Bradley Campbell
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bradley Campbell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out · Blood Empty: How a Beloved Team Made a Deal with the Devil · 15 May 2025
podcast
He visited the area in 1987. And is also, I learned, an honorary Schalke O-Form member. So somewhere... 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. You know, it's kind of all hands to keep everything afloat.
And if the ship lists, you know, you got to fix it yourself.
They formed in 1904.
That's the 04 in Schalke 04. And, God, they're known as one of the historic clubs in Germany. Seven-time German champions.
And the visuals here, what does this place look like? Oh, the visuals. It's up on a hill. It's right outside of town. So you've got grass field upon grass field. Everything just feels structured and efficient and German. It feels like a factory.
That, truthfully, is one of the coolest parts about Schalke 04, is that it's one of these rare professional teams that look like the town.
The other part that I liked is they're completely owned by fans, but at times it can put them in a bind.
But at least 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 some billionaire owner's teenage sons deciding who to buy based on their Madden rating. Yes, Brooke Johnson.
That's the big question. I mean, you need massive amounts of money to compete at the highest levels of football. Yeah.
So here begins our Faustian tale. Enter the Meat Baron, a man named Clemens Tonys, who says, quote, I am not a godfather.
100%, 100%.
He's like, I don't like that term. There's no such thing as a godfather. Again, godfather vibes. 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 Tisola Hummel.
He says that Tony has transformed from butcher to effectively running the Tyson chicken of West Germany.
And he couldn't just dump his own money into it. There's rules preventing that. That meat money wasn't good. Yeah, yeah. So what he had to do is he had to catch one of these giant big fish sponsors that they could put across the crest, right across the front of their jersey. Think like Crypto.com for the Lakers.
a state-owned Russian natural gas supplier, huge industrial giant.
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.
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.
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.
They thought that sponsoring a major historic German soccer club would be a great way to get that done.
Well, actually, no, Pablo, 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. And I learned this from that Reuters reporter, Tisalo Hamel.
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