Crisis club Schalke fire David Wagner

After a 3-1 loss to Werder Bremen, an end was called to the David Wagner era at Schalke, the tenth manager to have led the Royal Blues in the last 10 years.

It was after an 18th straight match without a win.

When those words are uttered, many things come to mind. Perhaps it is the 2010-11 Champions League semi-finals. Maybe it’s their place on the Forbes Magazine list of most valuable clubs. Maybe it’s the number of high end players that have left the club to play and thrive elsewhere. All these things would point that the club should not be in trouble, but they’d be wrong.

Despite all these positive thoughts, the club has been deteriorating at an alarming rate. Now the club is in the deepest mud that you wonder if there is anything that will be able to save them.

After Andre Breitenreiter was made coach for 2016-17, the Royal Blues finished in tenth and hadn’t made Europe for first season since 2010. Suddenly, the little money they had available brought in Dominic Tedesco and using a strategy of winning 1-0 with defence they finished second. But the club found that the strategy didn’t work anymore and they finished 14th.

Wagner took over and while the autumn was good and were in 7th place before the winter break. After winning on Matchday 18, Schalke would not win again and once the break due to COVID-19 came around, things financially hit the wall.

While teams were unable to train, the word came from the board that unless the club was able to return to matches and return of the cheques for the TV money, then the club would have to declare that they were bankrupt.

How does a club get to this? How do you let German internationals Max Meyer, Alexander Nubel, Manuel Neuer, Leon Goretzka simply go? How do you then lose your commercial director and the money dries up?

Schalke is a team that did what folks want. Chase the dream of silverware.

Now the club has self imposed economic restrictions with a salary cap on players wages. Now how do you attract players with that?

So where to go now for the club? We may start to find out when Schalke appoint their next coach to see if he can stop the rot at the Veltins-Arena.