The way back.

The last matchday arrived with three clubs on 26 points and two places to fall through. St. Pauli, Heidenheim, Wolfsburg, level at the foot of the table, split only by goal difference. No Bundesliga season in sixty-three had ended with its bottom three dead level on points. St. Pauli had to win and hope elsewhere. They lost.

St. Pauli lost 1-3 at a sold-out Millerntor, Abdoulie Ceesay’s goal the only reply, the ground full and silent well before the end. Eighteenth. 26 points, 6 wins, 8 draws, 20 defeats, 29 scored and 60 let in. Heidenheim went down with them. Wolfsburg kept the playoff place that goal difference handed back.

The season did not collapse on the last day. It drained. 29 goals in 34 games, the leading scorer, Danel Sinani, on five of them. The away record was its own quieter ruin, two wins on the road in the whole campaign. The squad thinned out badly late on, midfield and defence missing for weeks at a stretch, the captain playing the year on a foot that had been operated on and would not let him run. Alexander Blessin held the dressing room and held the board, backed in public in November through a six-game losing run that took in a 4-0 at Gladbach. None of it turned into goals.

The last time the club fell out of the Bundesliga it also finished eighteenth. 2010-11, 29 points, a single season up. The shape was identical. The texture was nothing alike.

That season had edges. On a February afternoon St. Pauli won at the Volksparkstadion for the first time since 1977, Gerald Asamoah’s goal, a thing most supporters had never seen and have not seen since. Six weeks later the Millerntor stopped a Bundesliga match. Schalke were 2-0 up and into the final minutes, two St. Pauli players already sent off, when a full beer cup came out of the home end and struck the assistant referee on the neck. The referee took the teams off for good. The DFB awarded Schalke the 2-0. A club that sells itself on its stand had been relegated by its season and disgraced by part of its own crowd in the same spring. Holger Stanislawski, eighteen years here as player and coach, was already leaving for Hoffenheim before it finished.

What came next was the longest exile in the club’s top-flight history. Thirteen straight seasons in the 2. Bundesliga. It ended in 2023-24, champions, Fabian Hürzeler’s side, a coach barely thirty. Hürzeler was at Brighton inside weeks. Blessin inherited the Bundesliga, not the promotion that won it. He kept the club up once, 14th, 32 points. The second year is this one. Two seasons up, gone.

This is the sixth top-flight relegation in the club’s history. 1977-78, 1990-91, 1996-97, 2001-02, 2010-11, now. It has never held a place in the first division for more than three seasons running. The 2001-02 team beat Bayern, the reigning world club champions, 2-1 at the Millerntor in February and finished bottom anyway. The drop that followed became near-bankruptcy, a fall into the Regionalliga, and a licence saved on t-shirt money and raised bar prices. The yo-yo is not this season’s accident. It is the club’s shape, and the shape has always included the way back.

Last time the climb took thirteen years. It does not have to again. The club that fell in 2011 has not stood still since. The members are there, the ground is full, the side that won the second division two years ago did not vanish overnight. The 2. Bundesliga is a division this club knows how to leave.

And the thing that saved it the last time it was truly down has not gone anywhere. The stand does not empty when the team is relegated. The district does not move. Solidarity is the oldest thing at this club, older than any league position, and it is the last thing to go.

So the table reads eighteenth, and the away end will be in its place in August, one division lower, louder than the result deserves. The comeback starts now. It does not have to be long.