Schalke's early years

The club was founded on May 4, 1904 as Westfalia Schalke by a group of high school students and first wore the colors red and yellow. The team was unable to gain admittance to the Westdeutscher Spielverband and played as one of the "wild associations" of early German football. In 1912, after a number of years of failed attempts to join the official league, they merged with the gymnastic club Schalker Turnverein 1877 in order to facilitate their entry. This arrangement held up until 1915 when SV Westfalia Schalke was re-established as an independent club. The separation proved short-lived and the two came together again in 1919 as Turn- und Sportverein Schalke 1877. The new club won its first honours in 1923 as champions of the Schalke Kreisliga. It was around this time that Schalke picked up the nickname "Die Knappen" – from an old German word for miner – because the team drew so many of its players and supporters from the coal mine workers of Gelsenkirchen.

In 1924, the football team parted ways with the gymnasts once again – this time taking the club chairman along with them. They took the name FC Schalke 04 and adopted the now familiar blue and white uniforms from which their second nickname would derive – "Die Königsblauen" (The Royal Blues). The following year the club became the dominant local side based on a style of play that used short, sharp man-to-man passing to move the ball. This system would later become famous as the "Schalker Kreisel" (spinning top). In 1927, it carried them into the top-flight Gauliga Ruhr, onto the league championship, and then into the opening rounds of the national finals.

[edit] Rise to dominance

The popular club built a new stadium, the Glückauf-Kampfbahn, in 1928, and acknowledged the city's support by re-naming themselves FC Gelsenkirchen-Schalke 04. They won their first Western German championship in 1929, but the following year were sanctioned for exceeding salary levels set by the league and, in an era that considered professionalism in sport anathema, found themselves banned from play for nearly half a year. However, the ban had little impact on the team's popularity: in their first game after the ban against Fortuna Düsseldorf in June of 1931, the team drew 70,000 to its home ground.