How bad is Schalke’s situation?

Dimitrios Grammozis needed this win. Having been sacked from Schalke in 2022, and having seen his new side lose seven straight games in the league, a 4-1 win for Kaiserslautern was as emphatic as it was uplifting. It’s a win that only takes them one point clear of the relegation places, but it’s something to build on and a reason to be optimistic for the rest of the campaign.

On the other side of the ball, the team who lost to Kaiserslautern feel like they’re in a full-on tailspin. Schalke have lost both of their games in 2024 and now sit level on points with 17th-placed Eintracht Braunschweig. The news this week suggesting that the side would not be given a 3. Liga license if they’re relegated means we’re potentially months away from seeing one of the most historic sides in the German game crash into semi-professional football at either the fourth or fifth tier.

In 2018, that would have seemed beyond unrealistic. Schalke had just finished second in the Bundesliga, a whole eight points ahead of Hoffenheim in third and rivals Dortmund in fourth. What happened after that has been well documented, years of poor recruitment, not enough focus on their youth academy and managerial turnover that rivals Watford led to the dismal 2020/21 season. Schalke nearly tied Tasmania Berlin’s record of misery with 30 winless games and eventually went down on just 16 points. They had a lifeline though, the firing of the aforementioned Grammozis in March 2022 saw Mike Buskens take the helm. He would win eight of his nine games in charge as Schalke went from 6th in the second-tier to the 1st. S04 though would make another poor managerial decision upon their return to the Bundesliga, bringing in recent Arminia Bielefeld manager Frank Kramer and his three months with the side would be terrible. Thomas Reis was better but not good enough as Die Knappen once again returned to the second-tier.

Should it have been more obvious that Schalke weren’t going to repeat their success from 2021/22? Was I blinded by the size of the club to think that they wouldn’t truly struggle at this level? Schlake had been better in their relegation campaign from the Bundesliga last year than in 2020/21 (not an achievement), and they had spent more despite selling less. This season though, the whole has not been greater than the sum of its parts, especially true of their game against Kaiserslautern. The club is struggling like it hasn’t for most of our lifetimes, and there are players in that squad who are experiencing strife like they haven’t in their professional lives. That’s why the atmosphere around the club has been so poor. Timo Baumgartl’s explosive comments against Thomas Reis signalled the end for a coach who had clearly lost the dressing room, the letter Schalke players sent to the fans promising them that they would be better was an indication that the team were aware of how their long-suffering fanbase was feeling, and this weekend, reports indicated that the team’s statesman Simon Terrode was very unhappy about the performance and result of the game against FCK.

It’s really hard to actually point out things to be positive about at the moment. Assan Ouédraogo is still at the club, though relegation would see his price plummet, getting Darko Churlinov back seems like a good move, but that’s really about it. There’s obviously nothing more Schalke can do to improve the squad, we’ll have to wait and see if Brandon Soppy ends up being a big help or just another underperforming defender. On the last episode of the podcast, I said more performances like the defeat to Kaiserslautern could be the end for manager Karel Geraerts, but what’s that going to achieve? For a club that hasn’t had a manager last two years since Mirko Slomka in 2008, why would getting rid of this manager be any different? Marc Wilmots might not have too much experience in being a sporting director (literally just the four weeks he has been in the position with Schalke), but he will have a lot to do if Schalke stays up to ensure the deadwood is gone and the side can start to move up the table again.

So to finally answer the question of how bad Schalke’s situation is, quite bad. There are a lot of unknowns at Schalke: whether the side have enough to stay up, what league they will be playing in if they don’t, how they sort out their finances regardless, and how they build a squad for future seasons. The one morsel of comfort I can offer, both to fans of the side from Gelsenkirchen and German football fans who just don’t want to see such an iconic club go, is that there will always be a Schalke. The club is too big to truly ever go away, their fanbase is too big and passionate to allow them to stay in the lower leagues for too long. If the worst comes to the worst, a new side with the same identity will rise and take the place of the former. However, it would just be much easier if it never comes to that, it would have also been much easier if Schalke had been ran competently in any of the last ten seasons.