Schalke 04: The curse of Mark Uth suddenly very real

Schalke 04 finally managed to offload Mark Uth to FC Koln after a prolonged failure at the Veltins, but now he’s gone and cursed Die Knappen.

Mark Uth was just another of the many cheap (as in free), under-the-radar solutions that Schalke 04 tried to use to fix the striker situation at the club. Like Guido Burgstaller and Benito Raman, he was an attempt to strike gold. But he was definitely pyrite.

Uth scored just four goals in 38 appearances for the Royal Blues, including a goalless streak that stretches back to January 25th of 2019. So yeah, when Schalke loaned him to FC Koln after not having seen a goal in almost an entire calendar year, not many would have imagined what would happen next.

Mark Uth took off. Five goals and four assists in just 690 minutes of play. He has contributed to a goal in every single FC Koln match since leaving Schalke. His first match for Koln, a match that he, of course, contributed a goal in, came on January 18th, 2020.

Mark Uth may have cursed Schalke when he left

On January 17th, 2020, Schalke successfully defeated Borussia Monchengladbach in a match that convinced many that we were ready to get back into the Champions League.

But the next day, Uth assisted his first goal, and thus the curse was laid. Uth went on to score the lone goal in his Dortmund’s drubbing of Koln on January 24th and on January 25th, exactly one year since the last time Mark Uth scored a Bundesliga goal, Schalke was handed the loss that shook the fabric of their season—5-0 to Bayern Munich.

Schalke have not recovered from that loss. When they were losing 5-0 to RB Leipzig, Koln was beating Hertha Berlin 5-0, helped on by a goal from everyone’s favorite striker.

The only match Uth didn’t score in was when Koln buried Schalke 3-0, and that’s just because Uth couldn’t play his parent club. He made up for it by contributing two assists in his next match out.

There are a lot of cliches I could use to apply to the Mark Uth at FC Koln situation, but I don’t like cliches, so I’ll just tell it like it is—Mark Uth put a curse on Die Knappen. Much like the Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort prophecy, neither can succeed while the other scores.

For the sake of sparing this club from the curse of Mark Uth, we have to bring him back. There’s just no way around it.