Dana Sander, who chairs the management of Israel's Women's Basketball Premier League, pushed back this week against criticism that state sports funding unfairly favours the women's game, telling ONE's "Today's Conversation" programme that the real distortion in Israeli basketball economics has nothing to do with federation bias and everything to do with American colleges.
Her comments were a direct response to ONE's own reporting on the government's "Israeli player" incentive scheme, which showed women's top-flight basketball clubs are set to receive an average of roughly NIS 1.989 million each in 2026 - on paper more than men's Premier League clubs or top-tier women's soccer sides draw from the same pot.
Sander rejected the idea that this makes the system unequal. "The amount per point is identical for men and for women," she said, arguing the women's game's total allocation looks large mainly because it has grown fastest: she described a "dramatic increase" for women's basketball, against what she put at roughly a 20 percent rise for the men's game, alongside a substantial boost for women's soccer over the same period.
The real reason her sport's numbers stand out, she said, is that the Sports Ministry attaches far stricter conditions to women's basketball funding than to any other funded team sport. To draw full support, clubs must field at least five Israeli-eligible players under 26 and two under 22 - quotas that men's basketball teams, and every other funded discipline, do not face. "No other team sport demands more conditions of women than of men," she said, singling out basketball as the exception.
It is that quota system, Sander argued, that produces the actual distortion referenced in the interview's headline - and its root cause, in her account, sits 9,000 kilometres away on American campuses. She said roughly 14 young Israeli players leave every year for US college basketball scholarships, chasing deals she put at $200,000-$300,000 net over the life of a contract - money no domestic club can come close to matching.
That annual exodus shrinks the pool of Israeli-eligible prospects each summer, just as clubs are required to fill age-banded roster slots to qualify for their funding. The result, by her telling, is bidding wars among Israeli clubs for a handful of young players who choose to stay - a straightforward supply-and-demand squeeze on wages, not a funding formula skewed against men.
As examples of clubs operating under identical terms, Sander pointed to Maccabi Ra'anana and Bnei Herzliya, two Premier League sides she said received equal allocations under the current scheme, and noted that Israel currently has two women's clubs competing in European competition - evidence, in her view, that the league's investment is translating into on-court results rather than simply inflating budgets.
Sander took over as volunteer chair of the league's management in 2024, succeeding Hila Kanister Bar David after a five-year tenure. A former basketball player herself and now chief executive of the real-estate finance firm Arno Capital, she has repeatedly framed her mandate in personal terms, saying she took the unpaid role out of love for the sport and a determination to restore the league to what she has called its "glory days."
The funding debate is unlikely to end with one interview. ONE's reporting on the Israeli-player budget breakdown triggered the criticism Sander was answering, and with the Sports Ministry's criteria under renewed scrutiny across multiple sports, her defence of basketball's quota system sets up a rematch the next time budget figures are published.
