The easyCredit BBL’s core tool for development in Germany however has come under attack, according to a variety of leaders in the country who believe NIL will put 6+6 under pressure and could have massive implications in the game.

But it is not just Germany that is affected by the massive influx of NIL money in college. Everywhere in Europe, basketball leaders are trying to get their heads wrapped around the issue and how they can deal with it. Deal with it because they really cannot combat it. NIL money only four years into its existance is already on par with most clubs in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague.

Uncertainity still reigns in many regards in terms of Europeans heading to college, which on its merits is entirely understandable. With the money being thrown around, it is actually finanically irresponsible for the players not to go to the US for the financial benefit.

What will end up happening? It’s anybody’s guess. The basketball world governing body FIBA has recognized the problem and will try to address it. Their hope is to somehow convince the NCAA to join its jurisdiction in the FIBA system. But first off, FIBA has no leverage to make the NCAA do that - it would almost be more of an act of free will by the NCAA. And secondly, it’s questionable if the NCAA can even do it. That is because these deals are NIL contracts - money provided for athletes’ Name, Image and Likeness. They are not performance-based contracts.

This issue hangs over the European basketball world like a dark cloud. And there is no sun in the forecast for the near future.

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For those unaware of what NIL is … “Name Image Likeness” refers to the rights of college athletes starting in 2021 to profit from their personal brand - allowing them to earn money through endorsements, sponsorships, appearances and social media, without jeopardizing their amateur status.

The money that colleges started dishing out to players paled in comparison that anything European clubs could even fathom offering their players. Large masses of players have been receiving yearly NIL payments in six figures and some throughout Europe even earned 1+ million dollars.

With upwards of 350 colleges in Division 1 having cash to spend, even more Germans and Europeans have started to leave for the United States.

German BBL CEO Stefan Holz: “Worst fears have now become reality.”

“Unbelievable salaries. There's no two ways about it. If I were young and got an offer like that, of course I’d take it,” said German BBL CEO Stefan Holz. “A real talent drain, a real exodus. The worst fears have now become reality.”

For those keeping track of the Germans bailing their homeland for the homeland of basketball, it’s hard not getting depressed. The top three finishers in the 2024-25 Top German U22 player award - winner Sanada Fru of Basketball Löwen Braunschweig, FIT/One Würzburg Baskets’ Hannes Steinbach and Johann Grünloh of RASTA Vechta - will be with NCAA teams next season.

They will be joining the likes of Mathieu Grujicic, Davi Remagen, Jacob Patrick, Elias Rapieque, Amon Dörries, Dominykas Pleta, Antonio Dorn and Martin Kalu.

And there is no end in sight of the wave of this summer’s departures as colleges still have money budgeted and will be watching the youth national team EuroBaskets in the summer to find more players.

And that list will be added to the Germans who are already playing college basketball including Michael Rataj, Christoph Tilly, Simonas Lukosius, Nils Machowski, Jacob Ensminger, Joshua Bonga, Bent Leuchten and Rikus Schulte. Other Germans in the United States are Christian Anderson, Eric Reibe and Keenan Gardner.

6+6 under pressure

Would all of those players have certain jobs in the easyCredit BBL? No. But many of them would help the Bundesliga clubs fulfill the 6+6 regulation, which requires at least six German players on the 12-man roster.

That led league boss Holz to say: “6 + 6 will come under pressure.”

Holz believes it could become difficult for teams to recruit six Germans who can play in the BBL. And he is not alone in the thought.

“The clubs firmly decided to bet on their own young kids. Having these guys playing those minutes took years and years for the organizations to be convinced that this is worth it. And now everything is shaking,” said ALBA BERLIN sports director Himar Ojeda.

His ratiopharm ulm counterpart Thorsten Leibenath said the departures will lead to the decrease in the overall quality of the German players. At the same time, the salaries of the German players who are still in Germany will increase because the competition for those players is higher.

“This will put pressure on the entire league — and on the 6 + 6 rule as well,” Leibenath said.

This whole discussion about 6+6 pains Robert Wintermantel. The current BBL head of sports and finance was one of the key figures in implementing the rule back in 2009 with 6+6 taking effect in 2012.

“Historically, I’ve been absolutely opposed to changing this rule. Of course, there are now considerations in that direction — not from my side, but naturally people are bringing it up. And I think rightly so. If we truly have a problem and not enough young German players are coming through, then it’s certainly an issue. But fundamentally, I’m a staunch advocate of this rule.”

Instead of high quality German youngsters helping fill up the 6+6 quota, BBL clubs could be forced to look to older players who may not usually get BBL jobs. That will certainly see ProA teams being raided as the second league clubs are required to have two Germans on the court at all times.

And there are not a lot of youngsters in the ProA. According to figures by Christoph Nicol, the BBL saw 4.83 percent of minutes played by U22 players in the regular season. The total U22 figure was 8.35 percent in the ProA - 5.96 percent if you take away RASTA Vechta’s farmteam.

Dropping down to the ProB, Nicol’s figures for the regular season have a total percent of 32.31 for U22 Germans. That number is broken down into 57.45 percent for the 11 farmteams of BBL clubs and 16.04 percent of non farmteam sides.

FC Bayern Munich gave U22 players 80.02 percent of the minutes with other top development teams being Ludwigsburg (75.83 percent), Würzburg (68.21 percent) and Ulm percent (65.92 percent).

Coming back to NIL, Ojeda believes the exodus will drastically impact the ProB as well. The trio of Anton Nufer (519 minutes), Dorian Grosber (494) and Amon Dörries (484) played near 1,500 minutes for LOK Bernau in the ProB, and if they all leave for college (Dörries has already committed to a US college), Ojeda will have to make up those minutes in the ProB with other players. And the ALBA official believes the ProB will get drastically younger as clubs are forced to play more 17 year olds as many 19-year-olds are not around.

Leibenath believes the number of players heading to college will almost double compared to last year — maybe even more.

“Across the entire professional sector of German basketball, there will simply be a lack of good players in the coming years. And that, of course, weakens the domestic market,” the Ulm leader said.

“The current NIL deals present a general problem for international basketball, not ‘just’ for German basketball clubs. Clubs and federations invest large sums over many years in developing young talent, and currently receive no financial compensation when players leave for U.S. colleges,” said German Basketball Federation spokesman Christoph Büker.

“The combination of academics and basketball was already interesting and attractive even without NIL deals. Now, with NIL money, the NCAA has emerged as another financially powerful ‘player’ in the basketball landscape.”

Germany already losing top end talent … now losing prospects

The high number of Germans being recruited to colleges shows that American coaches respect the work done by German youth systems. But the German clubs have also been doing a good job improving players who are already pros.

The easyCredit BBL is considered a stepping stone league where the best players are often snatched up by clubs in other countries who can pay more. Six of the last seven regular season Most Valuable Players - Will Cummings, Marcos Knight, Parker Jackson-Cartwright, TJ Shorts and Otis Livingston - left the league after winning the award with only 2021 MVP Jaleen Smith staying in Berlin.

READ about how Germany’s economic restrictions makes it difficult for Bundesliga clubs to compete against clubs from other countries.

“We’ve always been in the middle of the food chain, but maybe now we’re in the upper third. It’s completely clear that we lose players to the EuroLeague or NBA. But now we’re also losing Germany’s top prospects,” Holz said.

Germany’s reliance on U22 players at 4.84 percent in the BBL was solid when compared with other top leagues. Italy’s Serie A only had 3.12 percent of the minutes played by U22 players; the Spanish ACB through the first 31/32 rounds had 2.55 percent time for U22 players; and the French ProA had a strong 8.62 percent for the whole league.

What can be done?

Right now, unfortunately very little. Clubs can write college buy-outs into their contracts with young players - and hope the colleges do pay them. Or that clubs will get a fixed percentage of the player’s NIL money. Clubs could also work closer with the players to then build up connections to colleges and feed their players into specific college - all the while securing an NIL cut.

The alarm bells are ringing loudly throughout Europe - with Euroleague Basketball CEO Paulius Motiejunas doing it publicly way back in May 2024.

"What is happening in sports is completely turning upside down. You see how the NCAA is changing it with the salaries. I know the salaries players make in the NCAA, and what they're paying now is completely nuts and breaks the market. There is no motivation for the [European] clubs to keep growing young players. But this is something on the table for FIBA as well," Motiejunas said at an official EuroLeague press conference at the Final Four in Berlin.

“It is the wild west of who wins and in which direction it goes. I don't think it's good for the players because getting these salaries at 18 is a big risk. Only strong personalities can handle this money and popularity. I hope the storm will blow over, and we will think of ways to keep growing good European players.”

Europe’s most influential agent Misko Raznatovic highlighted the concern of Europeans in college in the U.S. now commanding higher salaries than many EuroLeague players.

“A lot of players from Europe will have contracts in excess of a million in college this year, and as you know, a small number of players in the EuroLeague teams have contracts greater than that amount,” Raznatovic told MozzartSport.

“Let's not kid ourselves, this is a real cause for concern since the answer is largely out of our control,” Philippe Ausseur, president of the French first division league LNB told BeBasket.com. “A regulatory response is needed, which will involve dialogue with FIBA and probably the NCAA, to avoid this plundering.”

Here is just a sampling of the French talents who have already jumped ship for colleges in the United States this season: Ilias Kamardine, Roman Domon, Wilson Jacques, Clarence Massamba, Yohann Sissoko, Paul Mbiya and Mathis Courbon. Others apparently contemplating the move include: Illian Pietrus, Brice Dessert, Nathan De Sousa, Maxence Lemoine, Alexandre Bouzidi and Mohamed Diakite.

Italian LBA league president Umberto Gandini told Tuttosport: “It’s certainly worrying … There is no protection for clubs.”

Italian talents such as Achille Lonati, Luigo Suigo, Maikcol Perez and former Barcelona talent Dame Sarr are all heading for the US as are Sidi Gueye and Andrej Kostic among dozens more. Every day seems to have another social media post from a solid talent announcing a commitment to a US college.

According to Carro Funes, the CEO of FairPlay Agency and Octagon Basketball Europe Senior Director, in a Sports Illustrated article, many teams are rethinking the viability of youth programs. The report said some Spanish ACB clubs spend roughly $500,000 annually to run their youth programs. And many players are leaving early for America and the clubs are not getting a return on investment from contracts with EuroLeague teams for example. “Teams are saying if this is going to be the future, what are we doing,” Funes was quoted as saying.

The real solution most likely needs to come from FIBA.

Basketball’s world governing body did recognize the problem and created an expert group to look into NCAA and young players. FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis addressed the Mid-Term Congress in mid-May, saying “We need to acknowledge that (NCAA basketball) is no longer and has stopped being an academic experience primarily for the athletes. The colleges in NCAA are every day closer to being commercial entities, professional clubs, and that is challenging our eco-system for the simple reason that our eco-system is based on principle: that you can transfer as long as contracts are respected. Agreements must be respected.”

Zagklis said a letter of clearance - or however they want to name it - must be introduced. FIBA will formally talk with the NCAA and look for a solution.

“We cannot stay with our hands still, and we cannot stay just as observers in this. FIBA has an institutional duty to protect its members and at the same time it has an institutional duty to help the development of its players,” he said.

One major problem is that FIBA has no leverage over the NCAA, which will do anything in its power to admit or confirm that its players are professionals or employees - which is something letters of clearance could legally establish.

The situation could still get dramatically worse as one agent told TTC that a European player has been placed at a US high school with NIL money.

Yes, there is NIL money in high schools as well. Sure, this is the upper end, but it gives you a hint of what kind of money is out there. On3.com estimates players’ NIL valuation - based among other things on how much following the players have on social media.

AJ Dybantsa will be heading to Brigham Young University next season after which he is currently expected to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. On3 estimated his value at 4.1 million dollars. Tyron Stokes has been estimated with a value of 1.6 million dollars while Brandon McCoy and Cameron Boozer both have valuations of 1.5 million dollars. For high school seniors.

Below is On3.com’s listing of the Top 10 evaluations of college players.

What type of money are we talking about?

For thost trying to figure out what type of money we are talking about, let’s look at some of the numbers out there.

The Inside Carolina site reported that University of North Carolina’s payroll for its roster this up-coming 2025-26 season has surpassed a mark of $14 million. That would be more than triple what the Tar Heels spent on their roster last season.

Exact figures are hard to determine with the 247Sports news portal saying as of April 11, 2025 there are at least eight teams that will have 10+ million dollar rosters next season. CBS Sports meanwhile wrote on April 17, 2025 a variety of sources have that number being 10 colleges in the 10 million dollar club: Arkansas, BYU, Duke, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville, Michigan, North Carolina, St. John's and Texas Tech.

The article continued that a number of other programs are sitting at 8 million dollars: including Auburn, Connecticut, Florida, Houston, Kansas, Kansas State, Miami, Purdue, Tennessee, Texas, UCLA, USC, Villanova and Virginia.

Here is a list of the programs that are estimated to have spent the most money on transfers for this season - NOT the whole roster - as of May 15, 2025 - topped by Indiana with 10.1 million dollars.

Those are all figures for the players budgets. Let’s compare that to the 18 clubs in the EuroLeague. BasketNews managed to put together a list of budgets for the 2024-25 season and the North Carolina Tar Heels would stack up pretty well with 14 million dollars, which is about 12.3 million euros.

NOTE - the net value for players/coaches salaries is on the right.

NBA star Anthony Davis: NIL takes away from the integrity of the college game

NBA superstar Anthony Davis weighed in on the state of the college game with all the impact of NIL, saying it has taken a hit from all the money.

“It kinda takes away from the game a little bit because of—and I'm not hating—it takes away from the integrity in the sense of players are only going to certain schools because of the money,” he told Sports Illustrated.

“College basketball is still competitive, but the recruitment of it has kinda gotten a little wacky, especially when player can leave and enter the (transfer) portal and go anywhere. It just gets a little tricky,” Davis said. “The coaches either a) have to be more strategic with their recruiting, or b) if you don't have a lot of money for NIL, that kind of takes away your school, your program, as far as being a top recruiter for some of these players.”

NIL and the free movement of players have made it difficult to develop a culture, with Davis saying: “That kind of goes out the window, in my opinion.”

NBA Draft less attractive

Another impact the massive NIL money has made is the number of players declaring for the NBA Draft.

The NBA announced on April 29 that 106 players had filed as early entry candidates for the 2025 NBA Draft. That was already the lowest number of early-entrants since 2015. And it was down more than two-thirds from the peak of 363 in 2021 - just before the NCAA’s NIL era began.

That number lowered drastically a month later on May 30 as the NBA announced 50 of those 106 players had withdrawn their names, leaving just 56 names as early entry candidates. Under NCAA rules, in order to retain college basketball eligibility, college players must withdraw by May 28. The remaining players still have the option of withdrawing by June 15.

It’s not hard to imagine why so many players are withdrawing if they can earn so much money through NIL teams in college.

House vs NCAA settlement - no resolution of international players

Much has been discussed about the recent House vs NCAA settlement which essentially ends the era of amateurism with colleges now being allowed to pay the student-athletes - whereas until now they have received the money from separate NIL collectives.

FOR MORE DETAILS on that - read this summary of the settlement.

One of the main issues left unresolved - and actually probably most important for this article - is the status of international players. The subject was not included in any of the lawsuits resolved in the settlement.

The athletes are in US schools under a student F1-visa, which prevents them from doing certain work activities. The issue for some time was a major sticking point until NIL collectives found ways around regulations and got the international players their NIL money.

It was never really fully addressed by the US government. Some believe that the matter must be decided by the US Congress. But with no action recently on any legislation, it is unclear what the future holds.

Also unclear is who exactly would rule if athletes are in violation of their visa status and how or when that would come. One possibility is that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would make those visa determinations. And one source informed TTC that if an individual is caught in violation of their student visa in the United States and deported, they would be red-flagged by US authorities for five years.

College players better save their money

So where do we go from here? It’s anybody’s guess what the future holds. European clubs will certainly re-evaluate their entire youth development system.

One fascinating aspect of all this will be next off-season - before the 2026-27 season - when the first group of college players, especially Americans, finish their collegiate careers and look for jobs in Europe.

After four years of earning six-figures, those players will hear offers from European clubs - even EuroCup or Basketball Champions League teams - and say: “Sure, I’ll take that for a month.” And then reality hits when they hear back: “No, that is for the season.”

Will we see players just accept less money and remember the good ole days? Will we see a trend of more players retire from the game early? Will we see other leagues around the world pop up and offer more money - United Arab Emirates for example?

Or maybe some of these higher level earners actually try to buy into European clubs - kind of NBA players becoming club owners or stake-holders in their former university.

No white flag

When asked what message he has for fans of the German Bundesliga, the CEO Stefan Holz answered: “Raise the white flag? No, of course not. We somehow have to adapt to the situation, though we don’t yet have the solution. We’re relying on systemic solutions. But the next generation will come - the talent pool doesn’t seem to be drying up. A new generation will emerge and excite us.”

And everything will eventually be okay. Let’s just all tell ourselves that.

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But they want something bigger: namely to turn Bahçeşehir College Istanbul into an established powerhouse in European basketball - ideally starting next season in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague.

Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan have guided their Turkish club to just five victories from winning the BKT EuroCup and earning the right to play next season in the EuroLeague.

What makes Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan special? you might ask. Both the club president Yücel and the team general manager Çiler Çağlayan are women. Strong-willed and ambitious women doing their part in breaking down the gender barrier in European basketball.

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A story unfortunately needing to be told

The disappointing aspect of telling this story is that Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan should not be anything special because they are women. It should not need to be highlighted that these two are women in a men’s game. It should not even be a side note.

Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan should just be seen as two basketball leaders looking to do something rarely seen in European basketball: taking a club from its founding in 2017 and winning the FIBA Europe Cup and EuroCup in a matter of eight seasons and booking a spot in the second-best club competition in the world.

“We want to stay humble and go step by step. We are still far from the (EuroCup) Final and we should focus on every game without thinking of the championship. This is basketball, anything can happen and it is impossible to control everything,” said Yücel, whose team will face Cedevita Olimpija Ljubljana Tuesday March 11 in the single game elimination Quarter-Finals of the EuroCup.

“With that being said, I can say that the target is seeing our name in the EuroLeague starting from next season and it would mean the world to me personally since I was there in every step this club ever took.”

Çiler Çağlayan added: “Being just a few games from achieving our exact goal is incredibly exciting. Of course, it brings not only motivation but also pressure as it is unique to be this close to making history and knowing that every decision, every game could just define the whole season.”

Should they beat Cedevita and then both of their best-of-three series in the Semi-Finals and Finals, Bahçeşehir would become just the third Turkish club to win the EuroCup following Galatasaray Istanbul in 2016 and Darüşşafaka Istanbul in 2018. Frutti Extra Bursaspor and Türk Telekom Ankara reached the Final in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and Besiktas Istanbul advanced to the Semi-Finals in last season.

“Turkish teams have made strong cases for the EuroLeague and it is pretty common to see EuroCup contenders from our country, which is very important. Darüşşafaka were a great team with many future EuroLeague players; Bursaspor’s amazing final run was like a fairytale story; and Türk Telekom were one of the most successful teams that whole season both in the Turkish Super League and the EuroCup,” Yücel said.

“The question we should ask ourselves might be if this is sustainable, and how many Turkish teams managed to stay competitive in Europe consistently besides Fenerbahçe Beko and Anadolu Efes. We want to stay competitive and be consistent which would be even more impressive than making it to the Final in my opinion.”

Bahçeşehir have been one of the best teams in the EuroCup this season, finishing the Regular Season atop Group A with a 14-4 record and a direct bye into the Quarter-Finals. Things have not gone quite as smoothly in the Turkish domestic league, where they have a 10-9 record in seventh place.

The team has essentially a EuroLeague caliber roster with former EuroLeague playcaller Dejan Radonjic as head coach as well as players such as Jaleen Smith, Mateusz Ponitka, Tyler Cavanaugh, Sehmus Hazer and Marko Simonovic all having played EuroLeague in the past. Bahcesehir added even more experienced depth in January by signing Kenan Sipahi - a veteran of 57 EuroLeague games - and former NBA star Furkan Korkmaz.

“In the beginning, our goal was to make a name for ourselves, at least reach the playoffs and make it to the EuroLeague in at worst a couple of seasons. When you overachieve any of your goals, you unavoidably want more. This season, we saw the light,” Yücel said.

From Turkish second division to FIBA Europe Cup champs and runners-up

And the light is shining bright as the basketball club has seen a meteroic rise through first the Turkish ranks and then the European ranks. After being founded in 2017, Bahçeşehir started their journey in the Turkish second division and finished runners-up the first campaign. They played in the Turkish top flight Basketbol Süper Ligi in their second season and finished ninth in 2018-19.

Bahçeşehir were given a spot in the FIBA Europe Cup in 2019-20 season and the team stormed to the Semi-Finals before the remainder of the competition was shut down due to the Covid pandemic.

The 2020-21 season saw Bahçeşehir debut in the EuroCup and register a 2-8 record, grabbing wins over Joventut Badalona and Umana Reyer Venice.

In 2021-22, the club took part in the FIBA Europe Cup for a second time. Head coach Erhan Ernak guided a team including established players such as Sam Dekker, Jamar Smith, Langston Hall and Oguz Savas to the title, beating Italian side Reggio Emilia 162-143 over a two-leg aggregate.

In the Turkish BSL, Bahçeşehir College were swept 2-0 by Galatasaray Istanbul in the first round Quarter-Finals and the club missed the playoffs in 2022-23 with a ninth-placed finish.

The 2022 FIBA Europe Cup title gave Bahçeşehir College the right to play in the Basketball Champions League in 2022-23. And the team went 3-3 in the group stage and knocked off Filou Oostende 2-1 in the Play-ins. The Round of 16 group proved too much as the club went 0-6 to bow out.

Bahçeşehir College for 2023-24 moved back down to the FIBA Europe Cup and won their First Round group and went undefeated in the Second Round as well. The Turkish side went through a coaching change in December 2023, releasing Sinan Atalay in favor of Dejan Radonjic. The former EuroLeague playcaller guided Bahcesehir past FC Porto and Varese in the first two rounds of the FIBA Europe Cup playoffs.

In the Finals, they had a thrilling battle with NINERS Chemnitz. The Germans won the opening leg 85-74 at home. Bahçeşehir took the victory in the return leg in Türkiye but it was only a 105-95 overtime victory, meaning Chemnitz took the crown with a 180-179 aggregate victory.

Bahçeşehir College a place of higher education

This seems like a good time to take a step back. Bahçeşehir have already established themselves as a club to take seriously. But who or what is Bahçeşehir?

Bahçeşehir College belongs to the Bahçeşehir Uğur Educational Institutions family, which has been operating in the field of education for nearly half a century. Bahçeşehir College started education in its first campus in 1994 in the western Istanbul district of Bahçeşehir.

Bahçeşehir College had the mission of bringing quality education to every corner of Türkiye and began to open branches in Istanbul and throughout Türkiye.

According to the club, Bahçeşehir College serves nearly 100,000 students on 153 campuses in 63 provinces across Türkiye. It considers itself a “pioneer in world-class, contemporary and high-quality education in Türkiye” since 1994 with its practices that make a difference in foreign language education and educational models that set an example for the world.

Bahçeşehir College, the private Bahçeşehir University and Uğur Schools are part of the BAU Global Education Network, an international education network with institutions across three continents and 11 countries.

Bahçeşehir College has a total of 15,425 employees and 11,096 of them are women, making up 70 percent of the workforce.

“For me, gender equality isn't just about numbers or quotas but creating an environment of respect, fairness, and inclusivity. Ensuring that women feel equally empowered to take on leadership roles and be confident in their abilities is crucial,” Yücel said.

And bringing Bahçeşehir back to Begüm Yücel, the Bahçeşehir College itself was founded in 1994 by Enver Yücel - Begum’s father.

On top of that, Begüm’s brother Hüseyin founded the basketball club in 2017 - transferring the rights of the Turkish second division from Acıbadem Üniversitesi SK - and served as its president until December 2023 when he moved to Beşiktaş to take over a second time as that basketball club’s president. And Begüm filled the presidency vacancy at Bahçeşehir.

In addition to the senior men’s team, Bahçeşehir College have been working tirelessly in helping develop young talent with nearly 40 youth teams across the country. And the club’s teams won the Turkish U16 and U18 championships in 2023 and in 2024 won the Turkish U14 national title.

Family love of Beşiktaş

While father Enver Yücel has been involved with Bahçeşehir since 1994, the basketball team has only existed since 2017. And the Yücel family’s rooting interests in the heated battle for fans’ hearts in the Istanbul sports landscape actually have always been for Beşiktaş.

“Yes, we were Beşiktaş fans growing up, and I have only good memories about Beşiktaş. Supporting a club, it makes you feel like you are part of a huge community. In Türkiye, it is no different than having a family legacy,” admitted Begüm Yücel.

“Of course most of the fanbases in our country are football oriented. As I grew up, I started to lose interest in football. I am the biggest fan of the Bahçeşehir College basketball team and my love for basketball dictates my life.”

Her brother Hüseyin had previously worked with Beşiktaş as well, so when he answered the call to the Black and Whites in December 2023, it was not a surprise for Begüm - especially given his love for the club.

And given her own love of the Bahçeşehir College, taking over as club president was also a no-brainer.

“I was the biggest fan of Bahçeşehir College from the very beginning and I was involved in a lot of business decisions with my family. It was a natural move for both sides, and it felt like the right thing to do,” she said. “The whole organization knew my passion for the game and the club. I was confident once I saw their support. After the decision was made, we talked about some general details. I wanted to learn from his experiences but I always knew I wanted to run things my way.”

History being made - inspiration in the works

By taking over the reins, Yücel was also making history. Four years earlier in 2019, Berna Gözbasi became the first female president in Turkish football history at Kayserispor. Now it was Yücel’s turn. She had become the first female president in a men’s Turkish professional basketball club.

“I believe women should always have greater presence in management roles in professional sports clubs and of course in business as well. I am happy to have taken on this role but I do not want to overthink it. I hope I can set a good example and one day we can eliminate terms like ‘female president’ and ‘female manager’ from our vocabulary,” Yücel said.

When seeking inspiration, she always looked to her parents.

“My parents are and always have been my biggest role models. Their road to success is very inspiring and what they have been able to do for the children in Türkiye, how they manage to adapt to all the drastic changes in the system is impressive to me even as their daughter,” she said.

Yücel is aware that many eyes are looking at her - also of young women and girls in the country.

“I am just trying to be the best version of myself while doing my job. If it inspires other women and especially young girls who want to be successful in sports business, it means I am doing my job right. I hope more and more women succeed on their business journeys,” she said.

“Having women in leadership roles shows young girls that they belong in this space too. When they see women making decisions, running teams, and succeeding in sports management, it breaks down the idea that this is a man’s world. It gives them the confidence to believe in themselves and take the leap into this career, knowing that there’s a place for them to lead.”

Çiler Çağlayan has been impressed with Begüm Yücel since taking over for her brother.

“Begüm Yücel has not only carried forward the club’s success but with her vision, our club remains a competitive, well-run and respected organization. Having a president like Begüm Yücel not only breaks down the barriers but reshapes the culture, broadens opportunities and drives the long-term growth,” Çiler Çağlayan said.

“Begüm Yücel represents a modern, strategic and sustainable vision to club management and always focusing long-term development rather than just short-term results. I strongly believe that having Begüm Yücel as the president of Bahçeşehir College, a club now just a few wins away from reaching the EuroLeague, is not only a remarkable moment for our club but also for both Turkish and European basketball.”

Çiler Çağlayan taking her own historic journey

Pinar Çiler Çağlayan, for her part, has been with the Bahçeşehir from the very beginning. She worked with the club from its founding in 2017 as Executive Manager and remained in that post until February 2024, when Mehmet Alpaslan Aydın became a board member and she moved into the position.

That made Çiler Çağlayan the first female general manager in Turkish men’s basketball history.

“I can say it is a personal milestone and with the right approach women can lead and succeed in men’s professional sports. It also challenges the mindset that only men can lead and succeed in men’s professional sports,” she said.

“It is essential to create a structure where women take on significant roles not only in traditionally male-dominated fields but in every branch, department and position within the sports to ensure this equality.”

When asked how other leaders in the European basketball community responded to her becoming general manager of the club and making history, Çiler Çağlayan said: “I received messages of support and positive reactions from many people I have had the opportunity to work with or compete against. I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank everyone who has written, called and supported me.”

Just like for Yücel, the hope for Çiler Çağlayan is that evaluation of individuals can be done on merit and not be highlighted by exclusion out of tradition or unawareness.

“While emphasizing equality, it is also crucial not to highlight discrimination even further. When we evaluate individuals not as male or female executives, but simply as executives, and the primary criterion becomes the work itself, I believe that gender equality in sports can be naturally balanced without reinforcing division,” she said.

And again just like Yücel, Çiler Çağlayan knows the eyes of inspiration are cast upon her from young women and girls dreaming of doing similar great things.

“With this role being entrusted to me, I can confidently say that I will do my best to create a positive impact and show the path exists for them in sports management. I truly believe that the hard work will be recognized, regardless of gender,” she said.

It should not be a shock that Çiler Çağlayan is helping Bahçeşehir to lofty heights. She already helped two Turkish clubs rise further than ever before. She hails from Ankara but grew up in Izmir and played basketball recreationally there. She returned to the Turkish capital in 2009 to study philosophy at Bilkent University.

She was taking some online courses from FIBA and had a certificate for team management, but before planning on moving to to Netherlands to participate in the Erasmus program wanted some experience.

Çiler Çağlayan wrote to Ankara-based Süper Liga teams Hacettepe Universitesi Basketbol Kulübü, TED College, Türk Telekom Ankara and only Mutlu Hayran from Hacettepe responded. She then joined the club as administrative manager.

“Mutlu Hayran was the person who taught me everything when I first started in this field. I was 18 years old, and as the first female administrative manager, he believed in me. His trust and support at such an early stage in my career gave me the confidence to pursue my goals and prove myself in male-dominated industry,” she said of Hayran, who was the club’s general manager. “His mentorship, guidance, and leadership style helped me understand and handle challenges, make strategic decisions, and build strong teams.”

The team had been promoted from the Turkish third division to the second flight in 2009 and finished first in the then TB2L regular season but just missed out on promotion. Now with Çiler Çağlayan on board, Hacettepe finished second in the regular season but took second place in the post-season to earn promotion to then the Turkish first division.

Hacettepe ended up staying there two seasons, being relegated back to the second division in 2013, and Çiler Çağlayan returned to her studies in Ankara.

She would later re-unite with former Hacettepe head coach Alp Bayramoğlu at Acıbadem Üniversitesi SK, a newly founded club Istanbul-based club in 2014.

Acıbadem started in the third division and immediately won the league and were promoted to the second flight in 2015. They finished second in the regular season in 2015-16 but lost 3-1 to Balıkesir in the Semi-Finals.

In 2016-17, Acıbadem finished sixth in the league and beat Socar Petkim in the Quarter-Finals but then finished last in the Final Four, which was a round-robin style group with each team playing the other three teams home and away.

Acıbadem were unable to reach the top flight and team owner Mehmet Ali Aydınlar decided to give up the club’s rights to Bahçeşehir Koleji Sports Club.

Çiler Çağlayan moved over to Bahçeşehir in 2017 and started taking the new club to another level. And one of her role modes was Alper Tunca Yılmaz, who served as sports director and general manager at Anadolu Efes Istanbul from 2009 to 2024 and guided the club to back-to-back Turkish Airlines EuroLeague crowns in 2021 and 2022.

“I didn’t get the chance to work with Alper Tunca Yılmaz, but his work ethic and dedication have always been an inspiration to me. Watching his approach to hard work, discipline, and professionalism has influenced the way I approach my own career,” she said of Yılmaz, who in November 2024 left Efes and became sports director of the Turkish Basketball Federation.

Not easy being a woman in a man’s world

Look at Çiler Çağlayan’s resume and you have to think the general manager has really climbed the basketball ladder and deserves to be on the brink of something fantastic with the club.

Look at Çiler Çağlayan herself, and if you don’t know who see is and her standing in the basketball landscape, all that hard work, sweat, dedication and grind often has been for naught.

“At the beginning, outsiders never assumed I was a manager. Many thought I was a nutritionist or part of the medical team. Some team representatives even assumed I was a TV presenter rather than a basketball executive. And on a few occasions, at the passport controls in airports, I was even asked if I was a cheerleader!”

Let that sink in. The general manager of a club with a European club title as well as a runners-up finish in a second season was being asked if she was a cheerleader for the team.

Still, Çiler Çağlayan took the high road, saying: “These moments both funny and eye-opening, showing just how deeply gender stereotypes are ingrained in sports. However, over time, through hard work and persistence, perceptions changed, and now people recognize me for what I am, a manager in basketball.”

She continued: “I never had an ambition for titles. For me, the most important thing has always been hard work, enjoying the journey, and learning as much as possible. I was really young when I started this job, and to be taken seriously took time, let’s say at least 10 years.”

She finished that statement with a smile. But her president knows exactly what she has with Çiler Çağlayan on her side.

“Pınar has always been amazing. She was our administrative manager for years and she has been killing it as the GM as well. She is one of the most respected professionals in Turkish basketball community and deserves it,” Yücel said. “It is of course important for a woman to be in this position and it sets an example, but our intention was never to hire or promote her because of her gender.”

Yücel herself says she really didn’t face many barriers being a woman in the game.

“I’ve been fortunate to receive strong support from everyone at the club and from those around me. This support has made it possible to focus on my goals and continue growing as a leader without being held back. I believe having a supportive environment is key to overcoming any challenge,” she said.

Not the only women in European men’s basketball

What Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan are doing it not entirely unpredecented. There have been and are other women leading clubs in European basketball.

Natalia Furaeva serves as Vice President of eight-time EuroLeague champions CSKA Moscow while Natalia Kuznetsova is the Executive Director of the club. Both have been with the Russian giants since 2002 and in their posts since 2009, being part of two of the EuroLeague titles.

Graziella Bragaglio is the president and co-owner of Pallacanestro Brescia, which won the Italian Cup in 2023.

Veronica Bartoli has served as the president of Reggio Emilia since 2020 and took over from another woman president, Maria Licia Ferrarini.

In Greece, Vasiliki Belekou was the president of the club Charilaos Trikoupis, based in a small city called Mesologi and played in the first division during the 2020-21 season but is now in the amateur divisions.

Audrey Sauret - the former FIBA Women’s EuroBasket 2001 champion with France and two-time Women’s EuroLeague winner - has been the General Manager of French club Élan Béarnais Pau-Lacq-Orthez since September 2022.

In addition, Defne Patir has been the Director of Basketball Operations and Media Relations Manager with Fenerbahçe Istanbul’s men’s team since 2010.

What do leading male figures in Europe think?

With the cases being so few, women holding leadership positions in men’s basketball remains a highly uncommon occurrence. That begs the question, what do some leading male figures in the European game think about Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan and what they are doing with Bahçeşehir College

“I had a lot of talks with them, especially negotiating the deal for their current coach Radonjic. Everything was at a very high level, especially their professionalism,” said Misko Ražnatović, one of the leading agents in European basketball.

“Those two are smart and educated with vision and passion. And it made them successful.”

When asked what barriers he thinks women aspiring to leadership roles face, Ražnatović added: “A lot. Their starting position is low because generally people believe women don’t know the sport, and especially basketball. More or less, nobody has experience in negotiating anything in the sport with women. They had to have a lot of patience and self-confidence to ignore all of that and prove that they are capable of leading their club.”

Himar Ojeda is the sports director of the German EuroLeague club ALBA Berlin. And the Spanish veteran executive is confident in saying women are qualified to be taking leadership positions.

“It's about time that we all correct that. I definitely think that they have all the necessary skills to be effective leaders,” Ojeda said.

“I think it means a lot for European basketball to have a big club with two powerful women. It will give a good impulse and I really hope that the things go well there because it will open up possibilities and appreciation in different places for young women that might be coming up into the organizations.”

And while it may not be hiring a female executive, Ojeda still showed with ALBA how much he values women’s basketball. Before the 2019-20 season, he and the club dedicated themselves to professionalizing women’s basketball in their club and lead it to the national peak. ALBA’s women’s team reached the German first division in 2022 and won the German title in 2024.

“We have some women in our organization and we're trying to empower them and trying to open up situations for them. And Bahçeşehir College is definitely a good example. It will be very, very powerful. I would love to envision a time when women will be leading clubs not as an exception.”

Ojeda urged that not all men are the same and not all women are the same. But there are some traits that women tend to have, he said.

“I don't think there will be big differences that they're women and the others are men. Still, as a general idea, I think women are less tempted to go into overpowered situations that historically we as men have been done,” he said.

Nemanja Bjelica, for his part, doesn’t know why it’s such a big deal to have two powerful women leading the club. The former EuroLeague MVP with Fenerbahçe and former NBA champion with Golden State experienced that in the United States during his seven years in the NBA.

Bjelica witnessed Greek-American Matina Kolokotronis as Chief Operating Officer with the Sacramento Kings. Kolokotronis is serving her 27th season with the Kings.

“She was doing the same stuff. So I don't know why it's strange when you see some female running the club or being on the top of the club,” Bjelica said.

There was also Nanea McGuigan, who has been Senior Manager, Executive Assistant to the General Manager, and Basketball Operations Coordinator at the Golden State since 2004.

“I think maybe women are more organized than us,” Bjelica said, adding: “Sometimes women do things better than we do and it maybe helps make it a little more equal.”

Yücel once said in an interview that when a woman touches something, everything becomes more organized and more professional. She talked more about that women’s touch.

“Mostly the intangible things and little details matter to me in this case. I do not want to differentiate anyone, but I believe having a diversed environment in the work place leads to success. Most of the sports teams do not have that and I think it gives us an edge.”

And Çiler Çağlayan added: “Having a woman in the management brings a unique and positive impact on a club’s culture and values. Women in leadership roles often emphasize communication, collaboration, relationship-building, fostering a healthy and structured work environment. This approach encourages stronger teamwork between departments, improving efficiency and creating a more connected organization. A well-organized and communicative culture directly benefits team performance, morale, and long-term stability.”

One of Bahçeşehir’s players, Jaleen Smith loves the idea of having women at the head of the club.

“That's amazing. I tell everybody: my president, she's a woman, because you never hear anything about that in European basketball. You could say she's like the Jeanie Buss (Los Angeles Lakers controlling owner and president). But it's great to have leadership like that because she treats herself as a professional as well. She comes in, talks to us before the games. She's taking care of everybody, like the true professional that she is,” Smith said.

“And having her and Pinar is really nice to have. And it also shows growth in the basketball world that more women could be in that position and have successful basketball teams under their leadership.”

When asked how important it would be for this club with this dynamic to reach the EuroLeague, Smith added: “If we go to EuroLeague, then it's going to be … it's going to be fucking amazing to have a woman president in the EuroLeague with a team. That's going to be awesome to say and also to be a part of. She has her team in EuroLeague and brought it up from basically nothing to now this.”

Former NBA champ and EuroLeague MVP as sports director

Nemanja Bjelica has had a front-door seat to watch Yücel and Çiler Çağlayan. After playing the game for 20 years, Bjelica, who calls himself just a kid from Block 70 in New Belgrade, joined forces with Bahçeşehir College in April 2024, taking the spot as sports director.

During the 2023-24 season, Bjelica was with Fenerbahçe but unable to play. Bahçeşehir College was playing a game in the city and he decided to use his free time and watch a game.

“I learned more and I met with the people of Bahçeşehir College and it just happened. I never expected, I never counted on this. I was never thinking in this direction. My goal was always to go back to NBA, to stay there, to live in USA. But now I'm here, I'm very happy,” Bjelica said.

The 36-year-old announced his retirement from the game on March 23, 2024 and only about four weeks later on April 21, Bahçeşehir College announced that he had been hired as sports director.

“What Begüm Yücel has done is unbelievable. I never seen such a club organization in Europe. I'm not putting Bahçeşehir College into the top 10 teams in EuroLeague. I know where we are now. But potential wise, I'm just talking about big picture, it's beautiful, it's unbelievable.”

Bjelica played from 2010 to 2015 in the EuroLeague and the final two years in Türkiye with Fenerbahçe, winning the league MVP in 2014-15. And he understands the pressure that teams in the country face - losing to Real Madrid in the Semi-Finals of the Final Four.

“Türkiye is very tough place to work because you need to win every day. You need to win yesterday,” he said. “I'm competitor and I want to win, but I'm very aware, even though what we did so far, it was really great accomplishment. But what about next year? So we got to have consistency. We got to be professional and a philosophy or a family like this team is completely different than other team. We want to be gentleman, we want to behave well. It's all other small things what can help you to build some big organization. Of course it takes time but it's a different culture.”

And all that is a testament to the work of the president and general manager.

“It's great that females are working in some sports organization. Because I believe that all of us, we are equal. So she's the best,” Bjelica said of Yücel. “We are lucky that the family loves basketball, that our president loves basketball. It's easier to talk, to explain. And I believe what I learned most in this job, you got to be honest. You got to be honest. Even if you make mistakes, you just got to say what you think, what you feel. Because otherwise, a big company or a big sports organization with more than 30, 50 people who you see every day, then you're going to lose the edge. You're going to lose the trust. So everybody's got to be on the same page. You need to treat everybody the same. You need to respect, first of all, yourself. You need to respect your employees. And, of course, I always got to say you got to win.”

Bjelica has been in the game of basketball for some two decades, and what Çiler Çağlayan is doing with the club just thrills him.

“Without Pinar, I wouldn't be able to do anything. For me, it’s a privilege, and I’m really grateful working with her, and I can learn a lot of stuff from her because I was so lucky to be in the best team in the world, like Golden State Warriors, and I saw the best from the best. And what Pinar is doing here - like her skills, her job - it's like the same with the top NBA teams,” he said.

“Pinar is special and she's a hard worker. And she's like the top people from the NBA. So we are a very professional team and organized. And without her, we wouldn't be here today.”

Bjelica was asked to further explain what he meant in terms of Çiler Çağlayan and being at a similar level as NBA executives - not being asked to compare.

“What she's doing is the same way as top NBA teams. She's always on time. She comes first to the office. Always leaving last. She's so focused, she always prepares everything on time and always thinks ahead,” he said.

Çiler Çağlayan meanwhile believes that adding Bjelica adds instant credibility to Bahçeşehir College and their reputation.

“It was a crucial decision for the future of our club. Nemanja’s experience and deep understanding of the game instantly elevated the club’s credibility, professionalism, and basketball operations,” she said. “His experience as a EuroLeague MVP and NBA champion brings unique perspective on team building, player development, and competitive culture.”

She continued: “His presence makes Bahçeşehir College a more attractive destination for top players, as they know they will be working together someone with proven success at the highest levels. From the start, we have had a strong and open communication, and it is very important to build the culture together also with the same vision.”

Is Bahçeşehir College ready for the EuroLeague

Once Yücel took over as club president, one of the first trips she made was to Belgrade to speak to Dejan Bodiroga, the president of Euroleague Basketball.

“I wanted to meet him mainly because he is in charge of the best basketball organization in Europe. I wanted to learn from his experiences and we discussed the steps we could take to grow as a team, also we talked about basketball and management,” Yücel said.

Bahçeşehir College may only be five EuroCup victories away from being in the EuroLeague and have a head coach with EuroLeague experience and many players who have played in the competition, but that doesn’t mean the club is ready for the EuroLeague.

“EuroLeague is a different level of competition with the teams having larger budgets and deeper rosters. Bahçeşehir College is capable of following all kinds of requirements being a part of the EuroLeague. We have a great and consistent organization off the court also but with the help of Euroleague, it will get better and better,” Çiler Çağlayan said.

“We are trying to establish the right structure where everyone only focuses on their own responsibilities without taking on extra burdens. This allows each person to perform their job better and ensures that the system runs smoothly and consistently.

“There are no easy games in Euroleague, so also mentally we should be ready for the pressure of it and keep the winning mentality and consistency as a key.”

International Women’s Day

It seems fitting that the Saturday before arguably the biggest game thus far in the Bahçeşehir College club history - March 8 - is International Women’s Day. The world will be celebrating women around the globe and given their status as role models, both of Bahçeşehir College’s female leaders stressed the importance of the day.

“International Women's Day is a powerful reminder of the strength and resilience of women worldwide. As the president of a sports club, this day highlights the ongoing journey towards gender equality, especially in sports. It's a celebration of the progress we’ve made, while also motivating us to continue advocating for equal opportunities and support for women in every field,” Yücel said.

And Çiler Çağlayan added: “March 8 is a chance to highlight that competence, hard-work, vision, and leadership should always outweigh gender bias. Leadership has no gender!May we always celebrate women, not just today but every day.”

And may we no longer need to see cases like Begüm Yücel and Pinar Çiler Çağlayan as anything special just because they are women. Until then, let’s all realize just how special the situation at Bahçeşehir College is.

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Here are his comments from his Twitter account announcing the diagnosis of the injury (AI translated):

“Hello everyone. In the last match I suffered an injury to the cruciate ligament in my right knee.
Even though you never expect these things, it was something I didn't count on. It hurts me because I was feeling especially good and it was a very happy time in my life and career. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disoriented, a little sad and a little angry. I have a mix of emotions inside me that makes me think more than I should right now, but the boy who fell in love with this sport a long time ago doesn't plan on giving up easily.
I recovered once. It was hard, but I recovered. I plan to give it my all to do it again a second time.
I feel like I still have a lot to give to basketball, and something inside me tells me that basketball still has a lot left to give me.
See you in a few months on the courts. Thank you all for the messages of support.”

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It seems almost fitting that Carlos Alocen is playing at Dreamland Gran Canaria. Not only does the club sponsor’s name describe the playmaker’s joy of the game. But playing on an island where the sun dominates daily life shows how far Alocen has come since some of his darkest days.

Any article about Alocen for the foreseeable future must at least bring up November 26, 2023. That was the day when Carlos Alocen’s world returned back to normal.

He contributed 1 point, 3 rebounds and 1 assist in 8 minutes in Real Madrid’s 85-76 win over Andorra. But it wasn’t the points or assists that mattered. But the minutes played. That was the first time the point guard had played in a game for 651 days.

“It's something that I will have in my head all my life,” he said. “It's like the reminder for all the days, all the bad days, all the … the journey that I had. For sure, I was so proud, but that is a mix of a lot of feelings. I had all my family, all my friends in the arena. I had a chance to play. We won. Great feelings. No pain. Everything was like a perfect day. It’s like a reminder of all the days that I struggled, that I was off the court. And that day for sure is something that I will always remember.”

Alocen suffered a complete ACL rupture in his left knee in February 2022 during a Spanish league game at Unicaja Malaga. The initial estimation was he would miss seven months but his return was delayed because of an injury relapse.

In interviews about his return, Alocen said “I thought about it every night before going to sleep.” He elaborated on that.

“It's something that I said almost every day. You think about your return, you think about coming back to play and in the bad moments you wanted it to be right now and you know that it's not possible because you are maybe not feeling well or something is not how you wanted it to go.”

Missing two years still very early in his career was very difficult.

“Now I see all the journey, learning during the journey, growing during the journey. Yeah it was really tough, but I have learned a lot about those tough days,” he said.

Alocen admitted it was not easy to see good things that came of the whole time away.

“But the thing that helped me a lot was when I was not thinking about basketball or my injury, I was with my family, with my friends, talking about other things that, for my head was really good because I was all the time thinking about basketball or my knee, if I'm going to come back, if I'm not.”

The thing Alocen missed most about the game was the daily routine with his teammates.

“It's true that I can say, yeah, the game, the feeling of the game, for sure. When you are on the court and you feel all the arena, all the energy is great. But I missed the day to day. Sometimes when you are injured, you don't travel, you don't eat with your teammates, you are not in the feeling of the team. For me it's the day to day, the practices, the jokes, the bus, the flights. You don’t really appreciate the things you have when you are heathy.”

Alocen returned to Real in November 2023 and finished the season with the Spanish giants, appearing in 18 games in the Spanish ACB and contributing 3.1 points and 1.8 assists as well as 1.5 points and 1.4 assists in 12 EuroLeague games.

During the off-season, Alocen decided to move on from Real after being with the organization since 2020. He also played under contract with Madrid in 2019-20 but spent the season with his hometown club Zaragoza on loan.

But Madrid had a number of point guards and Alocen’s number one priority was playing time. And he landed at Gran Canaria.

“Gran Canaria was a great place, playing in a great competition like the EuroCup, two games per week, a club that wants to grow. It keeps growing a lot. For me, I had other chances, but it was an easy decision for me to come here because they showed a lot of interest. And for me, that was the key, too,” he said.

Joining Gran Canaria also meant playing for a head coach Jaka Lakovic, who as point guard won the EuroLeague as a player with Barcelona in 2010 and won two Spanish league crowns and four Greek league titles with Panathinaikos Athens. He played at two FIBA Basketball World Cups and seven FIBA EuroBaskets as a player for the Slovenia national team. Lakovic also shined as a head coach, helping Gran Canaria win the EuroCup in 2023 and being assistant coach on the Slovenia team that won the FIBA EuroBasket 2017.

“Jaka is great. He was great as a player. I think he's great as a coach too. The day-to-day with him is so good because he likes to go into the details. He sees everything as a team, for sure, but as an individual, he helps me with some details, with some things that he has experienced as a basketball player, as a top point guard. And for sure, it's a gift for me,” Alocen said. “It's a nice opportunity that I'm 24 and still learning a lot about basketball. Jaka loves basketball. He lives for basketball and I think he's a great mentor.”

And that relationship with Lakovic was a factor why Alocen choose Gran Canaria.

“It was a factor because I knew a lot of things about Jaka. We have the same agent too. All the things that I heard about Jaka were positive things.”

On top of that, Alocen shares the court with veteran French point guard Andrew Albicy. The 34-year-old has been with the club since 2020 and won the EuroCup with them in 2023. He also has won two Olympic silver medals with France - 2020 and 2024 - as well bronze at the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 and two silvers at FIBA EuroBasket - 2011 and 2011.

“Andrew is great. He's a great guy. He's an amazing player - a lot of years in the league, a lot of years in the ACB, a lot of years with Gran Canaria in the EuroCup too. He knows the league, he knows the competition. He's a great hard worker, great point guard, of course. He's a veteran and I'm learning a lot of from him because he knows a lot about basketball too. He loves basketball too. He watches a lot of games. He enjoys basketball and that's something that I really appreciate,” Alocen said. “Basketball is a very important thing for me and something that I love. When I share the court and the day to day with people that have the same feeling it's great.”

Alocen’s first season with Gran Canaria also featured him finally take a leadership role with the Spanish national team. In the two wins over Slovakia during the November 2024 window for the FIBA EuroBasket 2025 Qualifiers, Alocen totaled 16 points, 12 rebounds and 12 assists in 43 minutes.

“It was a great week because I had the chance to again play with the national team. It was something that I had in my head and to have that week and practice with those people and get two crucial wins that we had to win for sure, it was great,” he said.

“It was great to put the Spanish shirt on again and represent our country, have important minutes, two important wins. It was a great week with great people, with a great coach. And I was really happy to have that week because I really needed it. I had a lot of time thinking about that because I wanted to put the shirt on again, to feel that thing that is so special, so different, that is representing your country.”

After such a long time rehabbing on his own, Carlos Alocen is finally starting to live his dream again.

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That is exactly what is important - talking. Sharing experiences, creating information and points of contact and opening eyes to diversity and tolerance. These seven basketball players are all trying to do their part to ensure that basketball in Germany is aware that there is still a lot of work to be done.

This story is a journey through the east of the country of the world champions. A visit to five of the 13 clubs in the easyCredit BBL, ProA or ProB that are based in the new federal states. Author David Hein traveled a shade under 2,000 kilometers over three trips and a series of telephone calls to find out more about basketball in the eastern parts of Germany. A shortened version of this article appeared in issue number 145 of the German language basketball magazine BIG.

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CATL Löwen Basketball - a third ProB club from Erfurt - made headlines on August 22 when head coach and sports director Florian Gut as well Björn Harmsen - head coach of the ProA club Science City Jena - issued a joint statement ahead of the state elections in Thuringia on September 1.

And the message was clear: “Despite all challenges, we promote fair sporting cooperation and an inclusive, cosmopolitan society. Democracy is a team sport and the people of Thuringia have many talents for a successful, shared future.”

Gut and Harmsen's campaign - an appeal not to vote for right-wing extremists - received a lot of positive feedback from the basketball community. But in the end, it wasn’t enough.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) - a right wing party that has been officially recognized by a German court as suspected extremist - became the strongest force in the Thuringian state parliament with 32.8% of the vote.

“In my view, polarization in society has increased significantly in recent years. Especially since the pandemic, discussions between people have become more heated and a much less pronounced understanding of democracy and tolerance is evident in the conversations. It often becomes very brutal and resentment is becoming very strong again, especially against people from abroad. And in a certain form, unfortunately, more and more people are being persuaded by people who primarily stir up hatred and incite hatred against other people. And that is worrying,” Gut said.

Gut spoke out again against racism and xenophobia and their consequences in the MDR report “Die Große Angst - Zukunft in Ostdeutschland” (“The Great Fear - Future in East Germany”) - which came out after the election in Thuringia.

Musa Abra also appeared in the MDR report. The 18-year-old is one of the club’s greatest talents and is a real Erfurt native - born and raised. However, many in the state capital don’t see him as a player who was nominated for the German U18 national team training course in February 2024.

Instead, Abra talked about a past that should be long past.

“I was spat on. I was insulted when I was little,” he said in the report.

That was enough to warrant a visit to Erfurt and talk to those on the ground about the situation. An early morning train ride from eastern Bavaria through Nürnberg to the center of Thuringia ended with Gut picking up his visitor at the Erfurt main station.

A tour of the club’s facilities ended with the team practice early in the season. After the session, Abra told the visitor that a lot has changed in the city - especially in the people.

“You really notice it when you go out on the street, you notice it in the faces, in the eyes of the others. It has become a bit creepy.”

Taking part in the video report did Abra good.

“It was definitely a bit strange because you’ve never really had a situation where you’ve spoken so strongly about racism. That’s why I found it a bit unusual for me. But it was also a bit liberating because I could talk about my experiences and also speak for others who perhaps don’t have or didn’t have the chance that I did. But in any case, it was a good feeling.”

Although he was born in Germany and speaks the language perfectly, many people don’t see Abra as German. This is because of his skin color, which comes because his father is from Sudan but has lived in Erfurt for almost 30 years and runs a Sudanese bistro.

“My father experiences racism a bit more strongly than I do. When I hear what he has to experience every day, I find it a bit more extreme.”

Abra’s sister, he says, has been pelted with stones but fought back with words. She gave a speech at the Erfurt cathedral during the Black Lives Matter period and is also politically active in Berlin.

Abras teammate Tyseem Lyles is a dark-skinned American who himself has experienced a history of racism as an African-American who grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The 32-year-old hardly speaks any German and is not particularly interested in politics in the country, although he has been living in Germany since 2018. Nevertheless, he sometimes asks the coaches or other players what is going on. And he doesn’t like what he hears.

“This is pretty sad when I hear the stories about growing up here and the things that they've experienced and being from here, and it’s all they know,” said Lyles, who is playing his fourth season in Erfurt. “I really wish that there was some way that we can change it so that someone young like Musa doesn’t have to experience the stuff that he did growing up here. It’s really, really sad and it’s unacceptable. But the only thing that we can do is just shower people like Musa with a lot of love.”

Alieu Ceesay is also a newcomer to Erfurt. The Bremen native with a father from Gambia has been playing for the club since 2022. He says the topic of AfD and racism is omnipresent in daily conversations with friends. Many of his friends are active against the right and go to demonstrations and try to educate people.

Ceesay himself doesn’t experience a lot of it. Like many basketball players, he lives in a bubble. Many go to training, come back and don’t leave again - not taking part as much in the daily life in the city. Ceesay still has moments where he shakes his head.

“I was in the city and then I walked past an old woman and she said really loudly: ‘Oh, what has happened to Germany?’ And then she yelled really loudly: ‘Foreigners out.’ ”

Ceesay had another story of one young teenager riding around on his bike at a skate park with a big AfD sign mounted to his bike. Ceesay didn’t speak to the boy because he was among some 20 other boys about 14 years of age. But he would have approached the youngster had he been alone - simply questioned him and not said directly that’s wrong or something.

“I have to try to give him food for thought somehow, so that he thinks to himself, okay, wait a minute, what I’m doing here isn’t right at all.”

Ceesay has a lot of experience with young people. He is a youth coach with the Löwen and leads school clubs. And the AfD topic is already present among his young players.

"I heard that one boy lectured his other friend about why the AfD is bad. And that's a great thing,” he said. “I think it’s a shame that children are confronted with it like that. Confronted with racism at such an early age, whether it’s positive or negative."

All told, the issue is very present for Ceesay.

“I’ve had more encounters here in the two and a half years that have to do with the color of my skin than in Bremen in the 21 years I've lived there.”

There will be more from those in Erfurt, but it’s time to see how the situation is in Chemnitz - home of the easyCredit BBL club NINERS Chemnitz. The two-hour drive takes you through the wooded parts of northern Bavaria and western Saxony - a trip that also conjures up images of the divide of the country as you pass former watch posts where the border once split this region into two very different societies.

The former Karl-Marx-Stadt made big headlines in Germany and around the world in August 2018 when thousands of neo-Nazis, hooligans and right-wing extremist martial artists gathered in the city for days and went after people. They then marched through the city in solidarity with the AfD.

That was six years ago and Steffen Herhold - who was then and still is the NINERS Chemnitz general manager - did not shy away from addressing the issue when players asked about it in the aftermath.

“We invited the players to come, they were here: tryout trainings, interviews with the coach and me, and then we just let them move around freely in the city, not like in a gated community or safari. Instead, they were here for a few days and were not accompanied. They just spent their day here and then a lot of things were put into perspective very quickly,” says Herhold.

Cindy Rössel worked with Herhold in the NINERS management at the time: “I know how difficult it was at times to bring players to Chemnitz, to bring players to the East in general.”

We will hear more from Rössel later in the trip.

In contrast to Thuringia, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - the party of former chancellors Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel - won the election in Saxony in September. The party of Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer took 31.9 percent of the vote while the AfD received 30.6 percent.

Saxony, however, could be considered the hotbed of right-wing parties. The Freie Sachsen (Free Saxons) was founded in the state and has their headquarters in Chemnitz. The group of right-wing extremists, right-wing populists and avowed neo-Nazis is also the most active right-wing extremist party in Germany.

According to the 2023 report by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (German domestic intelligence services), there were 198 demonstrations by Freie Sachsen in 2023 - out of a total of 367 across the country. In 2022 there were 82 Freie Sachsen demos - out of a total of 145.

Nevertheless, NINERS have massively helped to improve the city’s image, to put Chemnitz on the European and world maps for positive reasons.

Herhold’s team won the FIBA ​​Europe Cup 2024 and made the name Chemnitz known across the continent. The club also reached the Semi-Finals of the German playoffs last season, losing to ALBA Berlin in five games. And that came in just their fourth season after earning promotion from the ProA.

Kevin Yebo made a big contribution to the club’s push last season. The center was long considered an MVP candidate in the German league and averaged 10.0 points and 5.1 rebounds in the FIBA Europe Cup, including 15 points and 8 rebounds in the two finals games against Bahcesehir College Istanbul.

And he was enthusiastic about the atmosphere in his two years with the NINERS.

“Chemnitz is a super, super open club. I’ve never had to deal with racism there and it was never an issue in the hall. The hall was always a place where it just didn’t exist,” said Yebo, who came to Chemnitz in 2022 after two years in the ProA with Eisbären Bremerhaven.

“I think this atmosphere in the hall can be a model for what you want to create here in this society. Simply a place where we all live together and where it’s not about how we look. Where we are all just here for one thing. We were all born here to have fun, to enjoy life,” said Yebo, who moved to FC Bayern Munich in the summer.

Yebo admits, however, that he lived a bit in a bubble. That basketball bubble again - just like Ceesay from Erfurt was discussing. A routine: driving to training, home, nap, eating.

“You don’t have that much time to go out a lot or party or just have this normal everyday life of society.”

Yebo himself was not often confronted with racism - but it did occur.

“I once had an incident on the train where a guy walked past me and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. I think he had been drinking a lot, that’s no excuse.”

Yebo said he also cycled past those Freie Sachsen right-wing demonstrations a few times.

“I was just interested in what they were talking about. But then you quickly realized that it was complete nonsense, at least for me, and then you carried on. Sometimes it’s better to block it out.”

Yebo wonders whether he was partly spared more racial encounters because he played for the NINERS.

“If I wasn’t the basketball player, then I don’t know how I would have been recognized. Whether I would have been recognized as the dark-skinned guy or, let’s say, with the N-word. Because I also met people there who told me what it was like for them to grow up there. And that was just a different story than the one I experienced there. It’s possible that I was identified as the basketball player,” said Yebo, whose father came to Germany from the Ivory Coast around 1990.

Yebo also talked about basketball friends of his who play in Aschersleben - located in western Saxony-Anhalt - and said it’s just not nice to go out there, that you’re always looked at and spoken to strangely. A friend of his had played in Rostock and was even followed to his front door.

“I have a lot of foreign friends and each of them has at least one story where they were confronted with racism.”

Eddy Edigin is currently playing his first season with the NINERS - just like for Yebo it is his first time in the new federal states. The 29-year-old was a bit worried when the offer came from Chemnitz and he asked other players about the situation there.

“All I heard for everyone, independent of the others, was: Chemnitz is a nice spot. It gets a worse reputation than it actually is.”

If Edigin had heard something bad, that would be a deal-breaker and he would have broken off talks with Chemnitz.

“After the first week here, I understood everything. All I can say so far is positive,” says Edigin, who was born in Nigeria but has played for Germany at the youth national team level.

However, Edigin also spoke about a questionable situation. He drove to a gas station to get something and a group of men were talking and one of them was looking at Edigin the whole time.

“I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t know why he was staring at like that. I went to my car and there was a NINERS logo sticker on it. Then he said: ‘Okay, lucky.’ He thought out loud but I heard it. That was strange for me.”

It’s time to bring Ferenc Gille into the story. The 26-year-old plays at BG Leitershofen, which is near Augsburg in Bavaria - so in western Germany. He has played in western German states subce 2019.

But Gille was born in the east. And for him, cities like Erfurt and Chemnitz - with their 215,000 and 250,000 inhabitants respectively - were something like metropolises.

As a toddler, Gille lived in Döllnitz - a district of the small town of Bismark in Altmark, high in the north of Saxony-Anhalt. Gille’s mother never saw Gille’s father - a dark-skinned Englishman - again after it became known that she was pregnant. In 2004, his mother married another man and they moved to Kremkau: about 20 minutes by bus from Bismark - even further out in the countryside. Population according to Wikipedia: 191.

“Racism was very, very present in my youth,” said Gille, who was bullied by his classmates in elementary school.

Secondary school students often held Gille on the buses to Bismark to the elementary school so that he couldn’t get off at his stop and had to continue on and find his way back alone.

Gille remembered another episode at an outdoor pool in Bismark. He jumped from a 3-meter board and someone jumped after him and then tried to hold him under water. Luckily, a friend of Gille’s came and freed him. Later that day, the boy came towards Gille and said: “We are right-wingers and you don’t belong here. If you come back here I'll kill you.”

Gille continued: “It was a dark time and I was reminded every day that I was somehow different.”

Gille’s mother divorced her husband and Ferenc and she moved to Stendal for a year and then to Leipzig - which was like a rescue for Gille. He attended the sports school in Halle and played with Weißenfels in the youth team and BSW Sixers in the regional league and ProB. Ferenc however lived in Weißenfels and drove 45 minutes to the Sixers games since he had no desire to live in one of the small surrounding towns.

Weißenfels has 40,000 people is located about 45 kilometers southwest of Leipzig - the former being in Saxony-Anhalt and latter in Saxony. The area is pretty flat and Leipzig is the biggest city by quite some margin with a population of nearly 620,000.

The Sixers play in Sandersdorf - population just about 10,000 - in the rural area about 25 kilometers north of Leipzig and 20 kilometers northeast of Halle (Saale). Driving towards Sandersdorf, visitors see a massive solar park.

BSW actually stands for Bitterfeld-Sandersdorf-Wolfen - Bitterfeld to the west and Wolfen to the north of Sandersdorf - in the so-called chemical triangle because of the chemical and petroleum processing industry.

The area actually has loads of potential as it sits centrally located near the A9 highway going from Berlin to Munich and the A14 highway running from Halle and Magdeburg to Dresden and Prague.

But the spectators simply say Sixers - because the club was founded in 2006. In May 2010, the club was actually sued by the NBA for trademark protection: The Philadelphia 76ers, colloquially known as the "Sixers", belong to the NBA. The 76ers saw too high a risk of confusion. An out-of-court settlement was reached and the club was allowed to continue using the Sixers name, but had to change its logo slightly.

On the way to the Sandersdorf Ballsporthalle - also known as the "Sixers Dome" - posters from the AfD - “Unser Land Zuerst” (“Our Country First”) - are impossible to miss. Not far from the Dome are also beautiful old brick houses and a federal bowling alley.

On the court - as in almost all basketball clubs in Germany - there is a colorful mix of faces. Among them are dark-skinned Germans such as Berlin's Jean-Marley Louis; Max Nwokedi, who played in the Jena youth team, and 18-year-old Ilias Amin, who was born in Münster but grew up in Leipzig.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to speak to the Sixers management or players. When asked for a statement about the political situation, the club said: “As a sports club, we do not comment on political developments. We separate political issues completely from our sports club. The only thing we can say is that we do not have or have never had any problems with racism.”

During an evening visit to the Ratskeller restaurant in nearby Brehna, there was a subtle reminder of where the federal Greens party - known officially as Bündnis90 Die Grünen - stands in this part of the country. On the menu is the “BullShit 90 DER Grüne-Burger” as a veggie burger alternative. Also in green writing.

Not so long ago, the Greens were quite popular in Germany as a party. Also among young people. But that has clearly changed.

In the state elections in September, many young people voted for the AfD. Looking at the 18 to 24 year old voters in Saxony, the AfD received 31 percent of the votes in this age group - an increase of 11 percentage points compared to 2019. In Thuringia, 38 percent of 18 to 24 year old voters voted for the AfD - 15 percentage points more than in 2019. And 32 percent of voters between 16 and 24 years old in Brandenburg voted for the AfD - up 16.5 percent from 2019.

Edigin finds this alarming and shocking.

“When things aren’t going well in an economy or a country, which is what happens, they all go right. All very nationalistic, all very patriotic, all very, very proud. If I have nothing, then at least I have my pride,” Edigin said.

Abra from Erfurt thinks that young people simply haven’t been educated well enough.

“They just watch TikToks, on TikToks the AfD is perhaps well presented in some videos and they may find that cool. They won’t be educated any other way.”

After a night in Brehna, the road trip continues with a short detour to Halle (Salle), where the Mitteldeutsche Basketball Academy (MBA) - the youth program of Bundesliga club SYNTAINICS MBC - is playing a U16 JBBL game against Science City Jena.

The MBA coach is Darren Stackhouse - an American who is married to a woman from Leipzig and lives in Saxony. The 41-year-old played in Germany from 2007 to 2012 - mainly in the 1st and 2nd regional leagues and one year in the ProB. Stackhouse, the cousin of former NBA superstar Jerry Stackhouse, was assistant coach of Crailsheim from 2013 to November 2014 and joined MBC in the youth division in 2015.

He coaches with MBC's lower ranks: in the MBC's youth division as well for the Sixers from Sandersdorf and the Uni-Riesen Leipzig, both of whom have cooperations with MBC.

Stackhouse has experienced the East for many years and is of the opinion that young people could also be influenced by their parents when it comes to voting for the AfD.

“If my mom, for example, say we are Nazis, then maybe my kids will also be Nazis. Another example, if I play basketball, my son will probably also want to play basketball. So this is also a part of it,” said Stackhouse. “The older generation raised their kids in a certain way, who then raised their kids also in a certain way. And this is the spiral effect.”

An important point to consider in the lack of openness in the East is encounters with other cultures.

The former West Germany began making increased efforts to attract foreign workers in the mid-1950s. The first Italians arrived in 1955, followed by agreements with Spain and Greece (1960), Türkiye (1961), Portugal (1964) and Yugoslavia (1968). The number of foreign employees in West Germany - so-called “guest workers” - rose from 73,000 in 1954 to 2.6 million at the time of the recruitment ban in 1973.

At the same time, around 3 million people fled or emigrated from East Germany (DDR) for West Germany. The DDR countered its labor shortage with nationals of socialist-friendly countries. In 1963 there was an agreement with Poland, in 1967 with Hungary. From the 1970s onwards, agreements followed with Algeria (1974), Cuba (1975) and Mozambique (1979). In the 1980s, guest workers also came from Vietnam, Mongolia, Angola, China and North Korea.

The sustainable integration of foreign nationals into DDR society was not planned thanks to the time limit on their stay. And they remained a small minority. Their share within the total population was only about 1 percent until 1989, according to the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship.

“The western part of Germany simply has a head start in dealing with foreign citizens and therefore also a head start in integration. I'm not saying that everything works wonderfully in the western part of Germany and that everything is peace, joy and happiness. That's not the case either. But it's more normal than, for example, having different cultures living together," said Robert Cardenas.

The 42-year-old is half German and half Cuban, born in Chemnitz - then Karl-Marx-Stadt - and played for all three major East German clubs - Jena, MBC and Chemnitz. Cardenas is now an agent with ATHLEADZ, a sports and marketing agency that he founded in the summer of 2016.

“The guest workers weren’t families. They were mostly men who were actually supposed to come for a certain period of time and then leave again. And that meant that integration didn’t really take place. There were no experiences in that sense among the general population, the East German population, with foreign people.”

This led to what Akeem Vargas describes as almost “everyday racism”. The former German national player has been living in Leipzig for a few months and plays for MBC - his first excursion to the East.

Vargas, who was born in the USA to a dark-skinned American father and light-skinned German mother, has already been asked why he can speak German so well and where he is from.

“Is it racism or not? That is relatively difficult, because on the one hand it is a question of interest and on the other hand it perhaps implies a little that you look different, you are not from here.”

Vargas answers that he comes from the south - he was born in Heidelberg - and the answer to that is: “Oh, but where are you actually from? The question was not where are your roots or what are your origins, but where do you come from?”

Vargas classifies this as everyday racism, although the question is asked out of interest and with good intentions.

The same thing happened to Edigin during his time in Chemnitz and Ceesay in Erfurt. Yebo experienced this a few times too and had fun with it here and there. Since he is from the Cologne-Bonn region, he can speak the Kölsch dialect.

“Sometimes I would answer in Kölsch for fun. And then I notice that they are very surprised. And it’s easy to understand why: the encounters are missing,” Yebo said.

Drive about 10 kilometers north from Magdeburg and you will land in Wolmirstedt - located about 100 kilometers east of Braunschweig and 150 kilometers southwest of Berlin in Saxony-Anhalt. The city is home to the SBB Baskets Wolmirstedt.

Fabien Kondo is from Hamburg and has been playing for the ProB club since 2022. The son of two parents from Togo quickly noticed a very low proportion of foreigners in the small town with about 12,000 inhabitants. However, since Kondo plays for the Baskets, he almost enjoys rock star status.

"People are really always friendly and can see that you are probably from the Baskets, even if you are not wearing any Baskets clothes. They approach you, ask for a photo, ask for an autograph. That happens more often because it’s a small place," said Kondo.

Edigin finds this point of contact helpful but also potentially dangerous.

“At the end of the day, people can still differentiate. They can say, okay, he’s a basketball player. But what about the black guy who, I don’t know, works in a supermarket somewhere? What about him? He’s an athlete. But the other one is a parasite. There are distinctions again. And that’s the sad thing about it - that everyone is put in the same box at the same time and if there is something positive, it’s not appreciated at all. They just say, okay, he’s the only one,” said the Chemnitz player.

Back to Saxony-Anhalt where there were no state elections in September. But in June 2024, voters were called to vote in European and district council elections. The AfD received 30.7 percent of the votes in the European elections - compared to 22.2 percent for the CDU - and 29.9 percent in the election for the district council of the Börde district - compared to 22.7 percent for the CDU.

“I find it frightening, to be honest,” said Kondo. “If you go out on the streets, statistically speaking, one in three people voted for the AfD. I don’t think all of them are right-wing or xenophobic in any way, but are doing it out of protest. But I think that’s wrong. That’s not the solution to problems in your own life or to finding that more foreigners are coming.”

This is not surprising, however, for Cindy Rössel, who used to work with Steffen Herhold in Chemnitz. She has been with Wolmirstedt for seven years and is the club’s managing director.

“People don’t hide it. They openly say what they think and how they think, and that’s why it wasn’t surprising. So as bad as that may sound, you could have seen it coming.”

Rössel and the Baskets are also trying to stand up strongly against racism. She gave a short speech before the home game on February 17, 2024 - days after an attack in Oberhausen on two Ukrainian youth players who were playing with ART Giants Düsseldorf. Both 17-year-olds died.

“Sport is a place of encounter with fairness and tolerance. With us, everyone is welcome. There is no black, there is no white. We only have color,” Rössel said.

Rössel knows that it is difficult to attract players to Wolmirstedt.

“We are trying to offer the guys here something. We know that we can’t offer anything with the city - even though Magdeburg is not far away. But we are a reliable club, everyone has a decent apartment and gets their car and the money comes on time. I think you just have to offer a little something.”

The Erfurt general manager and head coach Gut also used the video report to discuss how racism and xenophobia actually had an impact on the club’s ability to attract dark-skinned players to his club. That players - and their parents - asked about their well-being if they joined the club.

“When we wanted to sign young players from Germany with a migrant background, they themselves and even more so their parents brought up the subject very early in the discussions,” Gut says. “Do they have to be afraid of racism? There are very serious concerns and a great deal of uncertainty here - especially in Thuringia.”

Martin Geissler doesn’t see it that way. The 40-year-old was born in Weißenfels and has been the general manager of SYNTAINICS MBC since 2004.

“Racism or right-wing extremism was never a problem for players who came to us, which is why we never had a problem convincing players to come to us,” Geissler said.

He says he has had different experiences in his 20 years as MBC GM, including in his personal environment.

“I have a daughter who also has a migrant background. She walks through the town here in Weißenfels and doesn’t have to worry, even though her skin is darker than that of her 23 classmates,” he adds.

But ultimately the current situation is what it is - however any part of society may see it. And in the end, it could force the 18-year-old Abra out of his hometown of Erfurt. Abra’s mother is worried about him and is considering moving away.

“You always hear from your parents that it just happens. You just have to be strong and fight against it. But when the person you always look up to says, no, I think it’s really time for us to move away. Then it’s really scary.”

Musa said maybe it would be a good chance for his father if he moved somewhere else. But he himself is not thinking about it.

“I’ll stay here in Erfurt anyway because of basketball.”

Abra, however, already has a past in Erfurt and the East. The reasons to stand up to the situation are are stronger for him than for others - Kevin Yebo, for example. Two years in Chemnitz were certainly successful and great with the NINERS fans. But what would Yebo say to someone who is thinking about playing in the east of the country?

“I would really advise people, quite honestly, if you have the opportunity to go somewhere else, then do it. Because you don’t have to put up with that. Nobody deserves that. Nobody deserves that.”

So, where do we go from here?

The trip through a large part of the East showed that Nazis and AfD members are not everywhere on the streets causing chaos. It was clear from the start that this is not the case. Just like not everything is rosy in the western states.

How strong will the AfD be in the rest of Germany - both in the east as well as in the west? Germany has a massively important election on February 23 in which the country will vote for a new parliament after the ruling coaltion broke apart. The federal election will be the first time voters go to the ballots since the three state elections in the former East German states. And the big question is how much ground the AfD will gain across the rest of the country - and if the other parties have learned from their mistakes and the frustration of the electorate and can gain back their trust.

But the shift to the right is also taking place elsewhere in Europe - France, Italy, Sweden, Austria. And not even the biggest stars in the world have been safe from racist slurs.

Back in 2013, Giannis Antetokounmpo was the subject of a racial tirade by Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the leader of the extreme-right Greek Golden Dawn party. Michaloliakos referred to Antetokounmpo - who was born in Athens to Nigerian parents - as a “chimpanzee” in July 2013 shortly after he was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks.

And Michaloliakos said on a Golden Dawn online party broadcast in August 2013 that Antetokoumpo’s parents should have been arrested as illegal immigrants when they were received by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras at his office where Antetokounmpo was granted Greek citizenship.

“A policeman should have arrested them outside the Maximos Mansion (the prime minister’s office) and brought them to a detention center, along with the other illegal immigrants,” Michaloliakos said.

“We can all think that’s crap, but it’s actually there. And it’s not isolated to the East. It’s a pan-European phenomenon, maybe even a worldwide one,” said Herhold.

Of course, politics would have to do a lot to slow down the further spread of this phenomenon. But basketball can also play a part.

And to be fair, many clubs and leagues like the easyCredit BBL are doing their part in the fight against racism.

“The BBL has been pushing the topic more and more clearly over the last five years. The shift to personal storytelling by the players to raise awareness and educate is now in its third year,” said a league official.

The German league promotes the International Day Against Racism on March 21 with an International Week Against Racism. The easyCredit BBL allows German and international players to talk about their personal experiences with racism - and not just from a negative standpoint but also about their view of the world, any positive developments in the fight against racism and simple tools that can enable everyone in everyday life to make their own contribution against racism and not encourage it.

All clubs across the country have individual efforts and actions to help fight against racism and for inclusion and understanding.

“What you can do, which is also totally right and important, is what we do every day in the sports club. It’s about working together, it’s about acting together, talking to each other,” said Herhold.

Gille for his part said athletes in all sports need to deal with it more, speak out against it more, publicly. Take the initiative.

“Athletes reach a lot of people, their fans, etc., because they are in the spotlight and don’t let themselves be silenced. As a group, as athletes, we all have to really deal with these things more intensively. Many athletes are not affected by it or don’t notice it. But others, especially young players, athletes who are not yet in the professional field, for example, also have to struggle with it and it is swept under the carpet.”

Vargas says sport stands for integration, for multiculturalism. And the athlete as an individual can also help.

“I can be present, I can be approachable. And I can be open. And I think it is really important that people, and perhaps German players in particular, because they understand the language and can interact with people, also seek out this conversation in places where the community comes together.”

Basketball offers a chance to improve the city’s image, adds Geisler.

“As an important part of this region, we simply have to do everything we can to ensure that people are motivated, that they see that there are positive things in the region and not just things that are going badly. And that we also show that the people who play for us, who work for us, are also a completely normal part of this society.”

Rössel from Wolmirstedt, for her part, did not shy away from speaking frankly: There is still a problem in the East. Not just basketball, but in every sport.

“I would like to see maybe even the sports faction, that we somehow come together in our region and maybe make another statement and then try to move forward with concentrated power,” she says. “If we somehow come together again and say, this is what we stand for and this is what we want to pass on to you, I think it would have a much greater impact than if it were just the Baskets from Wolmirstedt or the Löwen from Erfurt. Using this manpower to send a political signal again.”

One last change of location. This time not in the East, not in the West and not even in Europe. But New York and New York University in New York City.

David Hollander is a clinical professor with the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport. He wrote a book called “How Basketball Can Save The World - 13 Guiding Principles for Reimagining What's Possible”.

As part of his university course of the same name, Hollander and his students managed to get the United Nations to launch World Basketball Day in 2023. Thanks to Hollander, basketball is the first sport to have its own day - December 21st.

Hollander sees basketball as a philosophy - a kind of academic discipline like math, history, law. Something that can be looked at to solve the problems of the 21st century.

The book talks about 13 principles. The first five - Cooperation; Balance of individual and collective; Balance of force and skill; Positionlessness; and Human alchemy - integrated how you play - i.e. how you behave. The next six principles - Make it global; Gender inclusive; No barrier to access; For the others, the other and the masses; Urban and rural; and Antidote to isolation and loneliness - show how you can change the world with social impact. The last two - Sanctuary and Transcendence - are how we manage to get to tomorrow.

“This sport is particularly good at showing us how to be in this world with each other and make it better. The game is more human in size, interactions, structure and participatory experience. As a result, applying basketball as a world view would be a lot more apt to solving the problems of humanity,” the book reads. "Why not look to a ubiquitous global phenomenon that has continued to grow faster in popularity, relevance, influence and impact than almost any other human activity over the past century.”

Speaking in Italy in March 2024, Hollander said: “Can basketball save the world? I don’t know … But this is my Ten Commandments. This is my Magna Carta, my Bhagavad Gita. To me, this is how basketball can save the world.”

Why not try out this idea? Our society is always looking to new winning models. Yet we continue to go back to the pond of infectious water of a losing example that history has repeatedly condemned. Maybe we should embrace Hollander’s ideas with a winning culture of an authentic team spirit of a basketball team.

A return to Germany to close seems fitting. German Immanuel Kant was one of the central Enlightment thinkers. He has been called the father of modern ethics, father of modern aesthetics and the father of modern philosophy.

His simple principle on how to use the globe should also be considered. He believed no one citizen has a stronger right than any other citizen to occupy a portion of the globe. Every citizen has the cosmopolitan right to visit and nobody can deny that.

And that goes perfectly with basketball since basketball is a small sphere - a fitting reminder of the largest sphere that humans use: the globe.

Maybe it’s time for basketball to have more influence. So that the next players like Musa Abra, Kevin Yebo, Eddy Edigin, Ferenc Gille, Alieu Ceesay, Akeem Vargas and Fabien Kondo do not have to go through these experiences.

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If you look around the basketball globe and talk to observers of the game, many of them will say Germany has emerged as a major player in European hoops - maybe an awaken rising giant or even worldwide superpower in the works.

Think about Germany qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics; taking third place at the FIBA EuroBasket 2022; and then opening eyes around the world by famously winning the title at the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023.

The easyCredit BBL is considered a strong league with great fan support, fiscal responsibility and reliable payments made to players. German clubs are also nearing the pinnacle of the continent’s competitions.

FC Bayern Munich twice came up just short of the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Final Four: losing to Armani Exchange Milan and No. 1 seed FC Barcelona in five games in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 playoffs, respectively.

ALBA Berlin reached the EuroCup Finals in 2018-19, losing in a series 2-1 to Valencia Basket a season after Bayern reached the EuroCup Semi-Finals.

Telekom Baskets Bonn won the Basketball Champions League (BCL) last season to become the first German club to win a pan-European title since Fraport Skyliners Frankfurt in 2015-16 with the FIBA Europe Cup.

RIESEN Ludwigsburg had come close twice in the BCL, finishing fourth in 2017-18 and third in 2021-22. And Bamberg Baskets were fourth in the BCL in 2018-19.

German clubs have been close in the FIBA Europe Cup since Frankfurt’s title as well. Würzburg Baskets reached the Final in 2018-19 and Bonn and Bayreuth both advanced to the Semi-Finals in 2016-17 and 2019-20, respectively.

GERMANY’S TOP PLAYERS ARE LEAVING

Despite all that, German clubs regularly have seen their top players leave with many of the league’s top stars heading elsewhere in Europe.

Over the last four seasons, 21 of the 40 players selected for the All-BBL First or Second Teams have left the league the following offseason - including the last two Most Valuable Players.

The 2022-23 season MVP TJ Shorts fled Germany to France’s emerging power Paris Basketball - along with half the Bonn roster plus head coach Tuomas Iisalo. And the 2021-22 MVP Parker Jackson-Cartwright also left Bonn and Germany to head to the EuroLeague team LDLC ASVEL Villeurbanne.

The masterful Brazilian duo of Yago dos Santos and Bruno Caboclo both helped ratiopharm ulm to the title last season and earned spots on the First Team … and then went abroad. Just like last season Second-Team members Brandon Paul, Stanley Whittaker, Eric Washington and Selom Mawugbe.

Joining Jackson-Cartwright in the exodus following the 2021-22 season was the rest of the First-Team: Maodo Lo, Jaron Blossomgame, Deshaun Thomas and Maik Kotsar as well as Javontae Hawkins from the Second Team.

The 2020-21 First Team members leaving Germany were Trae Bell-Haynes and Jalen Reynolds along with Jayson Granger and Simone Fontecchio from the Second Team.

Four players from the top 10 in the 2019-20 season also left the country after the season. Khadeen Carrington and Marcus Knight were First Team members who decided for another country and Second Teamers Scott Eatherton and Martin Hermannsson left.

The German BBL has long been considered a stepping stone league, but how can this be you might be wondering?

It’s easy. As the saying goes: just follow the money.

And that is exactly what the players are doing as they are leaving Germany for greener pastures - meaning more money going into their bank accounts.

When all is said and done, German clubs have to spend more money than their counterparts abroad to reach the same amount of money that players will receive.

NO EASY TASK

Looking in depth into the economic situation in Germany and comparing it to other countries in terms of basketball spending is no easy task. Getting the information to accurately compare the leagues is like cracking a safe or asking for state secrets.

Many leagues have refused upon inquiry to release important information needed for a solid comparison. The main data needed to build a fully accurate picture of the situation would be total league revenue, total gross spending of the clubs for players’ salaries and total net spending of the clubs for players’ salaries.

Some leagues have been willing to provide more information than others with France being one of the most transparent ones on the continent.

GERMANY

Here is a look at the situation in Germany.

For an unmarried player with no children, a net salary of 60,000 euros needs a gross salary of 133,500 euros, according to the German league. A net salary of 120,000 euros costs a club a gross salary of 244,500 euros.

Individuals in Germany are taxed between 14 and 42 percent for taxable income ranging from 11,600 and 66,700 euros. The tax rate is 42 percent up for until 277,000 euros and then is 45 percent for more than that.

The German Bundesliga generated 127.5 million euros in sales revenue in 2022-23 - up 16 percent from 109.6 million euros in 2021-22 and surpassed the pre-Covid level for the first time.

According to league numbers, all 18 clubs met the BBL minimum budget of 3 million euros. Two clubs had more than 10 million euros in revenue, five were between 5.5 and 10 million, seven clubs had 4 to 5.5 million euros and four were 4 million euros or below in revenue.

League numbers showed that its clubs in 2022-23 spent 48.3 million euros in legal fees, social expenses, payroll taxes, income taxes as well as social security. That was up from 37.4 million in 2021-22.

The clubs also dished out 8.3 million euros - an average of about 460,000 euros per club - to the Employers Liability Insurance Association (Verwaltungs-Berufsgenossenschaft), which is a statutory accident insurance institution for temporary employment agencies, security companies, banks, insurance companies and almost 100 other sectors in Germany. That is an increase of more than 20 percent from 6.9 million euros from 2021-22 - or more than 380,000 per club. The other 52 million euros of expenses were either total assets.

The two biggest incomes for the league were sponsoring at a total of 84.3 million euros and tickets, which jumped from 13.7 million in 2021-22 to 25.6 million in 2022-23.

Speaking of tickets, Germans definitely have been interested in the easyCredit BBL with 1,403,712 fans attending games in 2022-23. That represented 84 percent of the arenas’ capacities. The attendance numbers rose dramatically over 2021-22 though the figure of 764,286 must be qualified since some games were still played under Covid restrictions.

A leading official with a BBL club said teams receive between 300,000 and 355,000 euros per season from the league’s new broadcast deal with DYN.

The 2022-23 season is really the first one which can be compared elsewhere since Europe and the rest of the world had gotten through the pandemic and game operations returned to pre-Covid levels.

SPAIN

That being said, attempts to find salary-relevant economic figures in Spain for the ACB were met with comments such as: “We have all the information, we do financial control for all our clubs activities and budgets, but it is not public information.” Of course it must also be said that it is up to each of the clubs to decide how much of their details they want to make public.

The league did say that the average attendance for the 2022-23 regular season was 6,059 fans per game from a maximum of 8,516, meaning 71.1 percent capacity. As of February 11 this season, average was 6,183 of 8.371 per game for 74 percent capacity.

The league also committed to saying 15.9 million euros in TV/broadcasting revenue was shared by the 18 ACB teams, varying slightly in distribution depending on the standings.

Spain’s tax situation is a bit different than Germany - though the top rates are actually higher depending on region. The usual rate ranges from 45 to 54 percent with Madrid at 45 percent, Barcelona at 52 percent and Valencia at 54 percent.

The tax rate in the northern Spanish area Basque Country, however, is only 20-22 percent with the major clubs there being Baskonia and Bilbao.

One major difference in Spain is if you are a non-resident, meaning you are in the country for 182 days or fewer. Then you are only taxed at 24 percent. If a player stays in the country a second season, they then fall under the higher rates.

But a player can stay in Spain for one season at 24 percent and then leave the country for a season and return and they are once again taxed at 24 percent - but just for that first season back.

Some of the clubs lower in the ACB standings definitely take advantage of this rule.

One of the main teams doing this is Rio Breogan in the city of Lugo in northwestern Spain. The club was promoted to the ACB in 2021 and immediately brought in a number of players debuting in the Spanish top flight: Dzanan Musa, Rasid Mahalbasic, Tyler Kalinoski and Nikola Jankovic.

None of them were back in 2022-23 and instead the club brought in new Spanish debutants such as Justus Hollatz from Veolia Towers Hamburg, Nemanja Nenandic, Toni Nakic, Stefan Momirov, Ethan Happ and Luka Brajkovic.

And after retaining Nakic and Momirov, Rio Breogan for this season brought in Hollatz’s former Hamburg teammate Anthony Polite as well as former Bayreuth big man Martynas Sajus, ex-FC Bayern Munich talent Matej Rudan as well as Ben McLemore, Mouhamet Diouf, Matas Jogela and Rob Gray - all of them playing in Spain for the first time.

There are some big name players who have benefited from the other half of that rule - that they are taxed at the lower rate after a season abroad. Dylan Ennis is one after leaving Andorra and returning to Zaragoza. Janis Timma last played in Baskonia in 2017-18 and is back with Obradoiro. Augusta Lima played at Real Madrid in 2016 and returned in 2018 with Murcia.

Another phenomena in Spain is the image rights - where a club pays an image company to manage the image rights of the player. The companies are not obligated to do anything for the money, but that payment is taxed at a lower rate of 9 percent. One source said clubs can have an image rights payment up to 15 percent of a player’s salary.

ITALY

The clubs from every league are funded in two primary categories: sponsors and tickets. And Italy’s basketball leaders have not pushed the envelop in terms of new arenas. Italy’s minimum capacity of 3,500 spectators for its venues has been in place since 1974.

Italians have this season come out more for games. The average attendance for Serie A games in 2022-23 was 3,570 or 63 percent. In the first half of 2023-24, those numbers have jumped to 3,968 fans or 73 percent.

The Italian league in July 2022 signed a three-year television contract worth 10 million euros, an increase of 54 percent compared to the previous deal.

According to the Melandri Law - Italy’s regulations to govern sporting event rights - Italian clubs receive 60 percent of the TV revenue in equal share. Another 20 percent is divided up considering the standings and the final 20 percent is distributed considering the user base of the clubs - 15 percent according to the number of fans and 5 percent corresponding to the population of the province where the club is located.

The league did not share revenue figures for the league or clubs but Italy’s most important economic newspaper Il Sole 24 ore reported that the total turnover of the clubs in 2019-20 was 120 million euros.

An agency with players in Italy said a contract of 100,000 euros net costs the club 240,000 euros. Lower level contracts of 16,000-20,000 euros cost the club only double.

That being said, Italian clubs - like their Spanish counterparts - also have the ability to use these image rights companies to lower their salary costs with the image rights money declared as a company expense and taxed at a lower rate. If clubs declare a salary of 50,000 and 50,000 goes to an image company that pays the player, then the club total cost is: 50,000 x 2.4 = 120,000, plus the 50,000 to the image company for a total of 170,000. That is a savings of 70,000 euros.

Apparently all clubs except Virtus Bologna and Reyer Venice use the image rights exemption - as those local governments do not allow it. Otherwise there is nothing prohibiting the clubs from utilizing it. And one agency said image rights are used for anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of player salaries.

Similar to the Training Fund in the German BBL, Italy also has a program to help incentivize clubs to play Italians they developed. Clubs pay 15,000 euros to register a player in the Serie A - Italian or foreigner - and that happens each season. If a club has only two young players from their academy among their 12 players, that would mean 150,000 euros. And that money goes to the clubs that developed the player between ages of 14 and 20.

GREECE

While things are quite even in the standings in Italy, Greece has clearly been dominated for some time by Olympiacos Piraeus and Panathinaikos Athens. And those two teams drive the Greek Basket League.

According to a league spokesman, the 12-team GBL is expected to generate 50 million euros in revenue this year. The spokesman said gross salaries for players for this year are estimated at 35-40 million euros with net salaries at 25-30 million euros.

Those numbers were a big jump up from last season predominantly because Panathinaikos’ budget increased from 12 to 20 million euros, according to the league source.

The Olympiacos and Panathinaikos importance can also be seen in the league’s TV money distribution. Both clubs receive 1.5 million euros of the total 7.5 million euro deal with the remaining 4.5 million being distributed to the rest of the league progressively according to the standings.

The tax rate in Greece is 22 percent, which changed more than 4 years ago after the country’s financial collapse. It had been 40-45 percent up to 100,000 euros and then up to 55 percent for up to 1 million euros. There was a luxury tax for more than that. For example, when Vasilis Spanoulis signed with Olympiacos in 2010 the club paid 5.1 million euros for his 2.4 million euro net salary.

One other financial source for the Greek clubs comes from the government. There is a gambling tax in Greece and from the monies that are collected, the state gives money to all the sports. Basketball receives 5 millions euros with the money divided up equally among the 12 teams.

FRANCE

Perhaps the most transparent league is France with the Direction Nationale du Conseil et du Contrôle de Gestion des Clubs Professionnels (National Directorate of Consulting and Management Control of Professional Clubs) (DNCCGCP) acting as an advising group to support the league and clubs to help assure the economic regulation and financial balance of the league as well as assess the current and future financial health of the clubs.

The DNCCGCP publishes an annual report and it provides a pretty clear picture of the situation in the country.

The Betclic Élite’s total operating income for 2022-23 was 111.5 million euros - up 19 percent from the 93.6 million euros in 2021-22. About 45 percent of that money (50.2 million euros) came from sponsoring - down from 48 percent (44.5 million) in 2021-22. And it was a significantly wide range of club usage of sponsoring in their earnings. Nanterre 92 for example had 65 percent of their money come from sponsors while Metropolitans 92 only had 11 percent.

The league received 18.0 million euros in subsidies in 2022-23, which was actually 12 percent lower than the 20.5 million in 2021-22. The report pointed out that should not be interpreted as a disengagement of local authorities but rather a decrease in state aid paid to the clubs in 2021-22.

On the other hand, the league saw gross salaries of players and coaches rise 13 percent from 39.5 million euros in 2021-22 to 44.7 million last season. All told, the Betclic Élite had total operating expenses of 140.2 million euros - up 19 percent from 118.1 million in 2021-22.

Take the 111.5 million euros income and the operating expenses of 140.2 millions, and the total is a loss of 28.7 million euros. Yet the league actually had a cumulative net loss of 5.4 million euros in 2022-23. That is because 23.1 million euros in what are called “Resultat exceptionnel” - the result of exceptional earning minus exceptional loss, exceptional meaning the money does not come from “traditional” earnings like merchandising and ticketing.

That is made up of exceptional prize money - such as after winning a Leaders Cup - or if a club owner decides to invest more money in the team. The latter was the case with with Monaco, who got almost 16 million euros from Alexey Fedorychev; and with Paris, who received more than 5.5 million euros from Eric Schwartz.

There was discussion in France about commitment to financial fair play regulations but instead a luxury tax was instituted. If the accumaled salaries of your players and staff exceed more than 40% of your budget, the club must pay a tax.

Speaking of Monaco, the club won its first French league crown in 2023 and certainly has the bill for it. Despite doubling its operating income from 3.9 million euros to 7.9 million in 2022-23, the club from the principality logged total operating expenses in 23.7 million euros, including 11.3 million euros in gross sports salaries. Those numbers jumped from 15.9 million and 7.1 million euros respectively. That equates to the one single club making up for 55 percent of the league’s losses.

Add Monaco to LDLC ASVEL Villeurbanne and Paris Basketball, and that trio represents nearly 24 million euros of the 28.7 million in total league losses.

ASVEL’s operating income went up from 10.5 million in 2021-22 to 15.0 million last season. Their operating expenses also rose, from 14.0 million to 17.6 million euros. That included gross sports salaries of 4.2 million euros, which were actually down 6 percent from 4.4 million in 2021-22.

Paris meanwhile increased its operating income last season 125 percent from 2.3 million to 3.8 million euros. That did not cover however a 230 percent increase in expenses from 5.5 million in 2021-22 to 9.3 million last season. The spending also included 2.6 million in gross sports salaries 2.6 million - up 67 percent from 1.7 million in 2021-22.

One of the most important notes about the 2022-23 season in France that needs to be observed is what can only be described as the Wembanyama Effect. Victor Wembanyama was the talk of the league playing for Metropolitans 92 as the future No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft.

Metropolitans postponed a league game early in the season to take a trip to Las Vegas to play two games against the G-League Ignite team to get more attention for Wembanyama.

The engaging teenager was covered from world media and everybody wanted to get a glimpse of the future superstar.

Metropolitans saw their tickets sales jump 305 percent from 750,000 tickets in 2021-22 to 3.2 million last season. That helped the club’s operating income increase 114 percent from 4.6 million to 9.9 million last season.

What’s impressive about those increases is that unlike EuroLeague sides Monaco and ASVEL and eventual EuroCup quarter-finalists Paris, Metropolitans only played domestically and did not compete in any European cup.

Metropolitans’ total expenses went up 43 percent from 7.5 million euros in 2021-22 to 10.8 million. And the gross sports salaries jumped slightly from 2.8 million to 3.1 million euros last season.

One budget line in the DNCCGCP report was called “Other expenses”, and it listed 556,000 euros - up from just 13,000 in 2021-22. It does not describe what those expenses are but the trip to Las Vegas could be one of the largest items.

One of the items in the income section for Metropolitans was called “Other products”, and it was 2.7 million euros last season after only 180,000 euros in 2021-22. The DNCCGCP report states that money is the compensation received by the club as part of the NBA draft selection of both Wembanyama and his fellow first round pick Bilal Coulibaly, who played with Metropolitans last season as well.

Thanks to the Wembanyama Effect, the Betclic Élite set a new record in attendance with nearly 1.2 million spectators. The average attendance at the end of the regular season was 3,910 with SLUC Nancy Basket setting a new league average attendance record with 5,829 spectators per game. The 87 percent capacity also eclipsed the previous league best of 83 percent in the 2017-18 season.

POSSIBLE CHANGES

Again, without detailed information from all the leagues across the continent and the intricacies of the financial landscapes in the countries, it is impossible to give an accurate comparison of the situation.

But instead of just complaining and pointing out all the problems, why not try to offer up some possible solutions.

It seems the number one issue in German basketball is the VBG - the accident insurance institution. The clubs’ yearly contributions to the organization will continue to grow as they earn more money. One BBL team functionary expects the VBG bill to eclipse the 500,000 euro mark for the pay period.

Any kind of relief for the clubs in accordance with the VBG - which is not in the hands of the league - would be a huge step in German teams being able to compete financially with other countries.

One head of a European agency said Germany’s extra costs “suffocate” teams’ chances of competing and “cripple” them in keeping high level talent.

German politicians could also listen to the calls of labor experts and industry advisors and try to make it easier to attract higher quality employees in all fields: researchers, developers and better basketball players.

A way this would be possible is to lower the tax rate for those individuals for the first year they are in the country - similar to the model in Spain.

Denmark also has a special tax scheme for researchers as well as certain employee benefits for a maximum of seven years. They are taxed at a rate of 32.8 percent instead of the usual rate of up to 52 percent.

Another possibility a club official came up with was the league mandating clubs to pay into a savings fund with money from various areas designated for future investments. For example, take 200,000 of the 300,000 euros from the TV/advertising deal for the video rights and put it into an escrow account. Once there is enough money in the account, the club can for example then build a 24/7 practice facility like the Orange Campus in Ulm.

That would give German clubs a competitive edge to attract players, who might be able to earn more money in another country but they would get the best practice facilities in Europe.

Another possible push for basketball in Germany could be more of the top football clubs in the country following the lead of Bayern Munich and start up a basketball program. More football clubs using their financial clout would push the entirety of the league - just like the promotion of Bayern to the Bundesliga in 2011 did for the league.

The actual full implementation and observance of the financial fair play rules in European basketball would also benefit German teams since they act very fiscally responsible compared to others across the continent.

FORWARD-THINKING LEAGUE

It would be one thing if the easyCredit BBL did not really push the envelop and try to increase the total level of the league. But that is not the case at all.

Way back in May 2011, the BBL famously put out the “Vision: 2020 the best national league in Europe”. The league - spurred on by CEO Jan Pommer - set long-term goals based on improvements in attendance figures, television ratings and revenues and better sporting results among the clubs.

Clubs were required to have a minimum budget of 1 million euros as well as an arena with at least 3,000 capacity. The league also instituted youth talent promotion guidelines for the U16 JBBL and U19 NBBL leagues to statutes for all BBL teams.

The BBL in 2010-11 had just achieved a new attendance record 10 years in a row, eclipsing the 4,000 mark for the first time in 2010-11. And the clubs went into the 2011-12 season with a total budget of 61 million euros.

The BBL in 2012 instituted the 6+6 rule by which clubs must have six players with German passports on a 12-player game roster. At the end of the 2011-12 season, Germans played 22.39 percent of the minutes of the 2011-12 season. That has jumped to 33.3 percent in 2022-23 - topped by Braunschweig’s 63.3 percent. Rostock had the lowest percentage at 19.7 percent while 11 clubs had Germans play at least 35 percent of their minutes last season.

While some considered the Vision 2020 a failure, it achieved many of the things the league had hoped for - especially in terms of economics and organization.

In 2015, Stefan Holz took over from Pommer as league CEO and his stated mission was: “We need faces, we need German faces. We need full arenas and major TV reach.”

The league in November 2022 came up with its next strategy for the future, calling it Triple-Double.

By the start of the 2032-33 season, the minimum budget will be increased from 3 million to 6 million euros. The minimum will increase by 500,000 euros every two years. In addition, the minimum arena capacity will jump from 3,000 spectators to at least 4,500 by the 2032-33 season. But it will be a higher minimum in many cities. A minimum capacity of 1 percent based on the next 100,000 inhabitants is then required. A club in a city with 650,000 inhabitants must have a hall with at least 7,000 seats.

The league also wants to double the league’s reach in terms of TV, traditional digital (websites and apps) and social media and increase the teams’ success in international competitions.

NEXT NEW FACES NEEDED

Germany’s league and its clubs are trying all they can to really take the next step in the continent. But the financial infrastructure in the country is not really allowing it.

If nothing changes, then the German clubs will need to continue one aspect where they are truly elite on the continent - finding new talents.

According to one of the leading figures of one of the top agencies in Europe, German clubs have the best scouts in all of Europe. And they need the great scouting personnel in order to find the quality to compete on the European stages.

Just look at some of the players who are debuting in the BBL this season: Trevion Williams from Ulm, Jeff Garrett and Wesley van Beck at Chemnitz, Hamburg’s Aljami Durham and VJ King, Chevez Goodwin from Rostock, Elijah Childs at Heidelberg (after starting the season at Ludwigsburg), Oldenburg’s Chaundee Brown and Jhivvan Jackson from Tübingen.

There are also some stars who are in their second season in Germany and excelling, including Vechta’s Tommy Kuhse, Otis Livingston and Zac Seljaas at Würzburg and Rostock’s Derrick Alston.

Would it be a surprise if nearly all of those players get rewarded for their great seasons in 2023-24 and leave Germany for more money elsewhere for 2024-25?

As difficult as it is for German BBL fans to admit … no.

And once more and more of those players do leave the country, then it will be up to the clubs to give fans the next new faces to fall in love with - before they too follow the money.

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Hundreds of international players every year flock to college basketball in the United States. Youngsters from throughout the globe are looking for chances to play during an important development time.

And now there is an added incentive to play for colleges - making money.

FIBA publishes an annual International Basketball Migration Report, and findings from the Switzerland-based International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) showed that 781 international male players played for Division I schools in 2022-23. A total of 324 Europeans decided to go the college route - a number which has increased drastically from 182 in 2016-17 and rose from 309 in 2021-22.

A major reason for the migration is less opportunity to develop in their own country. According to the report, no league in the world averaged more than 10 minutes per game for national U21 players. And the world wide average percentage of national U21 players decreased from 17% in 2022 to just 15.8% in 2023.

Germany came in at just 14.4% in 2023, down from 15.4% a year before and from 15.5% in 2021. Those U21 national players averaged just 4.2 minutes per game in 2023, down from 5.7 minutes in 2022.

The lure of 351 Division 1 college basketball programs which allow young players to get to know the United States, feel the hype of playing college basketball and often being seen as stars in their schools, get into a regular weightlifting program, take themselves out of the comfort zone and actually get playing time is too much to pass up.

The CIES does not break down how many players from the specific countries have taken the jump to the United States, but more and more are going - also players who have played for their countries’ youth national teams in recent years.

One factor that will lure even more Europeans - and already is - is Name, Image and Likeness, more commonly known as NIL.

If you follow college sports in the United States at all, you probably have heard of NIL. But what might not be known is just how powerful an instrument this new phenomenon has become.

Let’s take a look at how NIL came about; issues that have surfaced since it has metamorphasize into what it has become; and what impact it is already having and will continue to have on European basketball.

Name, Image and Likeness has its roots back to a former college basketball superstar named Ed O’Bannon. Back in the early 1990s, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) was re-living a moment of being a powerhouse again. In 1995, O’Bannon and his younger brother Charles O’Bannon along with Tyus Edney and George Zidek helped the Bruins win the NCAA title - UCLA’s 11th and first since 1975.

Ed O’Bannon was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four after picking up 30 points and 17 rebounds in the national championship game. Later in 1995, he was drafted with the ninth overall pick in the NBA Draft by the New Jersey Nets. He would go on to play 128 NBA games over two seasons with the Nets and Dallas Mavericks. O’Bannon would then play across Europe in Italy, Spain, Greece and Poland besides also one season in Argentina before retiring in 2004.

Fast forward four years and we get to O’Bannon’s part in the NIL ordeal. In 2008, he had been told by a friend that his son had a new video game and that O’Bannon was in the game.

The game was NCAA Basketball 09 from Electronic Arts (EA) Sports, and sure enough O’Bannon recognized himself in the game - a tall, bald, lanky left-handed power forward with same skin tone and his No. 31.

In July 2009, O’Bannon decided to file a lawsuit against the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company, the latter being the body that licensed the rights for the game. O’Bannon was the lead plaintiff of a class action suit alleging violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act and also actions against his right of publicity, which are rights of an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image and likeness.

O’Bannon was joined in the lawsuit by 19 other former college athletes including former NBA superstars Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson.

A US court in California ruled in favor of O’Bannon and the plaintiffs on August 8, 2014. The NCAA appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, but the highest court in the country denied the appeal on October 3, 2016, and the NCAA was ordered to pay the plaintiffs 42.2 million dollars in fees and costs.

The sports community argued for decades that student-athletes should get paid. The NCAA had forever been dragging its feet, arguing that they were being compensated by getting a free education. The NCAA said once athletes would get paid then they would no longer be amateurs - one of the fundamental concepts of the NCAA - and instead become employees.

All this despite the fact that the NCAA was raking in massive money from mainly men’s college football and men’s and women’s basketball. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament - more affectionately known as March Madness - brought in billions of dollars in advertising on its own.

The plight of student athletes also gained traction in 2015 when the popular comedian and political commentator John Oliver discussed the issue on an episode of Last Week Tonight.

With the O’Bannon ruling as a basis, state legislatures started putting pressure on the NCAA. In 2019, California passed a law saying student athletes couldn't be forced to sign away their rights to profit from their name, image and likeness.

That law was signed into effect by California Governor Gavin Newsom during an episode of LeBron James’ HBO show “The Shop”. O’Bannon was also on the show along with James’ business partner Maverick Carter, agent Rich Paul, former UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi, and former UConn and current WNBA player Diana Taurasi.

James admitted during the show that he skipped college because he couldn’t get paid and he needed to help his mother financially.

Florida followed California’s lead and approved a similar law that would go into effect on July 1, 2021.

The NCAA was left no choice and caved in. On June 30, 2021, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors put in place interim NIL rules. This meant that student athletes could profit from their marketable profiles for the first time.

But what that meant exactly in the practice was still unclear.

About a month after NIL was allowed, collectives started being formed. These collectives are organizations made up of college boosters - mainly alumni of a specific college who funnel money to the collective to be used to attract and retain talent for the school’s sports teams.

These are essentially the money providers as the collectives are also responsible for brokering NIL deals for the athletes. Almost every university and college has a collective responsible for NIL contracts. And it’s important to note that these collectives are not directly affiliated with the university.

Some collectives have more money than other collectives, meaning some colleges have more NIL money available to bring in players. And collectives work differently in terms of spreading out the money. Some give the most money to the best players and other spread it throughout the roster.

Another landmark change that would have have major implications on the importance of NIL came in April 2021 - just before NIL was approved. The NCAA allowed student-athletes to transfer from one college or university to another and compete immediately the following season. Prior to that, student-athletes were forced to sit out one year.

Now players who want to switch schools for whatever reason - not enough playing time, not getting along with coach, wanting to play at a higher or lower level of competition - could do so and not miss a year of playing.

The NCAA, however, limited it to a one-time penalty free exception, and players transferring a second time would then have to sit out the following season.

Anything the NCAA puts its hands on seems to have problems, and this one-time exception transfer was no different as it is facing massive challenges. As of mid-January, 10 U.S. states, Washington DC as well the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the NCAA as joint plaintiffs charging that prohibiting student-athletes from transferring more than once violates antitrust law - specifically the same Sherman Act that O’Bannon cited in his NIL suit.

The plaintiffs are urging that college athletes’ current and future earning potentials are negatively impacted by the rule. The player’s NIL value diminishes while sidelined and his future earning potential is reduced because he cannot showcase his talents while sitting out.

The suit also alleges that the NCAA’s policy decreases fan interest in a team’s season by making popular players ineligible and thereby decreasing a team’s competitiveness on game days.

With players able to go where they want - even with the one-time transfer exemption - a Wild West atmosphere has arisen. Collectives are busy putting together NIL deals to attract soon-to-be high school graduates to their colleges while at the same time trying to lure players from other colleges looking to transfer.

Besides playing time or the other aforementioned reasons to transfer, another reason some players are moving is simply they can get more money from another collective at another college. High school players were even asking out of signed their National Letter of Intent - a binding contract between a student-athlete and a college wherein the student-athlete agrees to attend that institution, which then in return agrees to provide financial aid for that year.

The money is not just coming from collectives. In October 2022, Nike signed endorsement contracts with five basketball stars including LeBron James’ son Bronny James and women’s basketball super talent Caitlin Clark.

Those deals came in year two of the new NIL era. Just how much money was made in the first year?

The NIL platform Opendorse estimates that 917 million dollars was spent on NIL deals from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022. The Opendorse platform said average annual compensation for an athlete in NCAA Division I was $3,711.

NCAA is not taking all these shots without at least trying to provide some governance. One of the collegiate ruling body’s biggest fights is against inducements.

While some may argue NIL deals are just collectives functioning in the free market. Some NIL deals however could be considered inducements, and those are banned by the NCAA.

An inducement is an incentive offered only to some athletes to sway their decision to choose a specific college. The NCAA’s Division 1 Manual lists the following as inducements: loans, free or reduced cost services or housing, gifts of clothing or equipment, employment arrangements, loans and gifts to family members, and in some cases, uses of equipment or academic services.

Florida State was recently punished by the NCAA for using an NIL offer to entice a football recruit to sign with the Seminoles, reportedly for $15,000 per month.

The university was fined and put on probation, a FSU assistant coach was suspended and the booster was ordered to disassociate himself from FSU for three years and the NIL collective was ordered a one-year disassociation.

While an overwhelmingly majority of the NIL deals are within NCAA rules, the massive amount of money involved has led to some skirting the rules.

NIL is only getting bigger. After estimating NIL deals of 917 million dollars in the first year, Opendorse announced that 1.2 billion dollars in deals were done in the second year.

Today, more than 250 collectives have been founded or are in the process of formation. Opendorse reported that collectives’ budgets increased by 11.2 percent from year two to year three. In addition, more than 300 NIL companies have been founded.

The expansion of NIL has also led to agencies specifically focused working with student athletes. The Seven1 group co-founded by former NBA All-Stars Jermaine O’Neal and Tracy McGrady worked with Drew Timme while he one of the leading players in college basketball with Gonzaga.

Timme said in an interview with Fox Sports ahead of the 2022-23 season that coming back to Gonzaga was the best financial decision for him. He said he might have made between $200,000 and $500,000 in 2022-23 as a pro but said he will make more in NIL deals. Timme had deals with brands ranging from national Dollar Shave Club - he sported a much-talked about mustache - and a local furniture store.

Other athletes are earning big money through NIL as well.

The University of Miami women’s basketball twins Haley and Hanna Cavinder turned their massive social media following - more than 5 million followers across the platforms - to more than $1 million in the first 12 months of NIL - despite not being elite level women’s basketball players.

Alabama’s Heisman Trophy winning Bryce Young had a valuation of $3.5 million this year, according to the NIL valuation site On3. Louisiana State gymnast Olivia Dunne has an estimated NIL value of $3.3 million thanks to being one of the most followed NCAA athlete on social media with over 12 million followers, including 425 million likes on her TikTok account.

Basketball has its fair share of good earners too.

Topping the list is Bronny James, who On3 estimates with a $5.8 million valuation. Hansel Enmanuel, most well-known for his talent despite having just one arm, is valued at $1.2 million while Duke freshman Jared McCain is valued at $1.0 million.

Other big names are Zach Edey from Purdue ($815,000), Shaquille O’Neal’s son Shaqir O’Neal ($812,000), Robert Dillingham ($765,000) and Sweden guard Elliot Cadeau of North Carolina ($479,000).

On3 estimates 53 men’s college basketball players valued with at least $200,000.

And even high schoolers can earn big NIL money. On3 estimates the value of LeBron James’ other son Bryce James at $1.2 million dollars while Cooper Flagg - expected to be the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft - is valued at $984,000. On3 estimates 35 high school basketball players are valued with at least $200,000.

And it is not hard to find a college with a collective. According to Fan Nation in mid-December 2023, only three of the teams ranked in the top 100 in men’s college basketball did not have a collective. A total of 74.1 percent of teams ranked between 100-181 had a collective, and 31.5 percent of schools ranked in the bottom half of the rankings (181 to 362) had a collective.

“NIL is everywhere now. At all levels of Division I and it’s creeping into the other levels. It’s also a very, very wide gap between what teams can and can’t do. Some are even surprising, some quote lower level teams have a lot more money than you might think. It’s all based on the commitment of your alumni,” said Brandon Goble, who is the CEO of Player Advocate LLC and also co-owns the VerbalCommits.com website.

“The NCAA is running around trying to put the genie back in the bottle. And it’s not working. Now you have this market where players are going to schools or considering schools based on what kind of money they can get there. And it has less to do with the true marketing value or the actual value of your image. And more about the value of you as a basketball player - which is what the NCAA doesn’t want.”

Opendorse estimated that the average men’s basketball player with a collective deal earns $37,000.

With that kind of money on the table, plus the players’ ability to move from place to place, things have become very difficult for college coaches. Legendary UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma spoke out in mid-January.

@nil_wireUConn’s legendary women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma was asked the challenges of coaching with the new #NIL /portal system, and he didn’t hold back. 😬

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“The average coach, who’s not where I am, you can’t do your job any more. And people are gonna say, you have to change with the times. How does changing with the times help have better relationships with your players when it’s all transactional now. What kind of relationship can you have with somebody who is telling you I might be here one, maybe two years, maybe three, maybe four. Or I might be at four schools in four years,” he said.

“It has nothing to do with the money. Forget the money part. This is about the possibility that you can just walk out any time you want. How do you coach in an environment where the players feel like they owe you nothing. And you owe them everything. What kind of relationship can you have?”

That average 37,000 dollar figure does need a qualifier - and one that is a major issue for international basketball players in colleges.

Nearly all of the foreign-born players are in the United States on F1 visas, more commonly known as student visas. And the international players are not allowed to earn NIL money for “active” work.

So, players from Europe and elsewhere cannot sign autographs, attend promotional events, generate content, and post sponsorships on their social media.

If anything is produced with the international player’s likeness - an NFT or a tumbler or t-shirt for example - the player can earn NIL money passively as long as they do not promote or market it. As soon as the athlete asks friends or family to buy the merchandise, it then goes from passive income to active. And that could have a negative impact on their visa status.

One loophole that has been used to circumvent the immigration restrictions is having athletes complete the NIL deal obligations while in their home countries during holidays or outside the US during trips with their teams - for example pre-season or early season tournaments in the Bahamas.

The startup company Influxer launched late in 2021 to connect athletes with companies and become a full-service NIL company with merchandising and consulting.

In August 2022, Kentucky basketball star Oscar Tshiebwe, who hails from the Democratic Republic of Congo, worked with Influxer and reportedly made $500,000 by filming advertisements and signing autographs during a pre-season trip to the Bahamas.

Influxer also had NIL sessions at tournaments in the Bahamas in November 2022 and ultimately worked with about three dozen international players. They created photos, videos, and introductory podcasts that could be used for potential NIL deals.

The internationals came from Canada, a number of African countries, Australia, Netherlands, Spain as well as Germany. Both Simas Lukosius, who came up in the Telekom Baskets Bonn system and is now playing at the University of Cincinnati after previously playing with Butler University; and German women’s senior national team player Lina Sontag, who is playing with UCLA; worked with Influxer’s international department.

In 2022, Mustapha Amzil, a Finnish forward playing at Dayton, announced on social media that when he plays for the national team of his native Finland this summer he will be “open to any business and sponsorship deals”.

All stakeholders know the risk that international players are facing and college athletics leaders, NIL service providers, athlete advocacy groups and politicians are all urgently looking for clarification from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the US State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, who have jurisdiction over international visas.

The USCIS made a statement in December 2023 to address “the nonimmigrant student classifications, including USCIS’ role in the adjudication of applications for employment authorization.” But no mention of NIL guidance was included.

Not only do schools want guidance, but international students are vulnerable, the NIL playing field is uneven and foreign athletes are being denied the full student-athlete experience.

Regardless of the touchy nature of NIL deals, the good money is another strong reason for international players to choose college basketball - hundreds of thousands of NIL dollars are more than almost all young Europeans can earn in Europe.

“A pretty big pool of European players between 17 and 20 years old who are not regarded as pure NBA prospects or even Euroleague prospects will have a very big motive to be part of the NIL program,” Nikos Varlas, Director of recruitment for Octagon Europe, told Taking The Charge.

“The money that NIL can offer them and their families is something that will push them to go to the US and not stay in European clubs. This issue will be even bigger in countries that don’t have very good facilities or very high standard of living. In these countries, I believe the damage will be even bigger. Some families see their kids as a survival tool in term of societal lives.”

Varlas continued: “At the end of the day, if a kid can combine a scholarship for his academic career with basketball, playing in the NCAA, and at the same time the kid and the family gain some important money from NIL, then Europe will be in a tough position.”

More bigger names are leaving Europe to attend colleges. Spanish big man Aday Mara was expected to play around 20 minutes this season with Casademont Zaragoza in the ACB, but he decided to play college basketball with UCLA.

Slovenian guard Jan Vide also picked UCLA just months after he helped Real Madrid win the Adidas Next Generation Tournament title in May 2023. Berke Buyuktuncel also went to UCLA despite having already played three seasons with the pro team at Tofas Bursa.

UCLA also brought in former Partizan Belgrade talent Lazar Stefanovic, who had played with the University of Utah the previous two seasons; and highly regarded France 2005-born talent Ilane Fibleuil.

Two of Zalgiris Kaunas’ top talents Paulius Murauskas and Motiejunas Krivas are both playing at the University of Arizona. Former Real Madrid star talent Henri Veesaar, who has already played for Finland’s senior national team, is also at Arizona, as is former Joventut Badalona guard Conrad Martinez.

Zvonimir Ivisic of Croatia is an intriguing case as the Misko Raznatovic client left Montenegro pro club SC Derby Podgorica, where he was playing in the Adriatic League against EuroLeague teams such as Partizan Belgrade and Crvena Zvezda Belgrade and moved to the United States and plays for the University of Kentucky.

Germany has also seen some bigger names leave the country for the United States.

Gone are former FC Bayern Munich talents Benny Schröder (George Washington), Michael Rataj (Oregon State) and Sebastian Hartmann (Eastern Washington). ALBA Berlin have lost Nils Machowski (Central Florida), Rikus Schulte (Davidson), Christoph Tilly (Santa Clara), Dwayne Koroma (UT Arlington) and Tjark Lademacher (St. Mary’s in Canada).

“It’s a very interesting time now. For us it hasn’t started yet to make a bigger impact. For countries like Spain, who are losing their biggest talents now to the States, which was impossible a couple years ago, it already has started. But it’s not far out and it will start here too,” said Alan Ibrahimagic, who has worked with the German Basketball Federation since 2013 and is currently the German U18 national team coach.

“In Germany the transition from youth to senior basketball is tough because it’s not very well organized. It’s tough when you finish with your NBBL career at 19 and you’re not ready to compete at the highest level senior leagues, then you get lost a little bit. It gets tough to come back and get a chance at a serious level. So going over there is always an option. Some of the bigger clubs are trying to do a better job with the farm team. But it’s still a huge gap between the (third division) ProB and the BBL. That is one structural problem from our side that makes it more attractive to go to college - and now with the NIL money even more.”

Former NBA scout and director of Basketball Without Borders Europe Marin Sedlacek is quite concerned.

“Money talks all around Europe and it always starts with youth categories and that can be very dangerous in the development of players over the long term,” he said.

“Federations should take a look at the players with the most potential and try to protect them - with laws, contracts or something in coordination with FIBA. Because if a big number of potential will leave Europe, we will have a big problem.”

He continued: “I am a little scared that clubs will give up on their youth programs after 16. Without that, they will not have players developed, we will not have national teams, especially 16 and 18s.”

Sedlacek also expressed his concern about the players’ development in the United States.

“High school and college is different than in Europe. Will we have clones of Americans, or bad copy-and-paste of American players who are not the best. It’s the first small step but I am worried that we will lose the European identity in the near future.”

Not everyone is as much a doomsayer as Sedlacek.

Brandon Goble, the Player Advocate CEO, says NIL impact on youth development in Europe is “only a positive”.

“I spend a ton of time in Europe, watching European basketball and scouting and help bring over European athletes to play college. I see a lot of kids and so many of them just kind of disappear. Because at the end of the day there is only a limited number of opportunities (in Europe). There are only a certain number of teams. Once you get to a certain age, you either make it or you don’t.”

College basketball provides many more opportunities, Goble said, especially the option of moving down levels.

He cited former Netherlands star 2001-born talent Tristan Enaruna. After heading to the United States in 2018 at age 16 to play high school basketball in Utah, Enaruna joined University of Kansas in 2019. After two subpar seasons (2.4 points and 2.2 rebounds as a freshman and 3.0 points and 1.7 rebounds as a sophomore), he moved to Iowa State University in 2021 and picked up 4.3 points and 2.9 rebounds with a very minor role by the end of the season.

The 2.03m forward transferred again in 2022 and ended up going to Cleveland State University with new head coach Daniyal Robinson, who was an assistant coach at Iowa State. After three seasons in the Big 12 Conference, Enaruna shined in the smaller Horizon League, averaging 15.9 points, 6.5 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.1 steals and 1.2 blocks. This season his numbers are even better at 19.7 points, 6.4 rebounds, 2.9 assists, 1.3 steals and 0.9 blocks.ddd

Goble said only after all that development after lower levels is Enaruna the impact player Kansas were hoping they were getting when he began there in 2019.

“When he goes pro next year he’ll have five years of college and now he’s good and ready to sign a good contract in Europe. If he had stayed in Europe and he got to that big boy club and he is not ready and he’s not good enough, that’s it. They are moving on to the next guy. A lot of players disappear. Their careers are over.”

Enaruna is exactly the cautionary tale Ibrahimagic imagines when he says one of his biggest concerns for young Germans heading to college in the United States is fit.

“Everything depends on the choice of school. There are a lot of schools and not all of them are good. And also not all of them are the right fit. So where you go is a decisive aspect. And also how you adapt. They give you something but they also expect something from you. You have to perform, you have to be what they want you to be. If you’re not, it can be more cruel than here where you are home and still people care about you. Not everywhere but I would say more than they do there. That would be one of the disadvantages: where you just have a role and don’t get better,” Ibrahimagic said.

The DBB coach did say that college basketball can be an advantage though.

“As far as adjustment to senior basketball, college basketball is closer to senior basketball. But it’s still a youth league. If you are here in a pro team you can get experience playing with the pro guys. It helps a lot and makes you better. I think we have more practice time and more opportunity to work on our basketball skills,” he said.

Overall, Ibrahimagic believes Germany will feel the impact of NIL.

“I think the NIL situation will affect us more than we are aware of, than we think or expect. I don’t know how much we will fight to get the kids better, to keep them here, to provide them more opportunities, to give them better chances to get better - in basketball but also in school. So they feel good and comfortable where they are and decide to stay here and use all the advantages that we have as a basketball country or basketball continent, if we are talking about Europe.”

This is no longer just some Europeans deciding for colleges because of a lack of playing time in European. NIL money is completely changing the game. And once things are better regulated for international players, there could be even more Europeans leaving for US colleges.

Below are other videos addressing NIL for you to learn more

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The 78-year-old first off does not really have an office. The easiest way to meet up with Geschwindner is catch him at his favorite cafe in the heart of Bamberg.

Geschwindner lives outside of Bamberg in the southern German state of Franconia and comes into the medieval city to work with youngsters - passing his view of the game to anyone willing to listen.

The long lanky Geschwindner arrives at his local cafe and heads to the back and orders coffee and cake - and waits for the servers to hook him up with a table in a packed cafe with people waiting for a seat.

Once he takes his spot at the four-person table, it’s open season with the man some might consider a wacky professor of the game that James Naismith invented in 1891.

Dressed in his usual casual and worn flannel plaid long sleeve shirt, Geschwindner is engaging and passionate when he talks. And his range of topics to discuss is vast thanks to having studied mathematics, physics and philosophy besides having a seemingly endless knowledge of sciences and music.

One of the main reasons the interview partner wanted to reach out to Geschwindner was to talk about Victor Wembanyama, the awe-inspiring NBA rookie taking the league by storm with his enticing skillset. Wembanyama came to Bamberg in late July 2021 and worked out with Geschwinder twice a day for 10 days.

“We got along well and it was a lot of fun to see how quickly he understood what the next steps were for him,” Geschwinder said about his time with the San Antonio Spurs star.

When asked if he set up a specific plan for the French youngster, Geschwindner said nothing special was mapped out.

“He came to us to improve himself individually. As always, we did the most important basic basketball exercises to warm up, placed great emphasis on precise execution and of course adapted them to his enormous requirements. He obviously enjoyed that,” Geschwindner explained.

Geschwindner enjoyed talking about Wembanyama and believes he can have a big future, having been quoted in US media as saying: “This kid has the potential to change basketball again.”

He expanded on that comment, saying: “He understands the grammar of the sport, which doesn't happen very often. I think Victor could also contribute something new to the further development of the sport. Add something creative beyond his very advantageous physical abilities or revive old successful moves, such as the sky hook if he wants.”

The conversation has been extremely pleasant and provides a valuable insight since this man helped create one of the few basketball players who changed the game in the NBA.

Nowitzki being a 7-footer who took his game outside truly revolutionized the game. He gave big men across the globe a role model that they don’t have to just stay close to the basket to be successful.

Many besides Geschwindner also believe that Wembanyama can change the game as well.

While the conversation with Geschwindner has been going on, three more people have joined the table - first one person and then two more at the same time.

Every now and again, Geschwindner’s attention would switch to one of the newcomers and he would talk to them about local Bamberg topics.

At first this seemed very odd, but then it became obvious. This was Holger Geschwindner during his office hours if you will. If you wanted to see him, this was his designated time and this cafe was his designated place to be found.

Holger Geschwindner was truly holding court.

And once he had answered the others’ questions, his attention returned to Wembanyama.

Razor sharp with his focus and as if nothing had interrupted his thought process, Geschwindner emphasized that Wembanyama really needs to be patient with his body in order to reach the next level.

“He has to do his homework regularly and listen to his body very carefully. He plays with and on a very sensitive instrument,” he said.

Weight training, Geschwindner says, really should be a no-go at this time for Wembanyama, who only turned 20 years old on January 4.

“All you have to do is look at him. The fragility of his physique will not allow him to hold out for long under a standard strength program,” he said.

Geschwindner is a big believer that people should have other interests with music being one of his biggest preferences. And he said it is very promising to hear that Wembanyama said in interviews that he likes to listen to classical music as well as draw and practice creative writing and even enjoys building with Legos.

“I really hope he also develops all his other talents and maybe tries to learn a musical instrument,” Geschwindner said.

Music is truly a prevailing theme for Geschwindner, who implements music and musical theory in a lot of his work with children.

Geschwindner has since finished his cake and coffee and asks for a second cup of java.

And he continues on about Wembanyama.

His ending up with the Spurs was perfect for the young French man, according to Geschwindner. Wembanyama would get to work with the legendary Gregg Popovich, who understands and reveres the international game having worked with many international players such as Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Boris Diaw among others.

Geschwindner however also believes that someone like Wembanyama will reinvigorate the 74-year-old Popovich, a five-time NBA champion coach who has been dealing with a losing franchise as the Spurs have not finished a season better than .500 and made the playoffs since 2018-19 - hitting rock bottom with a 22-60 record and .263 winning percentage last season. That was the worst since 1996-97 when Popovich - then general manager and vice president of basketball operations - fired Bob Hill and inserted himself as head coach after a 3-15 start, and the team finished 20-62 for a .244 winning mark.

Geschwindner drew a comparison between Popovich and Wembanyama and Dirk Nowitzki and Don Nelson. Nelson had solid success in Golden State with the “Run-TMC” grouping of Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin, twice reaching the Western Conference Semi-Finals.

Nelson was a known champion of the international game who brought Lithuanian legend Sarunas Marciulionis and was the head coach of the Dream Team II in 1994. And his son Donnie Nelson was an even bigger proponent of the world game. Donnie was assistant coach of the Lithuanian national team at the 1992 Olympics and served as an assistant coach for the World Select Team at the 1997 Nike Hoop Summit, where Nowitzki scored 33 points to go with 14 rebounds.

Nelson Senior resigned from Golden State in February 1995 and then only lasted until March 1996 with the New York Knicks the following season as his up-tempo style of play did not fit with the Knicks’ defensive style with Patrick Ewing on board.

Nelson was named as head coach and general manager of Dallas in 1997, and he and Donnie stayed true to their international interest in selecting Nowitzki in the 1998 NBA Draft. And the rest is history.

Geschwindner experienced first hand the Nelson-Nowitzki relationship and the coach’s appreciation of his new enticing project. And he believes the same is happening with Popvich and Wembanyama.

The other three men at the table slowly get fidgety and regain Geschwindner’s attention. They want to get their questions about local meet-ups in and see if the basketball guru can stop by.

One by one, they ask their final questions and head out of the cafe. Geschwindner never tires though with his talk of basketball with his first-time visitor.

Of course, Geschwindner needs to be asked about his famous 47-degree concept. According to his calculations, the perfect jump shot has an arc of at least 47 degrees - the reason Nowitzki had such a high arc on his shot.

The basketball is 23 centimeters in diameter and the rim is 45 centimeters wide - so just less than double the width of a ball. Geschwindner proudly shows a photo from his phone of five balls laying on top of the rim.

The trajectory angle of at least 47 degrees allows for the highest possible leeway should a ball not swish.

“The higher the better,” said Geschwindner, who used a giant broom to force Dirk to shoot higher.

Geschwindner’s discussion partner thinks for a second and asks contemplatingly: “So, when Steph Curry shoots the ball really really high in the air, that is actually a better shot in terms of chances of it going in.”

“Exactly correct,” answers Geschwindner promptly.

The main thing is about getting space to take the shot - with Nowitzki’s one-step fadeaway virtually unguardable.

The talk steers back to Wembanyama briefly at this point. Geschwindner actually thinks the French youngster being less strong actually can create a huge advantage for him.

“He should let the defender push him off the block and thank him. That is the space Wembanyama needs to take his jumpshot, and the defender is just giving it to him,” Geschwindner says with a slight smile on his face.

Geschwinder and his visitor talk for more than two hours and meander through a variety of topics - going from one to the next besides just Wembanyama.

Eventually Geschwindner hints he must get on to other things and upon leaving the cafe rushes off in the opposite direction.

He has held court in his favorite cafe long enough today and it is back to the game he loves so much.

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Johnson continues to make a name for himself in the Georgia high school hoops scene as he stars for Norcross High. But his name went viral internationally last December when he put on a performance for the ages at the FIBA Centrobasket U17 Championship 2021. Playing for Jamaica, Johnson turned the tournament in Mexico into his own personal playground.

The 2004-born Johnson dominated the competition in Mexcali, Mexico to the tune of 36.0 points a game - the most ever in the eight editions of the biennial event.

“It was a lot of fun. It was cool playing against other teams. They were communicating in a different language that we didn’t understand. It was pretty cool to see other countries play basketball,” said Johnson, whose outstanding performances could not keep Jamaica from finishing sixth with one win in five games.

Johnson’s scoring output was not the only impressive feature as he averaged 9.0 rebounds, 4.4 assists and 4.0 steals. Those numbers still didn’t tell the whole tale at just how unstoppable the 6ft 4in guard was. He connected on 57.8% of his two-point shots, 46.7% of his three-pointers and 87.5% percent from the foul line, where he connected on 63 of an amazing 72 free throws in five games.

Not impressed by those shooting numbers? Well, consider the lower talent level of his teammates on the Jamaica team, which allowed opposing teams to concentrate on Johnson with regular double and triple teams.

“It was hard to find my shots. I was still trying to share the ball. But Coach (Trevor) Poyser was telling me to try to break down one defender from the double-team and attack him and then try to find the open guy or get my shot or pass the ball and put my teammate in a position to be successful,” Johnson said.

All told, he played 179 of a possible minutes - in five games in five days.

“I was very exhausted. I had a trainer after a couple days help me out with stretching to stay healthy,” Johnson said.

Okay, how about more reasons why the performance was impressive?

Consider that Johnson playing for the first time outside of the United States, according to the slightly different FIBA rules, facing completely unknown opposition - oh, and with a 24-second shot clock.

“Being a fast-paced player it really didn’t affect me that much. The only time it affected us was when the ball got stagnant and the other team was playing good defense and we had to force a shot at the end. But that didn’t happen that often,” said Johnson, who had only previously played with a 30 second shot clock on the AAU circuit. “I really prefer a shot clock because I play a fast pace. I really don’t like when teams have the ball for like a minute.”

When asked what he learned from a basketball perspective at the U17 Centrobasket tournament, Johnson offered: “How serious other guys from other countries take it. It opened my eyes that it’s not just kids in the USA trying to make it to the NBA but it’s happening all over the world.”

The NBA is Johnson’s goal - no doubt. But not at all costs. And not before his time has come.

Johnson still has the rest of his junior year of high school and his senior season, plus the AAU circuit. By the time he finishes his high school career, there could be another path that could lead him to the NBA.

Right now, top level talents not wanting to go to college could go to the G-League, the new Overtime Elite Series or abroad - such as the Australian NBL league, where players like LaMelo Ball, RJ Hampton and Terrance Ferguson have played instead of the college hardwood.

When asked for his thoughts about the other choices, Johnson said: “They are another way to make it out. It opens up different options. It’s a pathway to get money I’d say. I’d rather take the long term way. I’d rather not take the fast money. It’s not worth my process. I would prefer to continue to work and my time will come with the money.”

Hearing that makes one wonder how Johnson got here: in the final process of choosing a college among big institutions like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, North Carolina, USC and Virginia.

Getting to Atlanta marks just the most-recent stop of a tour of the United States that Johnson has been on his whole life.

He was born in Houston, Texas and moved with family to Washington DC when he was 2 years old. When he was about 4 or 5, the family left for Virginia and then to Boston, Massachusetts when he was 7. Around 9 or 10, Johnson and the family was on the move again, this time to Johnson City Tennessee, not far from Knoxville. He stayed there until he was 12, when it was on to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then after about 4 years, Johnson and family relocated to Atlanta in 2020.

The uneasy feeling for the listener is the calmness that Johnson lists those moves - remember, he won’t turn 18 until early June.

“It was Virginia or Boston where I start to remember things. I don’t really remember anything from Houston or DC,” he explains.

Johnson’s father played basketball in college at Cincinnati State and he handed London a ball early on and it was love at first sight.

London played competitively for the first time in Virginia. And it was in Boston when he started to have more friends - also because he was getting older. Johnson started playing AAU basketball in Tennessee, and he also started to get used to moving.

“It was more difficult up to Tennessee. After all the moves I felt I adjusted to the fact that we move a lot and making friends didn’t become that hard, especially while I was playing basketball. That’s really how i made my friends,” he says.

Just like changing where he lived, Johnson also has changed his role models. Early on - in Virginia - it was LeBron James.

“I still like LeBron but then when I realized I wouldn’t have a LeBron body I watched more players who fit my style of play and I started liking guys like Chris Paul, Steph Curry and Damian Lilliard.”

Sure, Johnson has moved around a lot, but his basketball story really isn’t that out of the ordinary just yet. Neither is the fact that he says he would probably play American football or baseball if he could do any other job.

But Johnson has another side. And that’s where his beat and rhythm come in.

Of course hip-hop and rap artists take up a major part of Johnson’s musical library. But he said about 30 percent of what he listens to is music with saxophone. Johnson actually plays the brass instrument - “on and off since I was in Tennessee”.

“I like some jazz and I like hearing the saxophone. I feel the more I hear it the more I can imagine playing it,” said Johnson, who doesn’t have a favorite saxophone artist but likes watercolors and smooth jazz as well as Afro music.

His mother plays a lot of piano and listens to a lot of Beethoven.

“Sometimes I end up listening to it with my mom, but it’s not necessarily part of my musical culture,” Johnson said of Beethoven.

As it turns out, Johnson thinks playing the sax helps him in basketball.

“I feel it can free my mind a little, especially listening. I think the rhythm of the saxophone can translate to being on the basketball court. The rhythm is smooth and allows me to have a steady mind to also maintain my focus to make shots,” he said.

So the next time you see Johnson swerving through traffic on the court, imagine it just might being a sweet chord progression that gets his creative juices flowing.

Johnson is making waves on the court, but what about if he put his time and energy into music? Would he be an emerging professional saxophone player?

“Yes if I really locked in and that was my main focus. I feel like I could be a professional saxophone player,” he answers without hesitation.

Johnson has not only taken his mother’s interest in music, but also her career choice. London plans on studying pre-med, right in line with his mother, an oncologist (cancer surgeon) in Atlanta.

“Like my mom I would like to do something in the medical field. That is something I willx look at when I get to college,” he said.

And it was London’s mother’s heritage which actually got him the international attention. She was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and his aunts in Kingston.

London’s mom wanted him to have dual citizenship with a Jamaican passport as well. He has had it about five months.

His mother’s side of the family is mostly Jamaican and most of them moved to Houston. For holidays, London and the family would return to Houston and he would feast on Jamaican food such as oxtail, Jamaican patties and plantain. And London’s grandfather was a big Bob Marley fan, so they would listen to a lot of reggae music.

Johnson really doesn’t know how Jamaica’s U17 coach Poyser learned of the passport.

“I am not sure how he found out, but as soon as he did he reached out to my mom and they were wanting me to come down and play,” Johnson remembered.

Playing for Jamaica meant leaving the United States for the first time - and that going to his mother’s homeland.

“It was cool to see where my mom grew up. We flew into Montego Bay, but the training camp was in Kingston - about 2-3 hours by car,” he said.

Johnson was actually picked up in Montego Bay by his nana and grandfather - another special moment.

Another special moment coming up will be when Johnson announces his college choice - spoiler, it will be a commitment video on Instagram and Twitter. And he expects it to come soon.

When asked what reasons will mean most in his decision, he said: “The main reason will be the connection to the coach. But also the style of play and how it fits my game and also if it will push me to get better. My main goal is to get to the NBA. It has to be a school that has good academics as well and also one that doesn’t have players when I get there so I can play right away when I get there.”

But Johnson said the whole process has had its highs and lows.

“The most fun is seeing that you’re getting better by all the schools reaching out and also being offered a college scholarship,” he said.

And the least fun part?

“Just trying to keep up with all the coaches calling you day after day.”

Johnson expects to really have a feeling of relief after the announcement.

“I will definitely be really relieved. After I drop that and get all the congratulations I feel like I will be able to lock in on playing with my school and AAU teams and getting better without all the distractions.”

Without the distractions from him hearing his own beat and moving to his own smooth rhythm.

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As far as under-the-radar signings go, it’s kind of hard to beat a German third division ProB club adding a new player to their roster who really might not even be a major contributor.

But then again, the September 18, 2021 announcement of EPG Baskets Koblenz bringing in 16-year-old Jamaal Phatty is the kind of news that at least can hint at major shockwaves on the German youth landscape.

Sure, sure … this story needs a lot of background - especially for those who are less aware of the youth scene in Germany. But by the time the final words of this article are read, you just might believe that EPG Baskets Koblenz could soon be an emerging influence - let’s not say powerhouse just yet.

So, what’s the news all about and why does some player named Jamaal Phatty who I have never heard of going to a club I have never heard of warrant reading on? Please allow the case to be made.

First off to Jamaal Phatty. While the name may have come across your computer screen if you are into youth basketball, the name Bonga definitely rings a bell. Think Isaac Bonga, then his younger brother Joshua Bonga. And then consider the fellow 2005-born Phatty teaming up with the younger Bonga brother to do major damage in Germany together, winning the country’s U14 national title together in 2019.

Many consider Phatty - an athletic wing with good size and all-around skill-set - a better prospect than Joshua Bonga, who this season is playing in Lithuania for powerhouse Zalgiris Kaunas. Phatty’s name really started making the rounds outside of Germany in 2019 after his showing for Germany at the North Sea Cup.

Phatty, a native of Kassel who also lived in Frankfurt, had spent two years with Skyliners before spending last season in the United States with Mount Zion Christian Academy in North Carolina as well as the Indiana-based talent factory La Lumiere. A youngster going to America to play high school basketball might not seem out of the ordinary but consider Phatty’s whole picture. He was in the United States without his family during a worldwide pandemic in a time when the country was at major odds both politically and culturally on how to deal with Covid-19 and everything around it. There was also uncertainty about what games will be played or not due to restrictions or quarantine requirements. Oh, and he only turned 16 in March 2021.

Fast forward to this past summer. Phatty was back in Germany and had been invited to the training camp for the German U16 national team that would be playing at the FIBA U16 European Challengers in Sofia, Bulgaria with the hopes of perhaps qualifying for the FIBA U17 Basketball World Cup 2022 - which would be Germany’s second appearance in the global event following 2010 when they hosted the first edition of the competition.

Being back on home soil and seeing his friends, Phatty apparently started thinking about staying in Germany for the 2021-22 season. That’s where Mario Dugandzic enters the picture.

Oh man, another name that means nothing. Sorry, but it’s his connection to names you may already know that adds the intrigue to the story. Dugandzic has been a youth coach for a number of years in Germany, going through stints at Nürnberg, Karlsruhe, Bremerhaven and Ehingen/Urspring before really leaving his mark in the Brose Bamberg youth system - as well as with the German youth national teams.

Dugandzic served as head coach for Bamberg’s farm team Baunach Young and helped the team remain in the ProA second division in 2018 and also guided Bamberg’s U19 team to second place in the NBBL in 2019. In addition Baunach reached the ProB playoffs in 2020 and had home court advantage with Dugandzic as head coach. And he served as assistant coach for Germany on the team that took the bronze medal at the FIBA U20 European Championship 2019 in Israel.

Among the players who developed under his tutelage are Estonians Kristian Kullamae and Henri Drell, Australian Will McDowell-White, Jason George, the twins Brandon and Nicholas Tischler, Kay Bruhnke, Nelson Weidemann, Matthew Meredith, Haris Hujic, Edy Edigin, Felix Edwardsson of Sweden, Mateo Seric, Niklas Würzner, Tibor Taras and Elias Baggette.

After last season, Dugandzic was at a cross-roads: one option was to try to take a step up to the pro level as an assistant and work towards becoming a head coach in German pro basketball. That is not necessarily the most promising move, considering there are just two German head coaches in the German BBL league - Denis Wucherer of s.Oliver Würzburg and HAKRO Merlins Crailsheim’s Sebastian Gleim (compare that to four Spanish coaches in the league).

The alternative for Dugandzic would be to find a project with a youth dynamic to it and build up a new program there.

Enter Koblenz. The city of some 115,000 people hasn’t seen a club in Germany’s top flight since 1976 with ADB Koblenz. SC REI Koblenz played in the Bundesliga from 1969 to 1971 and ADB Koblenz from 1973 to 1976. And BG Post SV Koblenz was in the second division as late as 1998.

Okay, so it has been a while since Koblenz has been on the basketball map in Germany. Now I am not worried about never having heard about the city in terms of the sport.

In 2013, the club SG Luetzel-Post Koblenz - known in the league as EPG Baskts - announced the “Mission 15/20” to reach the fourth division 1st Regionalliga by 2015 and reach professional basketball by 2020. A businessman named Thomas Kleim took over the business and marketing aspects of the club and has been pushing for the professionalization of the team.

This past off-season, Dugandzic was asked if he wanted to take over as director of basketball operations and head coach. In addition to having a motivated financial backer, another attractive element to the offer was the CGM Arena, a 5,000-seat facility in Koblenz which is basically unused and the club wants to use for basketball this season. Ask cities like Cologne and Nürnberg what they would kill for to have a 5,000-seat arena and what it could do for a basketball program. And the Koblenz arena, which opened in 1992, is just waiting to be used - after having served until the end of September as a Covid-19 vaccination center. On top of that, Koblenz is also close enough to Frankfurt and Cologne to possibly draw young talent from those bigger cities. And there are three airports within an hour of Koblenz: Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Hahn and Cologne-Bonn.

“You have to take things into your own hands, and I have faith in myself and that I can develop a program and some guys. So, I said, let’s see and maybe some cool guys will want to come with me,” Dugandzic said.

He joined the club directly after he served once again as U20 German national team at the FIBA U20 European Challengers in Georgia. And the roster is more or less his own with just a couple of holdovers (Brian Butler and Lucas Mayer) from the team that reached the ProB playoffs last season after earning promotion from the fourth division 1st Regionalliga in 2019-20.

So, what does this season’s Koblenz team look like? Are there any interesting names?

For this season, Dugandzic was able to bring in Marvin Heckel, who played in the ProA second division last season with Bremerhaven but is a point guard who knew the coach from their time together at Baunach. The same goes for the 21-year-old, 7-0 center Leo Saffer. A nice addition to the team is also the 29-year-old forward Dominique Johnson, who has played five seasons in the BBL, including last season with NINERS Chemnitz and really gives the team a leadership figure on the court. And the 23-year-old center Moses Poelking is a former ALBA BERLIN farmhand who played the last two seasons for Bremerhaven in the second division.

Another interesting name on the team is Indrek Sunelik, whose arrival in Koblenz is thanks to Dugandzic’s past player development. The 21-year-old shooting guard is from Estonia and from the same 2000-born generation as Henri Drell. Sunelik had gone to high school in the United States and was at the junior college Northwest Florida State College in 2019-20. He returned home to Estonia for last season and played for BC Kalev/Cramo Tallinn, who won the Estonian league as well as the Latvian-Estonian competition last season.

“I had him on the list. I have known him for a while,” Dugandzic said about the 2.01 meter guard. “When I talked to Henri last summer he said he was in Tallinn working out with Indrek and I said what is Indrek doing, and he said he wanted to get out and was looking for something. I said let me talk to him, and Henri knows that I like to develop guys, and things came together.”

Dugandzic was pretty set with his team for 2021-22 at that point. Then came the news that Jamaal Phatty was thinking about staying in Germany - something for which the coach still had room in his roster.

“It was clear in the construction of the roster that I didn’t have a lot of room for projects and player development. We wanted to professionalize the team with guys who want to get to a high level. But I reached out to all of my network of scouts and agents that if a high level player came around I would be able to incorporate him into the team,” Dugandzic said. “In Baunach I had five or six of these prospects and it was always hard. They are all developing, as you can see and are all fighting for their minutes and will get them. But with a high profile guy I would definitely do that here.”

Dugandzic said he was with the U20 national team when a query came in if he could imagine taking a look at Phatty. He said the youngster’s agent and family were looking at a few programs, but Dugandzic thought he had a good chance.

“It was good that we didn’t have many prospects but that we would just have to incorporate the one while giving him everything he needs: school, individual training, a challenge at a high competition. We could offer all that. He liked that and his family did too,” Dugandzic said. “We had some tough competition with some of the other programs with bigger names. But I think it was an advantage that I had worked with the Tischlers, Baggette, Henri, McDowell-White and those guys. They knew I was not afraid to develop youngsters.”

Dugandzic said an added benefit was that Koblenz is not far from Frankfurt - about 125 kilometers away.

When asked about what his plan with Phatty is, Dugandzic said: “The plan is to bring him to this level and help him stablize himself as a person with school and obligations. He will also learn what it means to be a professional and everything that comes along with that. The plan is to bring him there step-by-step, not herky-jerky, but well thought-out and at the pace that he needs.”

Phatty will have the opportunity on the court to play at the ProB level and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Still, Dugandzic was quick to remind everyone that Phatty is still a long way from being a finished product.

“You can’t forget the highest level that he practiced at was JBBL (U16). So he didn’t play against men at all - not even in the (amateur) Oberliga. So he really has a lot ahead of him,” he said.

Phatty has been given his chances so far with his new team. He has played at least 16 minutes in all three games - three Koblenz victories - and he is averaging 6.3 points, 2.7 rebounds, 1.0 assists, 0.7 steals and 0.7 steals. Phatty impressed against FC Bayern Munich’s second team, collecting 11 points, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals and 1block. While he has made 8-of-10 2-pointers, Phatty has missed all seven of his three-point attempts and just 3-of-7 free throws.

Phatty will be playing only with the club’s top team since Koblenz does not yet have teams in the U16 JBBL and U19 NBBL leagues - one of the next developments in the works for Dugandzic.

The coach said his first impressions of Phatty have been positive.

“He really seems normal, not arrogant at all. From the time I have worked with him and how I’ve gotten to know him, he’s not arrogant at all. He’s a good, normal, inquisitive kid who definitely wants to get better every day. That’s how he seems to me. And he enjoys it that the competition is higher than what he’s had in the past,” the coach said.

While knowing that the youngster still has a lot of work to do, Dugandzic did admit that having someone of the quality of Phatty in the program is a major benefit.

“We want players who might not know where they want to go to know that we can be an option. We want to develop players and give them a chance to play at a high level,” the coach said.

“If you play in the ProB with with a couple of prospects - it doesn’t have to be a whole team but a couple a core of prospects - then you have a possibility as an organization to make it attractive for people. People want to see talents, they want to watch these high level prospects and then see where they go and follow them.”

One of the next items on Dugandzic’s agenda is to start building up more relationships in the area as well as the infrastructure in Koblenz and surrounding area to find and develop top players from the region.

EPG Baskets Koblenz may not be high on the list of well-known programs that develop youth talent yet. But it might not be long before they are no longer under the radar.

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Kyle Allman’s long-term goal is to reach the NBA. No one preordained road to the League exists, but the 24-year old point guard might find his path easier thanks to a move that many in the European basketball world might consider a step back.

The Brooklyn native was the talk of the Basketball Champions League in 2020-21, starring for VEF Riga in his first season in a pan-European competition - which was his second year in Europe after graduating from Cal-State Fullerton in 2019.

Allman collected 13.8 points, 3.2 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game in the BCL for a Riga team that advanced somewhat surprisingly from the first group phase - finishing second in the four-team group ahead of Lithuania powerhouse Rytas Vilnius as well as Peristeri of Greece. Allman was named the BCL MVP for the month of December 2020 and ultimately helped equally thrilling teammate Michale Kyser earn a spot on the BCL Star Lineup Second Team.

After starting his professional career with Greek club Lavrio, where he averaged 11.2 points, 2.7 rebounds and 1.3 assists, Allman had definitely taken a step forward - also in terms of name recognition. He also helped Riga claim the Latvian league title and finish second in the Latvian-Estonian Basketball League, falling only to Kalev/Cramo in the final.

It seemed that Allman was set up for a jump up in league and team - with even an outside chance at a spot with a team in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague. He told Taking The Charge that a lot of clubs showed interest in him but did not really make him an offer. The club that was working hardest to bring him in was Paris Basketball.

The team from the French metropolis definitely was intriguing as a club with an exciting plan for the future. The club president was David Kahn, who is the former president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves. The team features former NBA player Kyle O’Quinn, and Allman’s future teammates would also be some of the best talents in France including Juhann Begarin, Ismael Kamagate and Milan Barbitch.

The one drawback was Paris not playing internationally this season.

“I wanted to play two times a week. It was big on that in the summer. I was telling my agent I don’t want to go anywhere less than two times a week. I was getting interest from places but they were offering other guys in front of me,” Allman said, referring to playing one game in the French ProA as well as one in a European competition such as the BCL, EuroLeague or 7DAYS EuroCup. “Paris really wanted me and that was the biggest thing: they were really excited and had a plan … I felt the love here, and they were coming hard at me for about three weeks, and I went to where felt I was really really really wanted instead of just a little bit wanted.”

Allman decided in the end to sign with Paris, on a one-year contract with an option for 2022-23. But first off, he had to get over not getting offers from other teams.

“It was humbling. It showed me I had work to do. Clearly if they're choosing other people over me that means I need to improve. I had a good summer and I feel like I have had a good preseason, but it was humbling,” he admitted.

Now, Allman’s focus is on making the best of the situation. And there is actually a lot working in his favor with Paris. If the club reaches the playoffs this season, it’s almost a certain the team would play internationally in 2022-23.

But the bigger point is that Allman will definitely have NBA scouts watching him on a regular basis at Paris. His 19-year-old teammate Juhann Begarin was selected 45th overall in the 2021 NBA Draft by Boston, meaning the Celtics and other teams will also be watching him. There is also the 20-year-old center talent Kamagate, who is starting to gain more and more NBA attention. There is also the 2001-born point guard Milan Barbitch.

“That is a part that a lot of people didn't understand. And that was bigger picture for me,” Allman said of knowing that Paris will be a revolving door of NBA scouts this season. “I did turn down playing two times a week, but in terms of getting the attention I want, I think I can get just as much or more attention from NBA teams here than certain two-times a week teams.”

Of course there is also club president Kahn and all his connections to the NBA.

“If I handle what I need to handle, then maybe I'll end up there (the NBA) sooner than I think with (Kahn’s) his contacts and people on my team and the eyes that will be watching us. Maybe I’ll end up on a roster quicker than I think if I handle what I gotta handle. That was definite big part coming here.”

Some may have been surprised in the off-season when Kyle Allman signed with Paris Basketball and not a team playing twice a week. But in the end, it might just work out even better.

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