BONN, Germany — The arena here on the Rhine holds 6,000 people, and on Friday night, for the home opener of the Bonn club in Germany’s Basketball Bundesliga, it held all of them, with another 1,100 in a bar across the street watching on a screen the club installed after it sold out of season tickets in July.
“Ten years ago we had 2,800 people and we were happy,” said Dagmar Reuss, the club’s managing director. “Now I spend my days explaining to people why they cannot have tickets.”
The scene has become common across the country. The German Basketball Federation said on Thursday that it registered 391,000 licensed players in the 2025-26 season, up 38 percent from 2022-23, the year before the national team’s World Cup victory. Participation among girls under 14 has nearly doubled. The top league’s average attendance last season was 5,240, a record, and 11 of its 18 clubs reported waiting lists for season tickets.
The federation attributes the growth to a combination of the World Cup, a generation of German players in the N.B.A., and a deliberate push into schools. Since 2024, it has placed 2,300 portable hoops in primary schools through a program co-funded by the federal sports ministry, and trained 9,000 teachers to run a 30-minute weekly session. “We could not build gyms, so we put the sport where the children already were,” said the federation’s youth director, Simon Ehrlinger.
The boom has strained the infrastructure that exists. Munich and Berlin both report that youth clubs are turning away children because of a shortage of court time, and the city of Leipzig said in September that it had 1,900 children on waiting lists for basketball programs, more than for soccer for the first time. Several clubs in the top league play in arenas that are too small to meet demand but too new to replace.
Bonn is a case study. The club, founded by students in 1992, played its first seasons in a converted school gym and reached the top league in 1996. It won the European Champions League in 2023 with a budget a fraction of its rivals’, and has since doubled its sponsorship income to 9.5 million euros. On Friday, its starting lineup included two Germans under 22 who came through its own youth program, which now has 640 children and a waiting list of 400.
Among the crowd was Benedikt Scholl, 41, a tax adviser who brought his 9-year-old daughter, Lotte, who plays in the club’s under-10 league. “When I was her age, basketball was something you saw on television from America,” he said. “She has a German player’s jersey, she knows the rules better than I do, and she thinks it is normal that the arena is full. That is the change.”
The Bonn club won, 88-81, over the club from Ulm. Lotte Scholl, asked what she thought of the game, said it was good but the second quarter was slow.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section D, Page 9 of the European edition with the headline: Basketball Is Now Germany’s Fastest-Growing Team Sport, and the Arenas Are Full.
