Peter Knäbel is no longer a member of the FC Schalke 04 board with immediate effect. His contract has been dissolved. He will remain as an advisor until the end of the year.

FC Schalke 04 will enter 2024 without a sports director. As the club announced on New Year’s Day, Peter Knäbel’s contract has been terminated with immediate effect. The 57-year-old will also be removed from the board. However, Knäbel will remain with the club as a consultant until June 30, 2024.

“Together with our new CEO Matthias Tillmann and Christina Rühl-Hamers, we have made the decision to restructure football at Schalke without the position of the board of sports,” said Schalke’s supervisory board chairman Axel Hefer on Monday. For this reason, Knäbel’s contract as sporting director was already terminated at the turn of the year – by mutual agreement. “We are very grateful to Peter for his work and tireless commitment to Schalke 04. He played a major role in stabilizing the club after its relegation in 2021, in a very difficult sporting and financial situation,” said Hefer.

Knäbel initially joined FC Schalke 04 as Technical Director in April 2018, initially taking care of the further development of the Knappenschmiede. In March 2021, he was then appointed to the board. In mid-November, he had announced that he would not extend his expiring contract. However, it was considered unlikely that Schalke would have presented him with a new contract anyway. So now the end is even earlier – although Knäbel will continue to work as a consultant until the summer.

As a consultant, Knäbel will continue to push ahead with “a number of forward-looking projects in the areas of digitalization and sports science,” as he himself said. He thanked the club, where he worked for a good six years. In the summer, Knäbel will return to his family in Switzerland.

Schalke: Knäbel one of the architects of the 2022 promotion

Knäbel took over Schalke in March 2021 at the most difficult phase in the club’s recent history, when the first relegation was almost a done deal. “He played a major role in ensuring that the club was able to survive the relegation in 2021, both in sporting and financial terms,” said Supervisory Board Chairman Axel Hefer back in November.

This is also what will likely be associated with Knäbel in decades to come. In the hour of relegation, he and the sporting director he hired, Rouven Schröder, put together the squad that returned to the Bundesliga as champions of the second division in May 2022, despite major financial worries. These were the greatest moments of his tenure.