Basketball national coach Lange advises players to say goodbye to the German league

At the end of the home World Cup, national basketball coach Olaf Lange aggressively advised his players to leave the German league. "I have to make sure that our top players go abroad. As long as nothing happens in the league, it will be difficult to maintain this success," said Lange in the evening.

The basketball players had previously clearly lost the bronze game against Spain 58:81 and missed out on their first World Cup medal. The disappointment afterwards was great, and there were many tears among the players.

“It’s going down a lot,” says the national coach

Alexandra Wilke, Britta Daub and Emma Eichmeyer are three of the twelve players who play in the women's basketball Bundesliga, which, according to Lange, has not only stagnated in recent decades but has even developed backwards.

"My time in the Bundesliga was from 1995 to 2002. Back then we had better structures in the top clubs than we have today - and we're in 2026. That says it all. It's going down a lot," said Lange. His team surprisingly reached the semi-finals in Berlin and defeated European champions Belgium on the way there. Fourth place at a World Cup is the best result in the history of German basketball players.

If the national coach has his way, the league cannot keep up with the progress of the national team. The situations at the clubs are "semi-professional. Medically, the situations are catastrophic," criticized Lange.

The women's Bundesliga is still in a transition phase between amateur and professional sport. Only ten teams played in the 2025/26 season because four qualified clubs decided not to take part for economic reasons, including both promoted teams from the second division: Göttingen, Leverkusen, Bochum and Osnabrück.

The Rutronik Stars Keltern (near Pforzheim), who play their home games in the sports hall in the Dietlingen school center, became German champions. The club's website was unavailable on Monday morning and is being revised.