AGI – From second place in the Bundesliga to relegation in just three seasons: Schalke 04, the German club that won a Uefa Cup and three Cups and a German Super Cup, fell to the ZweiteLiga with four days to go before the end of the championship, following a 1-0 defeat at Arminia Bielefeld. A technical and financial parable aggravated by the pandemic and that is paradigmatic of the fragility of football in the current world emergency.
A nightmare season
“It hurts more than expected. What crap,” tweeted the Ruhr club, great rival of Borussia Dortmund, whose first relegation in 30 years is likely to be just the beginning of a nightmare from which it will be difficult to recover. The Gelsenkirchen Blues have only won two league games since January 2020 and they pay for the constant changes of coach, seven since 2016. In this season 18 goals scored and above all 76 conceded, worst attack and worst defense in the league. Since 2000, no club has conceded so many goals in one season.
Crushed by debt
Schalke 04 has a debt of 217 million, the result of expensive and bankruptcy campaigns and the bad season in 2018/2019, with relegation avoided at the last minute. The pandemic with the consequent economic crisis did not help the company, which even in April 2020 had asked fans to waive the reimbursement of the season ticket to save the accounts of their favorite team. “Every single waiver is an immense contribution to stabilizing liquidity and ensuring the survival of Schalke 04,” explained the club.
We need a revolution
Failure puts the club in front of the need to a revolution in its economic and political-cultural model: Schalke is in fact managed by an internal committee that is an expression of the Gelsenkirchen community, and the managers, starting with the marketing director, Alexander Jobst, have called for the entry of new external members “to make the club more modern in light of the changes economic circumstances “. A scenario opposed by the fans, in particular the ultras of the Veltins Arena curve, for which it would be a maneuver to favor the return of the controversial tycoon Clemens Tonnies, the former president who had left office in June 2020. His resignation came after a long controversy over some racist phrases and for the management of a Covid outbreak inside a plant of Tonnies Holding, his company of meats.
Uncertain future
The club that launched champions like Manuel Neuer, Benedikt Howedes, Julian Draxler, Leon Goretzka or Alexander Nubel are now afraid of ending up in Hamburg which, relegated for the first time in 55 years in 2018, cannot make it back to the Bundesliga. The Super League is a finger that perhaps points in the wrong direction, but the moon of the football crisis shines more and more in the darkness of this pandemic.
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