GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany (AP) — German soccer club Schalke plans to slash its future spending because the coronavirus pandemic has piled pressure on the Bundesliga team’s already strained finances.
Marketing director Alexander Jobst said Wednesday that Schalke spent heavily in a “bet on the future” but ran into trouble when it repeatedly failed to qualify for European competitions.
The announcement came a day after Clemens Tönnies stepped down after 19 years as chairman.
Tönnies, a billionaire who had previously faced calls to resign after making racist comments about Africans at a public meeting last August, had been under increasing pressure to go following a huge outbreak of coronavirus infections at one of his company’s slaughterhouses.