Magdeburg close to the finish line: One point missing

One last point is still missing. Then 1. FC Magdeburg will have secured their place in the 2nd Bundesliga. "I want the game against Kaiserslautern to be a game where everyone looks forward to it and we can celebrate together," announced coach Petrik Sander.

The Elbe club had already avoided direct relegation after their 3-1 win at Holstein Kiel. Now they have the final rescue in their own hands. "That was not to be expected after the first eight match days," said Sander, recalling the weak start to the season. Following the change of coach from Christian Titz to Markus Fiedler, the Elbe club only picked up one win from their first eight league games.

Back to a playful approach

The FCM pulled the ripcord accordingly early on and replaced Fiedler with the coaching duo Sander/Pascal Ibold. They returned to Titz's footballing approach, relied on playful solutions and brought success back. At the winter break, FCM were in 15th place in the non-relegation places with 17 points.

In the new year, however, not much was achieved at first. Magdeburg dropped down the table, even though summer signing Mateusz Zukowski, who had been injured for a long time, developed into a goalscorer. With 17 goals, the Pole became the second-best scorer in the league - and the team and coach managed to turn things around once again.

"We told ourselves before the Darmstadt game that if we manage to repeat the results from the first half of the season, we're on the right track," explained Sander in mid-April. In fact, the Elbe club have already collected two more points so far - and the game against Kaiserslautern is still to come.

Klassenerhalt secures investments

Staying in the league would be all the more important because Magdeburg has initiated significant improvements to its infrastructure this season. In addition to new training pitches, a new functional building is being built for twelve million euros, which should raise the training and regeneration conditions for all teams at the club to a new level.

In addition, relegation would also mean the U23s dropping out of the fourth-tier regional league and make the transition from youth to men's soccer more difficult. The fact that the U17s only failed to reach the semi-finals of the final round of the German championship is also evidence of the rising standard at the Elbe. All of this is of course easier to finance as a second division club.

How the successful Sander/Ibold duo will continue is not yet clear. While FCM sporting director Peer Jaekel has announced talks about a contract extension, 65-year-old Sander has occasionally flirted with the prospect of retirement.