GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany — About four miles from Schalke 04‘s Veltins-Arena sits the main train station, and it begins to get awfully loud and crowded about four hours before kickoff. The ride toward the stadium on the tram is packed. On the way, a number of fans get off at the stop next to Schalke’s former home, the tiny Gluckauf-Kampfbahn, where there are a number of storied old bars and a giant biergarten (you can probably guess the translation there) and everything is full. So is the parking lot at the stadium.
The singing in the stadium begins about an hour and 50 minutes out, when the visiting fans file into their section. When they really get going, the Schalke fans respond in full. The singing won’t stop until well after the match ends.
Two conclusions you quickly reach: The soccer in Germany’s second division, which houses a number of storied and celebrated clubs with mighty fanbases, really matters. And the chance to move back to the top division matters a lot.
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I was in attendance for Schalke’s 3-2 victory over St. Pauli on May 7, a come-from-behind win that indeed clinched promotion for Die Königsblauen back to the Bundesliga, from which they were unceremoniously dumped a year ago. It was so impossibly loud for much of the match that, from my perch in the media section near the top of the arena, I assumed they’d closed the retractable roof.
They had not.
Despite the miserable 2020-21 campaign — and the fact that they almost set Germany’s all-time winless streak in the process — Schalke fans filled the stadium every time coronavirus regulations allowed them to over the course of the season. And while they would never admit it, if you gave those in the Bundesliga offices some truth serum, they might admit they were quietly hoping Schalke would rebound as well. The same likely went for a couple of other huge clubs attempting a rebound this fall and spring.
Underdog stories are always to be celebrated. Union Berlin’s presence in the Bundesliga top five, for instance, is an incredible story. But it’s hard for a league to be at its absolute best if some of its biggest clubs can’t get their respective acts together.
Schalke is a club with over 150,000 members (topped only by Bayern Munich and, depending on the year, Borussia Dortmund), while Hamburg is over 85,000 and Werder Bremen is around 40,000. All three rank in Germany’s top 10 in that category. And if Hamburg beats Hertha Berlin, another top-10 club, over two legs in the coming days — the first in Berlin on Thursday, the second in Hamburg on Monday (stream BOTH matches LIVE on ESPN+) — they will join Schalke and Bremen in a return to the top division next season.
The demise of three heavyweights
Germany’s 50+1 ownership model — in which a majority of voting rights (50 plus one share) is retained by a club’s fans/members — is as pure as you will find in soccer. Fans fight to keep ticket (and beer) prices down and push back vociferously about kickoff times: Matches are to be played at 3:30 p.m. on Saturdays with the fewest possible exceptions. A team’s home stadium remains in the hands of the most passionate, and loudest, fans available. The beer flows, the bratwursts smoke and the songs never stop.
Of course, as idealistic as 50+1 can seem — especially in England, where it might cost you more to attend an Arsenal match than it does to travel to Germany and attend a match there — it also caps German teams’ revenue and spending. Going into debt to right your ship after a series of poor decisions or results isn’t really an option, and at the bigger clubs you can easily end up with a too-many-cooks situation, unable…
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