What do Vladimir Putin, David Hasselhoff and a shadowy businessman named The Meat Baron have in common? The remains of a fan-owned German football club that sold its soul, got stuck in the middle of a war, then woke up from a $200 million nightmare... to the basement of the standings. Correspondent Bradley Campbell travels to Gelsenkirchen, a mining town where soccer never stopped — and salvation was always a piece of merch away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main story behind Schalke 04?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. And today we're going to find out what this sound is. Right after this ad.
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With the Galaxy Watch 7 or the Galaxy Ring and the Samsung Health app.
How's it going, man?
I mean, I'm all right, but 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. You seem haggard, especially lately. It's been a stretch, dude. You are trying to be kind to yourself by eating a kind bar. Yeah. A real luxury.
Oh, it's good. It's good. Well, dude, question.
Yeah.
Have you ever done something, and this will go somewhere. Have you ever done something to someone where you ask them to, you know, like a favor for you? 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, asked a friend. Can you help me move, having never done it myself?
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Chapter 2: Who is the Meat Baron and what is his significance?
a state-owned Russian natural gas supplier, huge industrial giant.
But at that time, 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 didn't really have consumers. So the brand was completely unknown. It popped up out of the blue and suddenly it was everywhere.
They went to Schalke and they did this presentation. This is why Gazprom is great. So I actually found a guy in Germany who was in the room where it happened.
Yeah, I remember. I was actually at the presentation of Gazprom with my daughter. So yeah, it was 2007. She was four years old. So first time that she was in the stadium.
This is Axel Hafer. He's the current chairman of Schalke 04. And truthfully, Pablo, he actually saw a connection between this giant state-run natural gas supplier and this tiny mining town in Germany.
When Gazprom was presented, they basically shot a commercial where you had Gazprom employees somewhere in Siberia that were drilling for gas. And that was very similar to the mining images that we all had in our minds. So it looked like a very good fit. It was actually a good fit at that time.
And so Gazprom, when they saw Schalke, what were they seeing in this club?
So they were also using Schalke as marketing. They had this really big goal of creating a second pipeline connecting Russia to Germany, even more of their natural gas, called Nord Stream 2 was the big project. It was in the second Nord Stream pipeline.
The Nord Stream 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
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