In the “frequent player affair” about the former first division club TTC Neu-Ulm, sanctions by the Table Tennis Bundesliga (TTBL) against colleagues of national player Dimitrij Ovtcharov were legal. This emerges from the decision of the permanent court of arbitration for licensed players of the TTBL, which was published on Friday.
The court ruled that the €10,000 fines imposed on Truls Moregardh (Sweden) and Lin Yun-Ju (Taiwan) after matches for foreign clubs were reasonable for what was evidently a deliberate breach of the ban on playing for several clubs in the same season. Contrary to the plaintiff’s point of view, in the present case a punishment is in principle not objectionable.
However, the court, chaired by former national handball goalkeeper Andreas Thiel, lifted the bans of ten games each for the two players, which were imposed in addition to the immediate withdrawal of the player’s license, despite his fundamental position for formal reasons: from the English translation of the license player contract, according to the reasoning of the judgement , had not become unequivocally clear that an illegal assignment for a second club could also have resulted in game suspensions in the future.
In the dispute over the sanctions for Moregardh’s and Lin’s illegal foreign assignments just a few days after winning the cup final with the approval of the club management, Ovtcharov’s employer had returned his Bundesliga license, which he had received four years earlier via wildcard, at the end of the previous season. However, due to further gaps in the regulations of both the European Association ETTU and the German Table Tennis Association (DTTB), Bayern can also take part in the Champions League in the upcoming season without participating in national games. For the post-Olympic season 2024/25, DTTB President Claudia Herweg has already announced improvements to the association’s statutes to avoid a repeat of the “Neu-Ulm case”.