Blood Empty: How a Beloved Team Made a Deal with the Devil
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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?
And moving in New York is basically like, would you like to... Would you like to be basically stuck in a set of stairs trying to maneuver a couch at like a 64 degree angle?
My good buddy Juan, I am so sorry. He got the bottom part of the couch. And I was like just steering it from the top, which is... unequal distribution of labor. So, yeah, I did that, which I am still living down.
I did this with my cousin Max, who lives in Germany. And we were talking on Zoom. And I looked on, you know, kind of on Google Maps. And I found out where he was at. And I'm like, oh, dude, he's next to Borussia Dortmund.
Haaland. Haaland's volley is beautiful beyond compare.
And at that time, they were incredible. They had Erin Holling. They had Christian Pulisic. Is there any chance, like, you could get me a hat? Yeah, you're that kind of cousin.
You're like, oh, wait, you're in Germany.
Exactly. Can I get some merch? Can I get some merch? And he was just like, yeah, okay. So he gets one. And then I proudly, like, put the Borussia Dortmund hat on the next time we're on Zoom. And I'm like, Max, check out my hat. And he was like...
Yeah. He responded the way that Juan responded when I asked him to help me move a couch.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
I wasn't familiar with the geopolitics of intra-German professional soccer clubs.
It's huge.
But apparently, Bradley, as I understand now where you're headed, yeah, this is a thing.
But then he told me, like, well, it's okay. It's just, it's been a hard time to be a Schalke fan. And I was like, what do you mean?
Oh man, don't ask me. It's almost desperate to see what's going on at the moment. So of course I asked him.
He told me about this storied team of his, Schalke 04, one of the best in all of German football, just became dead inside.
Well, fans describe it as being blood empty. That's kind of a phrase we use here. Blood empty. Yeah, they're standing on the field, blood empty. It's like standing on the field and leaving a hollow impression of yourself.
Wow, that's a great phrase. Yeah, welcome to the German language. He went on to tell me all about Schalke 04's downfall. And as he was doing this, I realized that it was a very German story, a Faustian tale, if you will. One that involved a deal with the devil, the selling of a soul, and a story that dropped his favorite football club out of the top division and down into a geopolitical firestorm that our own president has said could lead us to World War III. Right.
I have a sense now of your cousin Max. Yep. God bless him. His favorite club. But in terms of the Faustian bargain here, this deal with the devil, who is the devil in this story?
So at first, I had absolutely no idea. So I went to Germany to find out.
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What you're hearing there is Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing earlier this week
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