The Worst Bundesliga Team Ever

Last Updated: June 2026

Schalke 04: The Bundesliga Collapse of a German Giant

In the 2020-21 Bundesliga season, Schalke 04 went 30 games without a win across 358 days — the longest drought by calendar duration in the competition’s history. They lost 8-0 on the opening day. They used five managers, a Bundesliga record. They were relegated for the first time in 30 years with just 16 points and 3 wins from 34 games, having been in the Champions League knockout stages just two seasons earlier. This is not a story about a bad football team. It is a story about how one of Germany’s greatest clubs destroyed itself from the inside out.

What Made This Collapse So Shocking

Schalke 04 are not a small club. At the time of their relegation in April 2021, they were Germany’s second-largest football club by membership, with over 155,000 members — second only to Bayern Munich. They had played in the Champions League round of 16 just two seasons prior. They had spent 30 consecutive seasons in the Bundesliga, a run stretching back to their promotion in 1991. Their home, the Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen, regularly drew over 60,000 supporters. Two seasons from Champions League football to relegation with three wins all season: the speed of the collapse is what makes it genuinely unusual, and understanding it requires looking far beyond the 2020-21 season itself.

The club is woven into the identity of Gelsenkirchen — a city in North Rhine-Westphalia whose coal mining industry collapsed in the decades following reunification, leaving behind high unemployment and limited economic prospects. For generations of supporters in a city with few other sources of civic pride, Schalke was not simply a football club. It was an institution. The scale of the 2020-21 collapse only makes sense against this backdrop. What happened on the pitch was catastrophic. What it meant to the city was something else entirely.

The Rot Starts Upstairs: The Heidel Years (2016-2019)

The seeds of Schalke’s relegation were planted long before the 2020-21 season began. In February 2016, Christian Heidel was appointed Sporting Director, arriving with a strong reputation built on his work developing managers — including Thomas Tuchel and Jurgen Klopp — during his lengthy tenure at Mainz. The appointment was widely praised. Within three years, it had become a cautionary tale.

The Free Transfer Haemorrhage

The pattern that would define the Heidel era began almost immediately. Centre-back Joel Matip departed for Liverpool on a free transfer in 2016, having been one of the more reliable defenders in the squad. The following year, left-back Sead Kolasinac — a Bundesliga Team of the Season selection — joined Arsenal for nothing. Neither departure generated a transfer fee. Both left holes that were filled with expensive, lower-quality replacements who failed to make a significant impact.

The summer of 2018 brought the haemorrhage to a crisis point. Midfielder Max Meyer, an academy graduate, left for Crystal Palace on a free after publicly criticising Heidel. Then Leon Goretzka, the best player at the club, walked out the door and signed for Bayern Munich — a direct Bundesliga rival — without a single euro of compensation. Four significant players lost across three summers, with no meaningful fees received and no like-for-like replacements brought in. The squad was hollowing out from within.

From Second Place to Crisis in Twelve Months

The extraordinary thing is that Schalke had finished second in the Bundesliga in 2017-18, 21 points behind Bayern but well clear of the rest. To external observers, the club appeared healthy. But the transfer policy told a different story, and by the end of the 2018-19 season the consequences were visible for all to see. Schalke dropped from 2nd to 14th — only five points above the relegation places — in the space of twelve months.

The Man City Humiliation and Heidel’s Exit

The 2018-19 Champions League brought Schalke a last-16 tie against Manchester City. They lost the first leg 3-2 in Gelsenkirchen, then were beaten 7-0 at the Etihad, completing a 10-2 aggregate defeat. It was a comprehensive statement of the gap between where Schalke believed they were and where they actually stood. Heidel resigned in February 2019. The damage, by then, was structural. A new Sporting Director could not immediately fix a squad that had been systematically weakened over three years.

Tonnies, Wagner, and the Season Before the Disaster

As the squad deteriorated on the pitch, the man presiding over the club off it was generating problems of his own. Clemens Tonnies, the billionaire meat magnate and personal friend of Vladimir Putin, had negotiated Schalke’s headline sponsorship deal with Gazprom directly at the Kremlin. He served as chairman of the supervisory board and was, for a long period, the dominant figure at the club.

The Racism Scandal – August 2019

In August 2019, Tonnies was speaking at a public event in Paderborn when he made remarks that were widely described as racist — suggesting that instead of raising taxes to combat climate change, it would be better to build power plants in Africa, after which, he said, Africans would “stop cutting down trees and stop producing children when it’s dark.” The comments drew condemnation across Germany, from politicians, the media, and from within football. Tonnies took a three-month leave of absence from his role, with Schalke’s ethics body finding that while the charge of racism was “unfounded,” he had violated the club’s non-discrimination principles. He returned to the role in November 2019.

Wagner’s 16-Game Winless Run Carries Into the Summer

Meanwhile, on the pitch, David Wagner — the former Huddersfield Town manager appointed in the summer of 2019 — made a decent enough start before the winter break. But the COVID-enforced hiatus that followed in spring 2020 broke whatever momentum the team had built. Wagner closed out the 2019-20 season with a 16-game winless run in the Bundesliga, finishing the campaign without a victory after 17 January 2020, the date of Schalke’s last win before one of the most extraordinary droughts in European football history began.

The COVID Slaughterhouse, the Protests, and Tonnies’ Exit

In June 2020, a COVID-19 outbreak at the Tonnies Rheda-Wiedenbruck slaughterhouse infected approximately 1,400 workers and triggered a regional lockdown across North Rhine-Westphalia. For Schalke supporters who had already been protesting against his stewardship, this was the final straw. At the last game of the 2019-20 season, fans formed a socially distanced human chain outside the Veltins-Arena in protest. A few days later, Tonnies resigned. He had taken the club’s main benefactor with him.

A Summer With No Money and No Answers

The financial consequences arrived quickly. Each COVID-affected home game cost the club approximately 2 million euros in lost matchday revenue. With no European football generating additional income, and with Bundesliga broadcasting revenue slashed by around 31% due to the pandemic, Schalke’s debt rose to approximately 200 million euros. Their Chief Financial Officer left the club. Unable to afford a managerial change, the club retained Wagner and waved goodbye to yet more key players in the summer transfer window. The squad that walked into the 2020-21 season was the weakest Schalke had fielded in decades, managed by a coach who had not won a Bundesliga game in six months.

The 2020-21 Season: Five Managers, 30 Games, One Win

Schalke entered the 2020-21 season with mounting debts, a dysfunctional hierarchy, a squad in serious decline, a fractured fanbase, and a manager who had not won a league game in 16 attempts. No Bundesliga club had used five head coaches in a single season. By May 2021, Schalke had.

Day One: 8-0 at Bayern Munich

The season began on 18 September 2020 at the Allianz Arena. Bayern Munich, the reigning Bundesliga champions and freshly crowned Champions League winners, beat Schalke 8-0. Serge Gnabry scored a hat-trick. Leroy Sane, returning to Germany after his transfer from Manchester City, marked his Bayern debut with a goal against his former Bundesliga club. It was, in a single result, the distance between where Schalke had been and where they now were. Wagner lost the next home game to Werder Bremen. He was sacked on 26 September 2020, having overseen 18 Bundesliga games without a win.

Manuel Baum and the Dressing Room Mutiny

Former Augsburg manager Manuel Baum was brought in as Wagner’s replacement. He steadied the ship briefly — three draws across his first five games lifted Schalke off the bottom spot and offered the fanbase a few weeks of cautious optimism. Then the run resumed, and with it, the internal collapse that had been threatening for months.

In a 3-0 home defeat to Wolfsburg in November 2020, Baum substituted midfielder Amin Harit in the second half. Harit responded by giving Baum the cold shoulder on the touchline. A confrontation took place behind closed doors. Days later, the club announced that both Harit and Nabil Bentaleb had been banished from the first-team squad and were required to train individually, the club stating the two players “clearly aren’t a good fit.” Two senior players removed from an already paper-thin squad in the middle of a relegation fight. Baum lost his job in December 2020, having not won a single Bundesliga game in his ten matches in charge.

Tasmania Berlin and the 30-Game Mark

As December arrived and Schalke’s winless run approached 28 games, attention turned to a record held by SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin. In 1965-66, Tasmania’s one and only Bundesliga season, the Berlin club went 31 consecutive games without a win. It is a record they have held for nearly six decades, and in the modern era it has become central to the club’s identity. Tasmania actively market themselves as the worst club in Bundesliga history, a badge worn with a certain pride.

The prospect of losing that record horrified them. Chairman Almir Numic went on a media campaign ahead of Schalke’s match at Hertha Berlin, imploring the football world to pay attention. Tasmania supporters made the trip to the Olympiastadion to cheer for Schalke — willing Die Knappen to beat Hertha and preserve the record. Schalke lost 3-0. The 30th consecutive game without a win. One from the record, with games remaining.

Nine Days Over Christmas: Huub Stevens

With Baum sacked, the club turned to the one man whose name still carried genuine affection among the Schalke support. Huub Stevens, 67 years old, was returning for his fourth stint as Schalke manager. The Dutch coach had led the club to the UEFA Cup in 1997, earning the nickname “Euro Fighters” from supporters who revered him as a cult figure. He had been voted Schalke’s manager of the century. Now, in the depths of a relegation winter, he was back for nine days — presiding over two defeats either side of Christmas before handing the reins to his successor on 27 December 2020.

Christian Gross and the Travelcard Manager

The appointment of Christian Gross as Schalke’s fourth manager of the season was not met with optimism. Twenty-three years earlier, in November 1997, Gross had arrived at his Tottenham Hotspur unveiling having taken the London Underground from Heathrow, brandished his travel card at the assembled press, and declared: “I want this to become my ticket to the dreams.” The British tabloids had never let him forget it. His record at Grasshopper Zurich was genuinely impressive — six combined league titles across Grasshoppers and Basel during his Swiss career — but he had not managed in European top-flight football for a decade before taking the Schalke job. At 66 years old, in charge of a club with 200 million euros of debt and no league win since January, the prospect of a miraculous escape had largely dissolved before the new year had begun.

Under Gross, the winless run extended to 30 consecutive games — a 3-0 defeat to Hertha Berlin on 2 January 2021, 358 days after Schalke’s last Bundesliga victory, the longest drought by calendar duration in the competition’s history according to the Bundesliga’s own records. Tasmania Berlin’s record of 31 games by match count remained intact. It was a small and painful consolation.

358 Days: The Matthew Hoppe Hat-Trick Ends It

On 9 January 2021, a 19-year-old American forward changed the season’s narrative for one afternoon. Matthew Hoppe had made his professional debut for Schalke just six weeks earlier. He had not scored a senior goal before that day. Against Hoffenheim at the Veltins-Arena, he scored three times in the second half — the first American to score a hat-trick in the Bundesliga. Amin Harit, recalled from banishment to provide three assists, completed the 4-0 win with a goal of his own.

Three hundred and fifty-eight days after beating Borussia Monchengladbach 2-0 on 17 January 2020, and following 30 games without a win, Schalke had finally won a Bundesliga match. Tasmania Berlin’s record of 31 games remained unbroken. The celebrations at the Veltins-Arena were genuine, if slightly bewildered. There were still 20 games of the season to play and Schalke were bottom of the table.

Dimitrios Grammozis and the Final Act

The brief optimism did not last. A new winless run began almost as soon as the previous one had ended. Schalke gathered only three draws in the weeks that followed. Gross was dismissed on 2 March 2021 after successive heavy defeats to Borussia Dortmund and Stuttgart. Dimitrios Grammozis became the fifth manager of the season — a Bundesliga record — tasked with overseeing the inevitable. He won just seven points from his eleven games in charge, but gave playing time to several young academy products and managed to reach the end of the season with some dignity intact.

April 20, 2021: Relegation Confirmed

The final nail came on 20 April 2021. A 1-0 defeat at Arminia Bielefeld confirmed Schalke’s relegation to the 2. Bundesliga — their first absence from the top flight since 1991. Four games still remained to be played. Across the city of Dortmund, Borussia’s ultras set off fireworks in celebration over Gelsenkirchen.

When the team bus returned to the Veltins-Arena, hundreds of supporters were waiting. Fireworks were set off around the bus. As the players stepped out, eggs and verbal abuse were hurled at them. Then it escalated. An anonymous player told Sport1: “The fans came at us. At that point, we were just running. It was fear, pure fear. Some of us were hit by kicks and punches.”

Violence is never condoned. But the context is worth understanding. Gelsenkirchen is a post-industrial city where the last coal mine had closed in 2018, and where unemployment rates have long sat above the national average. For over a century, Schalke had been the city’s most significant institution — the source of its identity, its pride, and its collective purpose. Over a period of a few years, and against the backdrop of a pandemic that had stripped the club of its revenue and its supporters of their access to the ground, Schalke fans had watched their club disintegrate in front of their eyes. The rage that greeted the bus was real, and the context of it matters.

The Final Numbers

One additional record that spanned beyond the single season: Schalke went 38 consecutive away Bundesliga games without a win, from matchday 14 of the 2019-20 season to matchday 21 of 2022-23 — a competition record, confirmed by the Bundesliga’s official statistics. The 30-game overall winless run and the 38-game away winless run together constitute the two worst sustained losing records in the league’s history.

What Happened Next: The Second Act

Schalke’s story did not end with relegation. In some respects, the years that followed were harder than the season that caused it.

The 2021-22 season brought an immediate return. With Grammozis sacked mid-season and assistant Mike Buskens taking over as caretaker, Schalke won eight of their final nine games in the 2. Bundesliga to claim the title and promotion — a remarkable turnaround achieved largely without funds. But the financial problems that had contributed to the collapse had not been resolved, and in February 2022 they were compounded by something no one could have anticipated: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Schalke’s headline shirt sponsor was Gazprom, the Russian state energy giant whose deal Tonnies had negotiated personally with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. With no alternative, Schalke cancelled the contract on 28 February 2022. A club already carrying approximately 200 million euros of debt lost its main commercial income overnight.

The 2022-23 Bundesliga season ended in a second relegation, this time finishing bottom with 31 points. The club spent the following two seasons in the 2. Bundesliga, finishing 10th in 2023-24 and 14th in 2024-25 — the latter perilously close to a third relegation that would have placed them in the third division, where their debt would likely have seen them placed directly into the amateur Regionalliga West. The situation threatened the club’s existence in its current form.

The turnaround came in 2025-26. New head coach Miron Muslic, appointed in the summer of 2025, transformed the club’s mentality and results. On 2 May 2026, Schalke clinched the 2. Bundesliga title with a 1-0 home win over Fortuna Dusseldorf, with captain Kenan Karaman scoring the only goal. After five years of financial crisis, managerial chaos, and two relegations, Die Knappen are heading back to the top flight. Whether the structural problems that caused the original collapse have genuinely been addressed remains the question that will define the next chapter.

Why Schalke’s Collapse Stands Apart

The speed of Schalke’s disintegration is what makes the 2020-21 story genuinely unusual. In the 2018-19 season, Schalke were in the Champions League round of 16. Two seasons later, they were relegated with the worst defensive record in the Bundesliga, having cycled through five managers and a winless run that lasted the better part of a calendar year.

Most Bundesliga relegations follow a pattern: financial difficulty over several seasons, gradual decline, a bad campaign, the drop. Schalke’s followed that pattern in terms of the financial and structural causes — but the speed at which it materialised on the pitch was exceptional. The COVID pandemic did not cause the collapse, but it compressed what might have been a slower decline into a single catastrophic season. The loss of matchday revenue, the inability to make a managerial change when it was needed, the carry-over of a winless run into a new season — each of these accelerated a process that was already underway.

And beneath all of it sat Gelsenkirchen. The city’s relationship with its football club is not like the relationship between most cities and their teams. It is more dependent, more emotionally loaded, and more exposed to the consequences of failure. When Schalke collapsed, they did not just lose a football season. They failed a city that had few other things to hold onto.

Watch the Worst Team in Bundesliga History Video