Blood Empty: How a Beloved Team Made a Deal with the Devil

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Speaker 16 How's it going, man?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I'm all right, but

Speaker 16 you're finishing. Is this lunch? Granola bar, which technically, I guess, is lunch right now.
Yeah, I've been tracking you across the office. I am always rushing around from thing to thing.

Speaker 16 You seem haggard, especially lately. It's been a stretch, dude.
You are trying to be kind to yourself by eating a kind bar.

Speaker 16 You know, a real luxury. Oh, it's good.
It's good. Well, dude, question.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 Have you ever done something? And

Speaker 16 this will go somewhere. Have you ever done something to someone where you ask them to do, you know, like a favor for you?

Speaker 16 They do it. And only then afterwards do you realize that, oh man, you just asked them to do like something absolutely wretched? Yes.
First time I moved out of my parents' apartment,

Speaker 16 asked a friend, can you help me move? Having never done it myself and moving in New York is basically like, would you like to

Speaker 16 be basically stuck in a set of stairs trying to maneuver a couch at like a 64-degree angle? Buddy Juan, I am so sorry. He got the bottom part of the couch.

Speaker 16 And I was like just steering it from the top, which is an unequal distribution of labor. So

Speaker 16 I did that, which I am still living down. I did this with my cousin Max, who lives in Germany.

Speaker 16 We were talking on Zoom, and I looked on, you know, kind of on Google Maps, and I found out where he was at. And I'm like, oh, dude, he's next to Borussio Dortmund.

Speaker 16 Holland, Holland's Volley is beautiful beyond compare. And at that time, they were incredible.
They had Aaron Holling, they had Christian Pulisich.

Speaker 16 Is there any chance like

Speaker 16 you could get me a hat? Yeah, you're that kind of cousin. You're like the, oh, wait, you're in Germany.
Exactly. Can I get some merch? Can I get some merch? And he was just like,

Speaker 16 yeah, okay. So, so he gets one.
And then I proudly like put the Borussio Dortmund hat on the next time we're on Zoom. And I'm like, Max, check out my hat.

Speaker 16 And he was like,

Speaker 16 yeah. He responded the way that Juan responded when I asked him to help me move a couch.
Yeah, and that's a good hat, Bradley. And I was like, what's up? And he was like, well, Borussio Dortmund,

Speaker 16 they're our enemy like we we root for this team called Shalka and we just hate Borgusio Dortmund and I'm just like oh

Speaker 16 oh oh yeah I wasn't familiar with the geopolitics of intra German professional soccer clubs it's huge but apparently Bradley as I understand now where you're headed yeah this is this is a thing but then he told me Like, well, it's it's okay.

Speaker 16 It's just it's been a hard time to be a Shalka fan. And I was like,

Speaker 16 what do you mean?

Speaker 19 Oh man, don't ask me.

Speaker 19 It's almost desperate to see what's going on at the moment. Especially no one really.

Speaker 16 So of course

Speaker 16 I asked him. And he told me about this storied team of his, Shalka 04, one of the best in all of German football, just became dead inside.

Speaker 19 Well, fans described it as being blood empty.

Speaker 19 That's kind of a phrase we use here.

Speaker 21 Blood empty.

Speaker 19 Yeah, they're standing on the field blood empty.

Speaker 19 It's like standing on the field and leaving a hollow impression of yourself.

Speaker 21 Wow, that's a great phrase. Yeah,

Speaker 21 that's a great phrase.

Speaker 19 Yeah, welcome to the German language.

Speaker 16 He went on to tell me all about Shulka O4's downfall. And as he was doing this, I realized that it was a very German story, a Faustian tale, if you will.

Speaker 16 One that involved a deal with the devil, the selling of a soul, and a story that dropped his, like his favorite football club out of the top division and down into

Speaker 16 a geopolitical firestorm that our own president has said could lead us to World War III.

Speaker 16 Right. I have a sense now of your cousin Max.
Yep. God bless him.
His favorite club. But in terms of the Faustian bargain here, this deal with the devil, who is the devil in this story?

Speaker 16 So, at first, I had absolutely no idea. So, I went to Germany to find out.

Speaker 16 Something very big is supposed to happen as early as today, Thursday, May 15th, 2025.

Speaker 16 What you're hearing there is Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing earlier this week to quote-unquote restart peace talks directly with Ukraine, the nation he'd invaded.

Speaker 16 And ostensibly, this would end the war that has impacted both all of Europe, certainly, as well as the United States.

Speaker 16 And what Putin says here is that these talks should, quote, start without delay, as early as May 15th.

Speaker 16 And look, the whims of Vladimir Putin, the whole way that his dictatorship in Russia can offer both destruction and salvation in one fell swoop might not immediately seem like an urgent sports story to you.

Speaker 16 But what you're about to hear today in the story of Schalka 04, this big German soccer team, is a story that's about a lot more than just Europe or international politics or our correspondent Bradley Campbell's cousin, Max.

Speaker 16 This is a story about the strings that get attached to offers of sports salvation.

Speaker 16 Which means that this is a story about your favorite team as well.

Speaker 16 So this is one of those stories that I green lit not because I love German soccer. It's a story that I green lit because there was this Faustian deal with the devil.

Speaker 16 And so when it comes to people who are not familiar with Faust and that deal, I mean, this is an omnipresent kind of story throughout human history.

Speaker 16 I mean, if you've seen The Little Mermaid, that's a Faustian tale. If you've watched Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny, also a Faustian tale.
Right. The Little Mermaid gets to

Speaker 16 be among

Speaker 16 us on land. Yeah, yeah.
Tenacious D

Speaker 16 gets to shred.

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 16 But the original, right, which goes back centuries. 1700s.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or earlier.
It's about an astrologer who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.

Speaker 16 And that story ends, I suppose, quite literally, with Faust, the astrologer, in hell.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 Which, judging from what we heard from Max and the Blood Empty Soccer Team, is kind of where Shaka was.

Speaker 16 I flew the overnight to Amsterdam because it's a much cheaper flight.

Speaker 16 And then, gosh, I took a couple different commuter rails

Speaker 16 and then got to a little West German town called Gelsenkirchen.

Speaker 16 It felt like being on Amtrak and then going through the Alleghenies and then all of a sudden landing in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 16 So as you look out the train window, it's Europe, but you're describing at this point.

Speaker 16 a very familiar part of America. Definitely, definitely.
It had this vibe of industry and kind of this vibe of an an area that's seen better days.

Speaker 16 It was the center of the mining region in Germany, but all the mines have been capped. So there's no mines anymore.
They switched from coal power to natural gas.

Speaker 16 Amid these rolling hills is a ruin that also harkens back to this time when it was thriving.

Speaker 16 And it's full of fans with just a ton of hope and a ton of faith.

Speaker 19 Schalker fans are notorious for for illusionary optimism, basically.

Speaker 19 And you already heard the comments on the internet, on the radio, they scored a goal at the weekend, which at this point is kind of rare. Okay, we score a goal, we can win.

Speaker 19 If we win this game, we win the next game, we win the whole season, we get up and next year, we're going to be German champion.

Speaker 19 This whole crazy loving fantasy of becoming the champion once again

Speaker 19 immediately kicks in.

Speaker 16 It's always like lottery or nothing. But then you start like walking through Gelsenkirch and and you're like, ooh,

Speaker 16 this is a poor area. It's a lot of working class immigrants, a lot of them coming from Turkey, and then a ton of working class Catholics.
So much that Pope John Paul II.

Speaker 16 I mean, this is the original cool pope. I know, the cool pope.
He visited the area in 1987 and is also, I learned, an honorary Shalka 04 member. So somewhere,

Speaker 16 JP2 and cousin Max are kindred spirits. And then also my grandmother as well.
Her family owned a barge, an actual barge that they went up and down the Rhine River. Everyone had to pitch in and work.

Speaker 16 You know, it's kind of all hands to keep

Speaker 16 everything afloat. And if the ship lists,

Speaker 16 you know, you got to fix it yourself. Right.
So this is the home of Shalka 04. Yep.

Speaker 16 For those like me who didn't know much about Shalka, when they clicked on this episode, what is the word you would use to describe just their sort of aesthetic, their vibe?

Speaker 16 Old.

Speaker 16 How old are we talking?

Speaker 16 They formed in 1904.

Speaker 16 Okay, so that's the 04. That's the 04 in Schalker 04.
And, God, they're known as one of the historic clubs in Germany.

Speaker 16 Seven-time German champions.

Speaker 16 Although the last one was in 57, 58.

Speaker 16 And the visuals here.

Speaker 16 What are those visuals?

Speaker 16 It's up on a hill. It's right outside of town.

Speaker 16 So you've got grass field upon grass field.

Speaker 16 Everything just feels structured and efficient and German. It feels like a factory completely.
Completely. And when you realize who they've produced, what this factory has

Speaker 16 put out into the world. So, Mezid Ozil, Turkish, right, son of Turkish immigrants.
Yep. One of the greatest midfielders in the world.

Speaker 23 And there's no flag this time. And Erzil with a chance to win it.
It's Mezed Ozil.

Speaker 16 Those creative midfielders for sure.

Speaker 16 And then the greatest goalkeeper, many would argue, ever. Manuel Neuer is from there.

Speaker 23 Trying to turn this chance into an early goal, and they might just do that.

Speaker 16 Marco Heis

Speaker 23 and foiled by the brilliant Panduel Noya.

Speaker 16 The larger picture here is just that here is this factory producing this raw material and then refining it along this assembly line, exporting it out to the wider football world.

Speaker 16 That truthfully is one of the coolest parts about Shock 04 is that it's one of these rare professional teams that look like the town.

Speaker 16 So this team, when you look at the business of it, yeah, they're on the Forbes top 10 list alongside alongside Bayern Munich, alongside Barcelona, alongside Manchester United.

Speaker 16 These are the biggest brands in soccer. The other part that I liked is they're completely owned by fans, but at times it can put them in a bind.

Speaker 16 So the perspective I want to bring here is from Green Bay. So Green Bay, the Packers, this is considered in America the most populist case study in how to do something like this.
Fan-owned.

Speaker 16 Lots and lots and lots of members. And I think it's Green Bay, hundreds of thousands.
In this case, Shalka is dealing with how many members? 190,000 members.

Speaker 16 But the idea is that, like, there's no, there's no one billionaire owner. It's this mess of people.

Speaker 16 God knows that's my dream. To own a soccer club.

Speaker 16 But at least like to have a say in some sort of team's direction, like where they're sailing, I think would be absolutely important rather than having just like, you know, some billionaire owner's teenage sons, you know, deciding who to buy based on their Madden rating.

Speaker 16 Yes, Brooke Johnson, not a character in this specific story.

Speaker 16 And so as they are living your dream, as they are voting on decisions, deciding collectively how to try to proceed with this idyllic populist football vision in an era, of course, of billionaires and petrostates and oligarchs and the deepest pockets you've ever seen in the history of sports, it does raise another concern about, so where is the money coming from, Bradley?

Speaker 16 That's the big question. I mean, you need massive amounts of money to compete at the highest levels of football.
Yeah, winning is correlated directly across the board here with money.

Speaker 16 So here begins our Faustian tale.

Speaker 16 Enter the meat baron, a man named Clemens Tonies.

Speaker 16 Who says, quote,

Speaker 16 I am not a godfather.

Speaker 16 Which is totally a a thing a godfather would say. 100%.
100%. He's like, I don't like that term.
There's no such thing as a godfather. Again, godfather vibes.

Speaker 16 Okay, so obviously we want to meet the godfather. Meat Baron was like, sorry, dude.
So he never responded to any of our emails. But we did talk to a German reporter from Reuters named Tisilo Hummel.

Speaker 16 54321.

Speaker 16 Who's an expert in all things Meat Baron? It's a very, very fascinating character, you know? I mean, he's originally a butcher. He grew up in post-war Germany.
He often told the tale how

Speaker 16 poor everybody was back then and how

Speaker 16 much he's kind of rooted in the working class, which he truly is. He says that Tony has transformed from butcher to

Speaker 16 effectively running the Tyson Chicken of West Germany. And he was a big, big, big Schalkernufe

Speaker 16 fan for his whole life. I mean being a Schalker fan is something that you're born into it's

Speaker 16 something that is so much part of that working class identity in in that part of Germany and he couldn't just dump his own money into it there's rules preventing that that meat money wasn't wasn't yeah yeah so what he had to do is he had to catch one of these like giant big fish sponsors that they could put across like the crest right across the front of their jersey think like crypto.com for the makers they need a sponsor in other words it's it's very american ideal and so

Speaker 16 so they got gas prom

Speaker 16 gas prom

Speaker 16 a state-owned russian natural gas supplier huge industrial giant but at that time

Speaker 16 no one ever really heard of that company i mean their business was selling gas to kind of bulk clients to other german like german utilities they they they didn't really have consumers.

Speaker 16 So the brand was completely unknown. It popped up out of the blue and suddenly it was everywhere.
They went to Shalka and they did this presentation. This is why Gazprom is great.

Speaker 16 So I actually found a guy in Germany who was in the room where it happened.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I remember. I was actually at the presentation of Gazprom with my daughter.

Speaker 18 So yeah, it was 2007. She was four years old.
So first time that she was in the stadium.

Speaker 16 This is Axel Haffer. He's the current chairman of Shaka 04.
And truthfully, Pablo, he actually saw a connection between this giant state-run natural gas supplier and this tiny mining town in Germany.

Speaker 18 When Gasprom was presented,

Speaker 18 they basically shot a commercial where you had Gasprom employees somewhere in Siberia that were drilling for gas.

Speaker 18 And that was very similar to all the mining images that we all

Speaker 18 had in our minds. So it looked like a very good fit.
It was actually a good fit at that time.

Speaker 16 And so Gazprom, when they saw Shalka, what were they seeing in this club? So they were also using Shalka as marketing.

Speaker 16 They had this really big goal of creating a second pipeline connecting Russia to Germany, even more of their natural gas called Nordstream 2 was the big project.

Speaker 16 It's in the second Nordstream pipeline.

Speaker 24 The Nordstream pipeline is one of the world's largest infrastructure projects along a carefully chosen 1,224 kilometer route to transport 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year from Russia to the European Union.

Speaker 16 They thought that sponsoring a major historic German soccer club would be a great way to get that done.

Speaker 18 Everybody was happy.

Speaker 18 Oh, this is a good deal. This is a very big company.

Speaker 18 It's very important. It's a good partner.
Relationships with Russia have historically been very good

Speaker 16 between germany and russia so so in 2007 i would say absolutely fine so now i am getting a sense of the devil in this story well actually no pablo i i think it's important that we step back here for just a minute and it's kind of wild to think now but during this period of time russia and Putin were considered great business partners.

Speaker 16 And I learned this from that Reuters reporter to Silohamo. The first thing is that, look,

Speaker 16 Putin wasn't the devil. He wasn't the devil for Tanyas.
He wasn't the devil for Schalker. He was the devil for nobody in Germany 15 years ago.
That's just not how it was.

Speaker 16 And the same thing in the U.S. at the time.
If you remember, there was President Barack Obama, kind of

Speaker 16 that guy. Yeah.
Mocked then, you know, mocked Senator Mitt Romney for holding, quote, antiquated views on Russia.

Speaker 25 A few months ago, when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al-Qaeda.
You said Russia.

Speaker 25 In the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.

Speaker 16 But Putin to the West looking like an ally, like an economic engine. Yeah, I had admittedly forgotten about this entirely.

Speaker 16 I think it's important when we hear Axel from Schalka and listen to him, you got to even magnify it more because Germany, they're absolutely familiar in dealing with communist leaders and businesses in a way that I would say few, if any, other Western democracies are because their country at one point was split East and West.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that was the whole wall thing.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I believe. Culminating with arguably the greatest moment in world history.

Speaker 16 So I like that you have power ranked all of the moments in world history and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bradley Campbell's number one slot.

Speaker 16 Yeah, yeah, but more specifically, I've been looking for freedom.

Speaker 16 David Hasselhoff dancing and singing atop the Berlin Wall while it fell.

Speaker 16 Wearing a black leather jacket, stonewashed denim. I do not apologize for liking that a lot.

Speaker 16 So this has now become so much more German than I even anticipated when I green lit a story about German soccer and German soccer politics. You're welcome.

Speaker 16 So Shalka has accepted this deal with Gazprom. And so the question, I suppose, is how much did they know that there were these strings attached?

Speaker 16 How much Faust did they know was going to be in this bargain? I mean, that's the nature of a Faustian bargain is you don't really know in real time how bad it will get.

Speaker 18 We are not only getting a very good deal and getting

Speaker 18 better money for what we are offering than with other partners. We were not getting that for free.
So I guess the price for that was obviously

Speaker 18 political greenwashing, if you want to say so, but also the risk that something would happen.

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Speaker 1 This podcast is brought to you by T-Row Price.

Speaker 1 Join me as I chat with Chris Murphy, their head of ETF specialists, to unpack what ETFs are, how they work, and how T-Row Price is helping investors make more informed decisions.

Speaker 5 So, as a peer investment tool, as an ETF versus, let's just say, a mutual fund, what are the advantages and disadvantages between those two?

Speaker 6 The ETF structure itself allows for the costs to really be materially lower.

Speaker 8 And so, on average, an ETF is going to be a lot less expensive from an expense ratio perspective.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about the philosophy that differentiates T-Row Price from other organizations that are in the ETF space. What's that secret sauce that you guys have?

Speaker 7 It comes back to kind of the core principles of our firm, which is curiosity around what can we do to find an edge or where can we innovate.

Speaker 12 Listen in to discover how T-Row Price's active ETFs can help you add an edge to outperform the index.

Speaker 2 Learn more at t-roprice.com slash explore ETFs.

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Speaker 16 So I'm thinking about the original astrologer, Faust, who makes this deal with the the devil for knowledge and power and gets it. And it is awesome.
Awesome. Right? For some amount of time.

Speaker 16 So what did that look like for Shalka 04,

Speaker 16 the high of getting all of this power? It was pure domination.

Speaker 16 The first year that they did the deal with Gazprom, Schalka went second place in the Bundesliga. But more than that, the next year, they reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League.

Speaker 27 German teams have ambushed Manchester United Champions League campaigns before, but Zradek Ferguson can hardly ask for more than a semifinal against the mid-table Bundesliga side.

Speaker 16 And so this team that hadn't won in Germany since the 50s is now competing to the point where they make the Champions League semifinals in 2011.

Speaker 16 They are playing Manchester United. Again, one of the top brands, one of the top clubs in the world.
With the best players. And things are going better than anybody could have thought.

Speaker 28 Anuchida with a

Speaker 16 And gas problem, like they're living life at this point, too. This is 2011.
They ink a deal to get Nord Stream 2 up in the middle. They get their pipeline.

Speaker 16 Exactly. They get the sequel.
But then comes 2014, Pablo. And that is when the story truly follows the tale of Faust.

Speaker 29 More than 200,000 protesters gathered in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev today, furious over the government's refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union.

Speaker 29 Police use tear gas and clubs to beat back demonstrators who surrounded President Viktor Yanukovych's office. They are demanding...

Speaker 16 Ukrainians overthrow their president in the Maidan Revolution. Russia responds by annexing Crimea by force.

Speaker 30 Russian troops spreading out throughout the strategic Crimean peninsula. President Obama speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 16 And during this hostile takeover of Crimea a lot of Shulka fans are they're pissed.

Speaker 18 It started to be more and more controversial. I guess from an economical perspective, it was financially still a very attractive deal.

Speaker 18 But the discussion that we had at that time was, okay, is it worth the risk?

Speaker 20 There is a growing international chorus slamming Russia's actions. The British prime minister saying there is no excuse.
Canada withdrawing its ambassador from Moscow.

Speaker 16 For the EU and the US,

Speaker 16 it was clear that not really. They imposed sanctions on Russian and Ukrainian officials linked to the Crimean takeover.

Speaker 16 They said it was, quote, undermining the democratic process and institutions in Ukraine.

Speaker 31 The Russian military must stand down. The aspirations of the Ukrainian people must be respected.
And political dialogue must be allowed to continue.

Speaker 16 And so this is where I am familiar with the West's view of Russia, right? Like Obama made that joke, this isn't the 80s anymore. Turns out it is.

Speaker 16 And now, if you're Shalka, the pressure clearly would be to cut ties with Vladimir Putin's gas giants. Like, how can you possibly be the team with Gazprom across your chest in all these ways?

Speaker 18 It's politics, yeah. So you have different views there.
I mean, we have 190,000 members, so you have everything from the far left to the far right. I mean, everything there.

Speaker 18 So in the board, some people were a bit more skeptical. Some said, okay, it's still a good partner.
Yes, there are political problems, but we are a sports club and that's not our problem.

Speaker 18 So for me personally, I mean, I never bought a Gazprom jersey.

Speaker 18 So because I just thought, okay,

Speaker 16 yeah, no,

Speaker 18 it doesn't feel right.

Speaker 16 This is him sticking to sports, right? This is another refrain we are familiar with in America. And so the partnership with Gazprom continues, as Tusilohaner from Reuters told me.

Speaker 16 Maybe that should have been the moment where people should have changed their minds and kind of updated their they do a software update in their in their in their strategic thinking which

Speaker 16 toniers and chalk did not do and you can say that maybe from that point in time it became really um a grave mistake and it went downwards ever since well the fact that the 2018-2019 season happens as that is happening right so i'm going back to the record that i'm consulting here

Speaker 16 they make another run in the champions league yeah they make it to the round of 16 but that's when they run into a club who made an even bigger deal with an even more powerful entity.

Speaker 28 Four places in the quarterfinals of the UEFA Champions League are confirmed.

Speaker 28 Four more will be decided this week with Manchester City and Schalker set to complete their round of 16 tie with a second run.

Speaker 16 So Manchester City might be the prime example of what you need to take over this sport. The deal you need to make.
So they made a deal with a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi.

Speaker 16 And so as a matter of scale, yeah, like Shalco4 is Faustian bargain.

Speaker 16 This is not rating in comparison to Man City. I feel like there's a lesson here, you know, like no matter how rich you are.
Sterling in on the goalkeeper, Sterling in the corner.

Speaker 16 Should he get a winner?

Speaker 23 Incredible scenes of the list.

Speaker 16 Someone's always richer than you.

Speaker 16 And I just got to jump in here for a second to put an even finer point on this observation.

Speaker 16 Because as much as you might think that Vladimir Putin's favorite state-owned energy company would have more than enough in its pockets, Manchester City is indeed owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family, which bought it in 2008, 2009.

Speaker 16 And this makes Manchester City the single richest club in the entire Premier League. They have spent billions on buying players.

Speaker 16 This most recent transfer window, in fact, they just outspent everybody else. And none of this is especially close.

Speaker 16 And so in that pivotal round of 16 against Man City in 2019, Shaka loses 10-2 on aggregate. At which point,

Speaker 16 really spins out of control. Shaka proceeds to finish in 12th place the following season.

Speaker 16 Then the meat bear makes dumbass comments about Africans that anger the fan base, rightfully so, I would add.

Speaker 16 And then the whole pandemic happens, meaning that Shalka's fans/slash owners can't even get into their building anymore, which cuts off the team's revenues at the knees.

Speaker 16 And as for what is happening in front of those now empty seats, the team goes winless in its first 14 matches.

Speaker 16 They learned through five different managers and finished the season dead last in the league by a lot.

Speaker 16 But the worst part about finishing dead last in the league in such a way was the fact that Shalka then got relegated down to the second division. And because it's COVID, there's no market for players.

Speaker 16 So they just get deeper and deeper in debt. Then a COVID outbreak hits the Meat Baron's factories.
Of course. PR Nightmare.
And the Meat Baron, after 19 years, finally steps down.

Speaker 16 Which is all to say that the Gazprom era of Shalka 04, beyond being morally compromised by Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula,

Speaker 16 also wasn't going great on the pitch.

Speaker 16 And so the Mead Baron, who I cannot help but think of at the end of that insane litany of events, government name Clemens Tony's, the Mead Baron, did he get any sort of cosmic punishment for his role in this bargain for leading Shalka down this particularly crazy path?

Speaker 16 Nah.

Speaker 16 For Ternius personally, not so much for the club, but for Ternius personally, the whole thing still made huge sense. He made money in Russia.
So

Speaker 16 I'm not even sure if he

Speaker 16 feels like Faust

Speaker 16 himself.

Speaker 16 So he was fine,

Speaker 16 but the fans weren't. And when I was in Germany, I talked to some and they're just like, who are we? And what happened to our soul?

Speaker 16 And I guess even worse was this knowledge that they were still falling. Their club was still getting worse and going down and down.
And they hadn't hit rock bottom yet.

Speaker 16 It does feel like there should be a German word for that feeling:

Speaker 16 blood empty.

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Speaker 16 So this brings us now to February 2022. And in the sports calendar, this is a familiar point.
The Winter Olympics in Sochi have just finished up. Vladimir Putin, Russian pride, everyone's riding high.

Speaker 16 And then...

Speaker 20 Right now, there is a sound of bombardment coming from all around us, and all of the civilians from this area are fleeing.

Speaker 18 I still remember that week. Absolutely crazy.
So you basically had the troops starting to move and you know it was obvious that something could happen.

Speaker 16 So again that's a that's Axel who I met up with in in Germany, the chairman of Shalco 4. And he was really remembering this time where it wasn't this question of is Russia going to invade?

Speaker 16 It was this question of when are they going to invade Ukraine.

Speaker 18 It was highly likely that something would happen. And so just the the weekend before the invasion, we started to get enormous pressure.

Speaker 18 Okay, you need to terminate the contract, you need to take Gazprom of your jersey, etc.

Speaker 16 So some fans already had, they actually put duct tape across the gas prom on the jerseys so you couldn't see it, covering up that logo. But the board that they had elected continued to kind of wait.

Speaker 18 We're not the richest club and we will never be the richest club

Speaker 18 and our fans are not the richest.

Speaker 18 But

Speaker 18 it's a very emotional club and that's obviously what is what's more important than anything else yeah so you need to keep the the feeling of belonging and really helping each other that that is more important than a bit more money as long as it doesn't kill you that's that's the thing yeah

Speaker 16 so that is a bind for axel and shalka to have to figure out

Speaker 16 and it's like you're trying to protect this thing that you love

Speaker 16 and it's like you know, it's not just simply just cutting ties to make a statement. Exactly.

Speaker 18 And that was exactly the challenge that we all had was, okay, are we willing to risk the existence of the club to do the right thing? And how could we actually de-risk that scenario?

Speaker 16 So they were working on Apollo 24-7, talking to Gazprom's representatives, who was actually, they were open to it because Nord Stream 2, that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.

Speaker 16 So getting out of contracts was the priority, but you know, that takes time, which is something they didn't have.

Speaker 18 So during that week I basically did nothing else than just talking 24-7 with everybody because they obviously everybody was very nervous and this balance of what is exactly the right point in time where

Speaker 18 we can basically manage the financial risk and still do the right thing, we had to find it.

Speaker 16 The thing that they really needed was a new source of money.

Speaker 18 We started discussions with actually with the old mining association. So the company that used to operate all the mines is still active and has a few assets.
And

Speaker 18 we basically went to them and said, listen, if something happens, is there anything that we could do?

Speaker 16 And they said, yeah, for sure, we will help you.

Speaker 18 If you need to do it,

Speaker 18 we will support you. We will basically find some money and we will basically step in as an interim sponsor.

Speaker 16 So just to recap this, what Axel is saying is that they go from Gazprom, Vladimir Putin's state-owned gas giant, to a local union,

Speaker 16 which doesn't have nearly the amount of money

Speaker 16 that they have, but it is, it's that all-hands concept again. You know, just a whole community rallying together to step up.

Speaker 16 But, you know, while this is happening, I want to be like, oh, it's all warm and lovely.

Speaker 16 The Russian troops were still there.

Speaker 18 And yeah, then we had on Thursday morning, 4 a.m., or I can't remember the exact time, it was basically before everybody got up. Obviously, the invasion started.

Speaker 34 Russian troops are closing in on the capital. Their military vehicles have been filmed entering the city.
And in the last few hours, multiple explosions have been reported.

Speaker 34 Exact figures are unknown, but there are reports of large numbers of Ukrainian casualties, both military and civilian, since the invasion began, and of Russian military deaths.

Speaker 34 Streams of people in Carlos.

Speaker 16 And so, at this point in the story of Faust,

Speaker 16 what happens is that he is condemned and judged for the deal he has struck.

Speaker 16 In the middle of the night, to put the most literary sort of emphasis on this, a pack of devils carry his soul to hell, Bradley.

Speaker 16 So is that what happens to Shalka 04 here? Kind of, yeah.

Speaker 16 But it's a lot slower of a death, which is in some ways a little bit crueler.

Speaker 16 You know, without a massive sponsor in the club in disarray, they drop again back to the second division, and they risk an even further drop to the third division. And that's the devil.

Speaker 16 The devil's carrying them to the netherworld. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they're struggling each week just to survive. And for fans, it's just pure psychological torture.

Speaker 16 They're watching this team just absolutely stink on the field. I cannot help but think.

Speaker 16 It's so bad.

Speaker 16 Worse than that, Pablo, is that there's a rule that if you're in the third division, you have to be financially stable. Shalka wasn't stable.

Speaker 16 So if the worst comes to worst, we're actually going to be forced to drop down to the amateur level. And so I'm not even being hyperbolic when I say like each week was

Speaker 16 facing annihilation. When it comes to identifying the devil, which is the reason you went searching in Gelsenkirchen in Germany in the first place, the devil isn't exactly Russia in our story, right?

Speaker 16 The devil seems to be the pursuit of money.

Speaker 16 The loss of control.

Speaker 16 And the loss of control they needed to center themselves in a way and just kind of overcome these massive mistakes and again they had so much debt so they had to be smart about it and you know uh

Speaker 16 they put out uh a a call i guess or you know cast nets to try and find which shock 04 member anywhere in the world could help them out and who do they end up finding Let's Go. Let's go.

Speaker 16 How's it going? Good. Yeah.
Yeah. Game day.
Game day, yeah.

Speaker 16 Matthias Tillman, and he's been a fan of Shaka since he was five years old and bought his first jersey, which is a right of any upstanding Shaka member, nearly three decades ago.

Speaker 16 It was in 1994.

Speaker 16 And since then, I bought one or two jerseys every year, always with a favorite player. So I collect jerseys, so I have a lot.

Speaker 16 So he moved back to Germany and started doing the lord's work man i'm like i don't know if you've seen a recent photo of daryl mori but yeah i mean i've seen daryl recently and dude is aging speaking of uh u.s presidents he's aging like one i mean running a losing franchise is just absolutely brutal so i wake up every day at 6 a.m so that's the same every single day yeah but i have four kids so yeah you have to get up and bring them to school to kindergarten and then i drive here so it's like 30 35 minute drive for me um and then normally I arrive here I have one other colleague in the management board and we discuss the most important things of the day and

Speaker 16 yeah then

Speaker 16 obviously as a CEO you have a lot to manage. It is truly a massive amount of work.
That's what it takes. That's what it takes.
Yeah. Which is a Faustian bargain of a different kind.

Speaker 16 But it's a different sort of pact.

Speaker 16 A lot of people in this region,

Speaker 16 they spend spend every penny they have on this club and spend all their time for this club.

Speaker 16 And yeah,

Speaker 16 that's why this club is more than just football.

Speaker 16 So the love is genuine, but let's get real. Dude was a former investment banker for George Bank.
He was hired to kick ass. And that's exactly what he's doing.

Speaker 16 He realizes that, yeah, the club's got a lot of heart. But it's time for it to get a little professional too.

Speaker 16 But how do you do that when you're you're loaded down with all of this insane debt from the Gazprom meat baron era?

Speaker 16 Five years ago, we had debt around 200 million, 220.

Speaker 16 But we had the value of our squad was also 200 million. Today, it's around the value of the squad is around 20 million, but we still carry 160 million debt.
So the ratio has changed.

Speaker 16 And we are coming from a time where we had over 300 million in revenue to where we have just over 100.

Speaker 16 What a nightmare. 200 million to 20.
It's real. It's real.
I mean, that's an insane fall. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 And I guess his big goal is just to get the debt down to $50 million, which he says is a manageable size. And look, he's up front with the fans.

Speaker 16 He's like, our football club, it's going to suck for a year or two. But with patience, there will be a pathway back up to the top.

Speaker 16 Yeah, you're describing, you know, trust the process, which I, of course, personally have some

Speaker 16 fondness for, but you're talking about a rebuild. This is an old-fashioned rebuild.
100%, it's a rebuild, but again, a rebuild with 190,000 fans voicing in on how to rebuild it.

Speaker 16 And so, oh my God, Matthias gets absolutely pummeled in the newspapers for this process.

Speaker 16 So what his answer was is they're going to have another separate cooperative that will run Velton's Arena, which is like the Madison Square Garden.

Speaker 16 So people will be able to buy a stake in the co-op separate from Shalka 04. And also businesses will be allowed to buy shares in this too.
That is the solution.

Speaker 16 And it's going to be run completely independently of the other club as a way to generate money. And with that money, with this new revenue stream, what do they want to do?

Speaker 16 Like, are they buying soccer players? Are they improving their facilities? What's their goal? It's all of that. I mean, the goal is to get back up to the top division.
And so whatever that takes.

Speaker 16 But I think the bigger goal than that, it's local control, which is also a philosophy I now understand that is adored true to this region. For sure.

Speaker 16 What I think is important that you don't lose your DNA. And I think that is in Shalke,

Speaker 16 it's very important, like what I said in the beginning. like everybody knows where we're coming from.

Speaker 16 Our roots are here in that region

Speaker 16 from the the coal mining. And I think for us, it's very important to be the club of the region for the people in the region.
And the values have not changed. They're still the same hardworking people.

Speaker 16 And you have to honor that. Yeah, look, man, they're not going to ever replicate the size or money or deep pockets of a state of a natural gas company.

Speaker 16 But I guess you asked me earlier, when are the angels going to come? Who are these angels? And the simple answer is the angels are themselves. It's like Shaka's going to pick Shaka back up.

Speaker 16 Investors come and go. They want to make money.
They have whatever their interest is.

Speaker 16 But people here will stay. There's a saying here that players will come and go.
Even CEOs will come and go. But we will stay.
It's us.

Speaker 16 And that's why we have to determine the future and not other people.

Speaker 16 And once you're on that ship, you feel the energy.

Speaker 16 That's why I think when you are there in the stadium, it's a different atmosphere because people know that's our ship and we can determine the direction. And that I think makes a big difference.

Speaker 16 And so now I kind of feel like I'm on your grandma's barge or also perhaps a Bernie Sanders event.

Speaker 16 My skepticism here is

Speaker 16 simple though. Like, how do you win? in this era of soccer? How do you win against the petro states and oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds and the deepest pockets in the history of sports?

Speaker 16 I really want to say you just do it with your own gumption, but I don't know, man.

Speaker 16 After the meeting with Matthias, I walked over to Velton's Arena for a match against FC Kaiser Slauten, who happened to be nicknamed the Red Devils.

Speaker 16 Just gets too perfect sometimes. Bit on the nose, but.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 So I got in there and, God, it was like an absolute rock concert. Fortunately, we couldn't film there, so you just got to imagine this.
You're walking into a giant arena and it's sold out.

Speaker 16 There's 62,075 fans, and they are screaming their heads off before the game even starts.

Speaker 16 I'm thinking they're gonna crush.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 how does it go? How does the crushing go? The devil just absolutely pummels them.

Speaker 29 Chalk can maybe

Speaker 28 salvage some pride right now.

Speaker 21 It's Kaiser coming forward and scything them apart as Daisuke Yokata makes it three.

Speaker 16 They get beat three to nothing,

Speaker 16 but someone else was in there with me, and I had no idea, and that was cousin Max. He was in the stadium.
He got like a last-second ticket, bought it, and so he was there watching.

Speaker 16 I had no idea, but that feels cosmic too, though. I know, I know.
It really does. It really does.

Speaker 16 And the reason why it does is because I was just thinking about a lot of things, but one of them was like, good God, how much of a d I was.

Speaker 16 Tell me what this episode is about is you being a terrible relative. Absolutely.
I'm like, here's this absolutely beautiful thing that was at the risk of just like

Speaker 16 not continuing. And here I am asking, hey, dude,

Speaker 16 can I get a borisi adorable? Yeah, knowing nothing about anything. Oh my God, nothing about anything.
And it's just absolutely stunning.

Speaker 16 And I didn't even tell you, like, beforehand, they actually had a minor's choir sing a sonnet beforehand just to like warm everything up.

Speaker 16 There's like so much to love about this community. And

Speaker 16 yeah,

Speaker 16 it was just beautiful. So, what do you decide to do with these feelings now that are sloshing inside of you? I decided to board the ship.

Speaker 16 Pablo, I'm uh

Speaker 16 abandoning my journalistic integrity.

Speaker 16 And so near the end here, Bradley, this video that you're playing is is what? It's me signing my name to a document that made me an official member of Shalka 04.

Speaker 16 Right, so this is you becoming becoming one of the 190,000 members. 190,001.

Speaker 16 I'm also in the process of buying a share of the co-op. Right, which is just the most Brooklyn shit.

Speaker 16 This whole time, you've been talking to the co-owner of a German professional soccer team and, I would add, a budding real estate magnet of Gelson Curtin.

Speaker 16 And so if you are now wondering how Bradley Campbell's new soccer club is doing as its season draws to a close, I do have a bit of news here.

Speaker 16 Schalka 04, which had been playing in the second division of German soccer this season, has spent all year trying to climb out of this hole left by Gazprom and, yes, their own generally horrible decision-making.

Speaker 16 The prospect of being sent down to the third division was looming.

Speaker 16 But we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out are happy to now tell you that while Shaka 04 is yet again coming down to the final match this weekend, meaning that yes, Putin's alleged peace talks and Shaka's future are once again intersecting,

Speaker 16 it does appear that they have fended off relegation this season.

Speaker 16 And things did not look good for a while here, to be clear.

Speaker 16 We've fixed ourselves and, you know, we're marching our way back up to daylight once more. I just got two questions before we get so truly like highfalutin celestial about this.
Where's the hat?

Speaker 16 The hat. The Borussia Dortmund hat that is responsible for why we are here doing this story.
Oh, I made amends.

Speaker 16 Here it is. So, okay.
So, the black and yellow familiar Borussia Dortmund logo has been has been vandalized.

Speaker 16 What an expert way it has been painted over here. But describe what we're doing.
Oh,

Speaker 16 we crossed out the 09 and we put an S04 across the BBD in bright royal blue letters. Incredible rebranding.
On that question of rebranding, my second question, my final question on the show today

Speaker 16 is: did Shalka 04 ever get a new sponsor? Like, what replaced Gazprom across the jersey? What's the, what, what, what are you doing? Oh,

Speaker 16 here.

Speaker 16 Okay, so this is the

Speaker 16 beautiful blue and white sun

Speaker 16 mini meal. Sun mini meal.

Speaker 16 What is sun mini meal across the chest of your jersey? It's a Swiss granola bar.

Speaker 16 God damn it.

Speaker 16 This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark media production.

Speaker 16 And I'll talk to you next time.

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