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South Africa will host the Basketball Africa League playoffs and final in June 2025, the BAL announced on Thursday, taking over from regular finals host city Kigali, Rwanda. The Moroccan city of Rabat has also been added as a new host city, with Cairo removed from the roster as Nile Conference hosts. The BAL season will tip off in Rabat from April 5-13. From there, the caravan will move to Dakar in Senegal (April 26-May 4), and then to Kigali for the third Conference round from May 17-25. The playoffs and finals will be in Pretoria from June 6-14. The champions of Egypt (Al Ittihad), Angola (Petro de Luanda), Senegal (ASC Ville de Dakar), Nigeria (Rivers Hoopers), Tunisia (US Monastir), Rwanda (APR) and Morocco (FUS Rabat) automatically qualified for the 2025 BAL. Al Ahli Tripoli (Libya) and Stade Malien (Mali) have automatically qualified through the Road to BAL qualifiers. There will be three more teams, as yet undecided, at the final tournament. Kigali's BK Arena hosted the entire tournament in 2021 in a COVID-19 bubble, and then the playoffs and finals in 2022, 2023 and 2024 as it expanded into other countries.  Rwanda will still host the Nile Conference and as per the Rwanda Development Board's 2023 deal with the BAL, they are scheduled to host the playoffs and finals in 2026 and 2028. However, having already hosted once since the deal to take the playoffs and finals every second year was struck, it was always likely that Rwanda would give way for another country to host in 2025. The inaugural 2021 tournament was won by Egypt's Zamalek. The 2022 edition went to Tunisia's US Monastir and 2023 saw Egypt reclaim the title via Al Ahly. In 2024, Angola's Petro de Luanda became the fourth BAL champion and the first from Sub-Saharan Africa. "Our fourth season was really a banner year... We set attendance records with over 120,000 fans attending games across four countries," BAL president Amadou Gallo Fall said. The 2024 season was the first played across four countries rather than three after South Africa was added to Egypt and Senegal, who hosted conferences in 2022 and 2023.
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