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*** INTRODUCTION TO GERMAN BASKETBALL ***
By André Voigt
Basketball in Germany has developed tremendously over the last ten years. When the original Dream Team played in the 1992 Olympics, basketball became more and more
popular in a country where traditionally soccer is king. When the German national team surprisingly won the European Championship in 1993 basketball had established
itself as the fastest growing sport in the country.
More and more sponsors discovered the "new" sport which appealed to the young generation and the premier domestic league (called "Bundesliga" or BBL) thrived. The BBL
nowadays can be considered one of the top five leagues in Europe. Teams like ALBA Berlin, OPEL Skyliners, Telekom Baskets Bonn or RheinEnergy Cologne belong to the
upper class of European basketball. Budgets of the 14 BBL-teams range from $ 6 M to $ 1 M with the aforementioned clubs, being the most free-spending franchises. Every
team is allowed to have two non-European players on their active roster and an unlimited number of players from Europe. The German National Team has profited most from
the boom of the early nineties. Players like Dirk Nowitzki, Ademola Okulaja or Patrick Femerling came up during this period and now belong to Europe's top players.
Germany offers two second divisions below the BBL - one in the north and one in the south. In the aftermath of the Bosman-ruling these divisions have experienced a sudden
increase in budgets and so has the level of play. While only one non-European player is allowed to play on a second division club, many Americans with EU-passports have
entered the league and are raising the standards. Only a few years back, very few athletes could live of their second division contracts and thus the vast majority were
semi-professionals. This has changed over the last three years, with more and more of the top-flight clubs looking to move up to the BBL and investing as much money as
the low-level BBL-teams.
Germany's third division are called "Regionalleagues". There are five of them which cover Germany regionally. All of these leagues feature the same foreigner rules, except
the western regionalleague. In the west the region's branch of the German Basketball Federation has opened the region to all foreign players. Thus teams, who are desperate
to move into the second league, have fielded ten Americans. Players in the third leagues are - except for the foreigners - semi-professional.
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