Leon Goretzka is probably going to sign for Bayern Munich. Although Bayern haven’t confirmed it yet and Schalke director, Christian Heidel, went as far as to publicly confirm through the player’s that no deal has been struck, the German press is rife with the news and when it comes to stories of this scale they’re rarely wrong.
However, the real story here isn’t the fact that yet another young, German star is moving to Munich. No, in fact the more telling feature is the harsh reality that another star-to-be is leaving Gelsenkirchen to one, unanimous sigh and shrug from Schalke fans that have grown to accept that no club in Europe likes to give away it’s young, promising players quite like the Royal Blues.
Despite an upturn in fortunes in the Bundesliga under new coach, Domenico Tedesco, Schalke will almost certainly finish the campaign waving goodbye to not only Goretzka, but also 22-year-old star midfielder, Max Meyer. The young playmaker has been linked with a move to the Premier League for the past 12 months and recently admitted he was feeling “50-50” about the possibility of leaving German football.
Yet both players leaving would only add to an already staggering amount of young talent that has escaped the clutches of the Bundesliga club over the past 10 years.
Last summer we saw Saed Kolasinac leave for Arsenal without a single Euro going to Schalke in compensation. The year before that Joel Matip did the very same thing, instead moving to Liverpool. All while Leroy Sane was granted a move to Manchester City for a truly astronomical sum of £45 million.
However, even such fortunes probably can’t compensate for the sheer amount of talent that left the club long before Sane or Matip came along. Since the 2006/07 Bundesliga season Schalke have lost Manuel Neuer, Sergio Escudero, Lewis Holtby, Ivan Rakitic and Mesut Ozil all before their 25th birthdays.
To put that into context, there are three World Cup winners, two Champions League winners, two Europa League winners and countless league titles in England, France, Spain and Germany among a group of players that all left Gelsenkirchen before their peak.
Sure, the club may have picked up impressive transfer fees for some of those names yet there’s no denying that even doubling or tripling the profits made from such moves would have done very little to help Schalke in the long term. However, had they held on to even some of the impressive names listed above they would have surely challenged for far more than they have done so in the past 10 years.
Every player has his price and there’s always the bigger club intent on luring your star player. That’s just a fact of modern football. Yet no fan base knows that quite as well as the fans of the Schalke.