In the fight against financial problems, second division club FC Schalke 04 is taking a new step, as announced by CEO Matthias Tillmann. It is initially about stadium shares.

FC Schalke 04 is founding a funding cooperative to reduce its financial difficulties. The club announced this on Wednesday afternoon. The cooperative is to acquire shares in the stadium company in the first step.

“To free ourselves from our financial constraints, we have to get money into the club. We have looked at various options and are convinced that the funding cooperative is the best fit for Schalke,” said CEO Matthias Tillmann in an exclusive interview with the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe.

Currently, the club owns around 85 percent of Immo KG – the rest is owned by the city and smaller limited partners such as former club boss Clemens Tönnies. The complete 85 percent are not to go to the cooperative. “How many percent it will be depends primarily on how much capital the cooperative collects,” said Tillmann. He did not mention a specific target. “Anyone looking at our figures knows that collecting two million euros won’t do much good. As soon as we reach a double-digit million range, it will be worthwhile,” Tillmann told Funke Mediengruppe.

Only members of the registered association can also acquire shares in the cooperative. Schalke currently has around 180,000 members. “We thought about it: What does Schalke stand for? Then you quickly come up with values like courage, tradition, emotion, self-determination. This self-determination is expressed in the current structure – the club is 100 percent owned by its members, and that will remain the case with the funding cooperative.”

According to Tillmann, Schalke is burdened with around 160 million euros in liabilities and “a high negative equity”. In 2023, Schalke paid around 16 million euros in interest and principal. “That’s more money than many second-division clubs have available for their professional squad. We have to earn this money before we can put a single euro into other projects,” said Tillmann. To avoid a points deduction, Schalke has to generate ‘significant profits’ every year, as Tillmann says – around five million euros in 2024.

Schalke plans to announce further details at the general meeting on November 16.