The short answer: In the West region of the Deutsche Pickleball Liga, Germany’s amateur team league, the side that earned promotion to the 1. Liga for 2026/27, SFD 75 2 from Düsseldorf, chose not to go up. With another club withdrawing its team, that kept last season’s two bottom sides in the top division. It sounds like a curiosity. My view: it’s the most revealing thing that has happened in German pickleball this year, and the team was probably right. An amateur league in only its fifth season works best as a place to get good matches, not as a ladder everyone is obliged to climb, and the DPL should design for that.
One sentence on a fixtures page
The story doesn’t appear in a press release. It sits in a single sentence on the Deutsche Pickleball Liga’s page for the 2026/27 1. Liga West, between the list of teams and the fixtures:
“Da der eigentliche Aufsteiger aus der 2. Liga, SFD 75 2, nicht aufsteigen wollte und sich die Spvg. Dorsten/Dülmen/Buer 1 aus der 1. Liga in Liga 2 abgemeldet hat, verbleiben die beiden Letztplatzierten des Vorjahres, HTV1896 1 und Borgholzhausen 2 weiterhin in der 1. Liga.”
In English (my translation): because the team that should have been promoted from the 2. Liga, SFD 75 2, did not want to go up, and Spvg. Dorsten/Dülmen/Buer 1 moved its team from the 1. Liga down to Liga 2, last season’s bottom two, HTV1896 1 and Borgholzhausen 2, stay in the 1. Liga.
Two teams relegated on the pitch and reprieved off it; a promotion turned down; another club taking its team down a level voluntarily. In football this would run for a fortnight. In German pickleball it got one subordinate clause, which is the most German possible way to announce a minor revolution.
Pickleball Guide, the German site that noticed it, put it in its headline: a promoted team “wollte gar nicht aufsteigen” (didn’t want to go up at all). The season started anyway, in Hennef on 10 October.
Who are SFD 75, and why does this matter?
SFD 75 is a Düsseldorf club with two teams in the West region. Its first team, SFD 75 1, plays in the 1. Liga West this season. Its second team, SFD 75 2, has been winning things. The league’s honours list records it as West Intermediate champion in 2023/24 and West 2. Liga champion in 2024/25. As “SFD 75 II”, it was one of the five regional winners who went to Göttingen on 15 August for the DPL’s nationwide 2. Liga final.
So this is not a team ducking out because it was poor. It’s a team that keeps winning and, having won, decided the next level wasn’t what it wanted.
The DPL page gives no reason, and I haven’t asked the club, so I won’t invent one. But one structural fact is worth stating, because it shapes the options: the club’s first team is already in the division the second team would have joined. Whatever the motive, promotion would have meant a club playing itself in its own region’s top flight, and asking its second-string players to face better opposition every matchday rather than winning most of theirs.
A quick word on the method
Everything here comes from the DPL’s own published pages (team lists, honours and the 1. Liga West page) and from reports by Pickleball Guide, ASC Göttingen and VT Böhl, read on 30 October 2026. German quotations are given in the original with my translation. I haven’t contacted any of the clubs, so where I discuss motives, I say so and keep to what the structure makes plausible rather than what anyone has said.
What sort of league is the DPL?
A young one. The Deutsche Pickleball Liga’s honours list starts in 2022/23, when the West title went to Spielgemeinschaft Aachen (later TV Roetgen). Four seasons on, the West region alone has a 1. Liga of eight teams (Borgholzhausen 1 and 2, Pickleball Cologne 1, HTV 1896 1, Duisburg Dragons 1, Osterfeld 1, HTV Hennef 1 and SFD 75 1) and a 2. Liga of eight more. Below that, a 3. Liga split into Nord, Mitte and Süd groups is building towards a finals day planned for 22–23 May 2027.
Look across the two West divisions and you’ll notice something: Borgholzhausen 1 and 2; Pickleball Cologne 1 and 2; Osterfeld 1 and 2; All Racket Club 1 and 2; HTV 1896 1 and 2; SFD 75 1 and 2. A large share of the league is clubs fielding more than one side. That’s what you’d expect in a sport where a club with a few dozen keen players wants all of them to get competitive matches. It also means promotion is rarely a simple question of ambition. It’s a question of how a club wants to distribute its players across two or three teams.
After two matchdays this season, Borgholzhausen 1 lead the 1. Liga West ahead of Pickleball Cologne 1, with the next matchday in November. Not to be confused with Borgholzhausen: the league’s first national finals day, in May 2025, crowned TV Burgholzhausen 1 (1. Liga) and TSV Haunstetten 1 (2. Liga), both from the Süd-West region. SFD 75 2 were runners-up in that 2. Liga final.
Isn’t refusing promotion just a lack of ambition?
That’s the conventional sporting view, and in a professional league it’s correct. Promotion is the point; the pyramid is the product; a team that turns it down is breaking the deal everyone else signed up to.
But an amateur pickleball league isn’t selling a pyramid. It’s selling good afternoons. DPL matchdays are tournament-style days in a single hall: the 1. Liga West opened with two matchdays in one day in Hennef, the 2. Liga a day later in Kerpen. What keeps them coming back is matches they have a chance of winning against people they enjoy playing. A team that would move from winning most of its matches to losing most of them has every reason to think twice, especially when its own club already has a team at the higher level.
There’s evidence that the league itself understands this. The 2. Liga final in Göttingen in August brought together the regional 2. Liga winners, five teams from four regions: ASC Göttingen (the hosts), ETV Hamburg, SFD 75 II, Schöllbronn II from near Karlsruhe, and VT Böhl from Rheinland-Pfalz. According to Pickleball Guide’s report, it was played with no sex or age requirements, and the hosts were proud of that: “Spieler:innen zwischen Mitte 20 und Anfang 60 zeigten dabei eindrucksvoll, dass im Pickleball alle Begeisterten auch auf hohem Niveau gemeinsam erfolgreich sein können” (players between their mid-20s and early 60s showed impressively that in pickleball, everyone who loves the game can succeed together at a high level).
That’s a culture, not a ladder. VT Böhl won. ASC Göttingen were second, having drawn 3–3 with ETV Hamburg and lost narrowly to Böhl. Böhl’s own club report headlined the win “Deutscher Meister 2026 im Pickleball” and noted that when it introduced pickleball to Rheinland-Pfalz in September 2023, “hätte das wohl niemand vorhergesagt” (nobody would have predicted it). A club that started the sport in its state three years ago is now a national second-division champion. That’s what a league built for participation looks like when it works.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that the DPL’s structure still assumes everyone wants to go up, and when someone doesn’t, it improvises. This summer it worked out neatly. One team declined, another stepped down, and the two that would have been relegated stayed up. But a league that relies on the numbers happening to balance is a league one awkward summer away from a 1. Liga with seven teams or a 2. Liga with a hole in it.
There’s also a fairness point. Somebody in the 2. Liga West presumably finished behind SFD 75 2 and might have liked the place. The published page doesn’t say whether it was offered to them. If it was and they declined too, that’s a story in itself. If it wasn’t, the league should say why.
What does the rest of the world do?
Most of pickleball’s team formats are built on different principles. Major League Pickleball, which began in 2021 with one event, eight teams and 32 players, is a franchise system: teams are bought, not earned on court. Its new MLP Nations Cup in Texas this week is built around eight regional teams. That’s team pickleball as entertainment product.
Germany is doing something closer to what European sport has always done: club teams in a regional pyramid. That’s more demanding to run, and far more likely to create local loyalty. The question the DPL is answering in real time is how much of the football model a participation sport should borrow. My answer: the regional structure and the club identity, yes; compulsory promotion, no.
What should the DPL do next?
Write the exception into the rules. Let a team decline promotion, set a deadline for doing so, and offer the place down the table in a published order. Consider explicitly whether a club’s second team can be promoted into a division where its first team already plays, and if so, on what terms. Then publish the decisions with the reasons, so that next year’s single sentence on a fixtures page is a paragraph.
And don’t treat SFD 75 2 as a problem. A team that kept winning, then said “no thanks” to playing harder matches so its club could keep fielding strong teams at two levels, is behaving exactly as a healthy amateur club should. The league’s job isn’t to make every team climb. It’s to make sure every team has a reason to come back in November.
German pickleball’s biggest story this autumn isn’t who went up. It’s who didn’t, and why that turned out to be fine.
