A dispute between record champions Düsseldorf and challengers Neu-Ulm kept the table tennis sport in suspense for a long time. The Ovtcharov club gave up, withdrew – and now has one last big chance.
No screenwriter could have brought this story to life better. In 2022, the Neu-Ulm table tennis club signed four world-class players to challenge the German series champion Borussia Düsseldorf. In 2023, those responsible for both clubs clashed so much that the Neu-Ulm team withdrew from the Bundesliga.
And at Easter 2024, the last game of such a short and turbulent era could now be calculated: a Champions League final between Borussia Düsseldorf and TTC Neu-Ulm (Easter Monday, 2 p.m.).
Both have qualified for the final tournament of the best four teams on Sunday and Monday in Saarbrücken. The 16-time European Cup winner Düsseldorf and its top star Timo Boll meet TTC Wiener Neustadt in the first semi-final (Sunday, 1 p.m.). Dimitrij Ovtcharov and his Neu-Ulmer team then have to get past the hosts and defending champions 1. FC Saarbrücken (Sunday, 5 p.m.).
TTC professionals played for hometown clubs and were banned
“Of course we want to finish it off,” said Ovtcharov. Media entrepreneur Florian Ebner’s ambitious project is only still included in the Champions League because it has previously been allowed to compete there without being a member of the national league. Starting next season, the German Table Tennis Association will stop this by changing its statutes. “Then we will no longer have anything to do with table tennis,” Ebner told the German Press Agency.
To understand the whole rift between the Ovtcharov club and the Boll club, you have to go back a year, when both faced each other in the German Cup final (winners Neu-Ulm) and in the semi-finals of the Champions League (winners Düsseldorf). . For exactly these two competitions, Ebner had put together a world selection with Ovtcharov, the Japanese Tomokazu Harimoto, the Swede Truls Möregardh and the Taiwanese Lin Yun-Ju.
The TTC boss was only marginally interested in the long Bundesliga season, which is why he allowed his stars to play for other clubs in their homeland after winning the cup final in their own hall. Ebner did not see that this violated the applicable rules, but the Table Tennis Bundesliga (TTBL) did: its sports court banned Harimoto, Möregardh and Lin for ten games each in the following 2023/24 season.
World Table Tennis tournament series as a future?
The people from Neu-Ulm were so outraged by the sentence that they declared their withdrawal from the Bundesliga and accused Düsseldorf manager Andreas Preuß of having influenced the harsh sentence as head of the TTBL supervisory board in order to harm a competitor. Preuss firmly rejects this. An arbitration tribunal overturned the long bans six months later. But the retreat was already perfect.
The intensity of the dispute has always obscured the exciting core of this debate: How do you shape the future of a traditional competition like the Bundesliga when the sport and the consumer behavior of many spectators are changing noticeably? This also applies to other sports.
When Ebner brought the four top stars to Neu-Ulm, the new World Table Tennis (WTT) table tennis tournament series had just started. Their promise was: significantly more money and attention for the players. And the fear: in the future there will hardly be any time left for table tennis as a team sport with its leagues and European Cups.
Conflict within the league remains
This week alone, two players each from Düsseldorf, Saarbrücken and Neu-Ulm are still active in a WTT tournament in South Korea. And all three clubs hope that they will be back in time and somewhat recovered for the Champions League final. The Neu-Ulm vision was therefore always aimed at shorter team competitions with a more attractive cast. “The basic conflict is: the club system or eventization like in the NBA – which will prevail in the long term?” said Ebner.
Düsseldorf’s manager Preuß sees it differently. Like many others in the industry, he realizes that the WTT series has not yet lived up to its promise. Poor pay, far too short-term planning – that’s the reality.
“This is fatal for the players,” Preuss told the German Press Agency. But clubs like Düsseldorf or Saarbrücken benefit from the fact that they are still much more attractive as employers and investors than was foreseeable two years ago. That’s why they want to strengthen the existing league system rather than weaken it.
Ovtcharov wants to stay in Germany
“It’s a constant struggle,” said Preuss. “It could be that in three years everything that was announced before will come to pass. Then Mr. Ebner’s model would have a completely different basis. Then I’ll call him and tell him: You were a prophet. But we’re still miles away from that. Table tennis is not tennis or golf.” From his point of view, the TTC Neu-Ulm “made a contribution to an important discussion – but presented it in the wrong tone and enforced it with a wooden hammer.”
Ovtcharov regrets this very much. “We had players like Lin Yun-Ju or Harimoto in Germany who are no longer playing in Germany,” he said. The former world number one has nevertheless committed to the Bundesliga. Instead of going to the Chinese Super League or just concentrating on his individual career, he is moving to TTC Fulda-Maberzell in the summer.