Glückauf-Kampfbahn

For many Schalke fans the Glückauf-Kampfbahn remains the club's true home. Built by club members on a colliery site in the 1920s, it still symbolises the "old Schalke", the miners' club that was despised by league officials from the neighbouring cities for being "a club of Polacks and proletarians" before going on to win six league championships in the 1930s and 1940s.

Although designed to hold around 35,000 spectators, as many as 70,000 used to squeeze their way into the Glückauf-Kampfbahn. One such occasion was a 1-0 friendly win over Fortuna Düsseldorf in 1931, when the Schalke team played together again for the first time since being suspended by the regional football association. All Schalke's championship titles were won in the Glückauf-Kampfbahn, and the name is inseparably linked with the term "Schalker Kreisel", or Schalke spinning top, a style of play that thrilled European football experts in the 1930s and 1940s.

The glory years of the Glückauf-Kampfbahn came to an end when the club moved to the Park Stadium. Following the final Bundesliga game against SV Hamburg on 6 June 1973, when Schalke staved off relegation with a 2-0 win, the stadium was used only for amateur and youth matches. The stands began to deteriorate and the weeds on the terraces behind either goal grew several metres high. The idea of turning the Glückauf-Kampfbahn into a football museum foundered due to a lack of funds, and at the end of the 1980s the stands were all demolished with the exception of the main grandstand, which is a listed building.

If you stand on Ernst-Kuzorra Platz today in front of the weather-beaten turnstiles and take a look inside the stadium, you can only begin to imagine what it must have been like in the old days when the ground was usually full to bursting point and Schalke's heart still beat inside the Glückauf-Kampfbahn.