The reporter of the Ruhr news had looked very closely: When Amine Harit recently fell to the ground in a friendly against Shakhtar Donetsk and lay there with a painful expression, the correspondent recognized with an undoubtedly razor-sharp eye how “the hairs on the back of the neck were bent” in Rouven Schröder and Dimitrios Grammozis. Schalke’s sports director and head coach were allowed to calm down quickly. Harit rose to full height and went on playing.
The fact that the 24-year-old Frenchman is still playing for Schalke 04 should have surprised some of the 500 spectators at the match at the training camp in Mittersill, Austria. On the last day of the Bundesliga season, Harit left the pitch in Cologne in insatiable tears, but it was certainly not so much the long-term relegation that he mourned, and certainly not the 1-0 defeat against 1. FC Köln. Rather, he was overwhelmed by the awareness of four maximum turbulent years in royal blue, which have now come to an end. That he would accompany the club into the second division seemed out of the question for everyone involved.
But now he’s back on the training ground. When Schalke was still marching towards the Champions League under coach David Wagner, Harit had extended his contract until 2024 – at terms that were already considered to be at least marginal in-house at the time. Until a buyer can be found who accepts these conditions and also pays the transfer fee, the fast technician belongs to the professional squad as an expensive relic of better days, which occasionally forces those responsible to make decisions of conscience. His commitment against Donetsk should be a reward for training zeal, an injury was of course particularly undesirable – then probably no club would pay the longed-for 15 million euros for Harit. The crooked hair on the back of the neck of sports director Schröder expressed this concern.
Sports director Schröder handles numbers like the port master of Shanghai
Schröder, 45, previously active in Bremen and Mainz, returned to the West at the end of May, is the juggler among Germany’s football managers: while he is handling Schalke’s first division past, he is also constructing the club’s second division future, handling numbers like the port master of Shanghai. The amount of transfer movements should impress even the great shunting master Felix Magath.
Twenty professionals have already left the club, nine have come, and Schröder works on a new data status every day. While the club announced the (temporary) takeover of the 18-year-old Russian midfield talent Yaroslaw Mikhailow on Monday, the next day it was about the farewell to the second goalkeeper Markus Schubert, who is allowed to transfer to Vitesse Arnheim for free despite the current contract. Like so many others, Schalke would have liked to keep him. But Schubert’s salary, generously measured in 2019 when he came from Dresden for free in the rank of U-21 national goalkeeper, spoke against it.
The construction work will certainly continue until the transfer window closes on August 31st, and the client is unable to say whether Schalke 04 will then have a team that will play for promotion. “That cannot be reliably forecast,” says Schröder. In addition to relegated Werder Bremen and the already notorious promotion favorite Hamburger SV, he can think of half a dozen other clubs that could be considered for places one to three: Heidenheim, Kiel, St. Pauli, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, Hanover. Schröder also knows that the X-factor typical of the league always promotes candidates like Sandhausen or Paderborn to the top group who had no idea that they could be candidates: “In the second division there is no midfield, only promotion and relegation battle, that’s why There will be – like every year – one or two surprises. “
The club engages in this treacherous biotope with a sense of reality that is amazing for its standards. Connoisseurs particularly praise the royal transfer of the royal blues: his name is supposedly not Simon Terodde (an almost mandatory purchase, as Stuttgart, Cologne and Hamburg have shown), but Viktor Pálsson. The 30-year-old Icelander came from Darmstadt and is considered a prime example of a strong second division professional. The Austrian Reinhold Ranftl, 28, is also raved about.
This is how it looks, the new Schalke. Sports director Peter Knäbel, who had taken over the business from Jochen Schneider in the spring, now reported Sports picture of a radical change: The status of the contracts in the professional department showed him “what world Schalke lived in – today I feel endlessly removed from this world”. Today, a leading member of the board of directors said recently, the new players receive monthly salaries that are not higher than the point bonuses of the players from the previous generation. Which is one reason why first division qualified professionals like Matija Nastasic and Omar Mascarell as well as Harit are still on the sales list.
Who apparently wants to stay forever: the fans. Only two percent of subscribers canceled their season tickets during the epic crisis. The waiting list for the successors has been closed. Too much rush.