and played across Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Korea. Around that, WBSC runs a world championship system covering senior and age-group baseball and softball, including the Women's Baseball World Cup and the Women's, Men's and age-group Softball World Cups. These events carry global broadcast and data value, particularly in Asia and the Americas, where baseball and softball have their largest fan bases and betting markets.

Digital Products and Market Position

WBSC operates its own OTT streaming platform and mobile app suite, and maintains the official WBSC World Rankings. The rankings function both as a competitive merit system and as a reference dataset for broadcasters and bookmakers. As an IOC-recognised federation, WBSC operates within the IOC's integrity framework for monitoring betting and protecting events from manipulation, which strengthens its credibility as an official-data partner. Its main data-rights equivalents are the feeds supplied by domestic leagues such as MLB, NPB and KBO, whereas WBSC's rights cover national-team international events.

Strategy and Outlook

The 2024 FeedConstruct deal is the clearest signal of WBSC's strategic direction: to make official federation data a standardised component of regulated sports betting. LA28 offers a further opportunity to expand the audience and commercial value of both sports, while the Premier12's 2024 participation and broadcast numbers indicate growing international demand. The main challenges are the media-market concentration of baseball and softball in North America and Asia, and the need to balance commercial priorities across the baseball-strong and softball-strong regions of the federation.