In the summer

Wolfsburg ends cooperation with St. Pölten

Dario Tadic

(Bild: GEPA pictures)

The cooperation between second-division soccer club SKN St. Pölten and German Bundesliga club VfL Wolfsburg will almost certainly come to an end in the summer. "VfL Wolfsburg have informed us that they will make use of their existing right of termination in the event of another year in the 2nd division," the Lower Austrian club announced in a short and concise press release on Monday. The sixth-placed team is 15 points behind leaders GAK.

That is after 18 of 30 rounds, in which only 29 points have been collected so far. "Based on the current table situation, we must therefore assume that the cooperation will end in the summer," the club also realistically assessed the situation. Several media outlets recently reported on the imminent end of the cooperation between the two teams. On the day on which the license documents for the coming season must be submitted, St. Pölten now officially provided clarity.

On May 10, 2021, St. Pölten announced the cooperation and spoke of a contract that would initially run for four years. Now they are likely to part ways a year before the end of this period. At the time the contract was signed, the Lower Austrians were still part of the Bundesliga and had hoped for a "win-win situation" and a sporting leap up the table. As bottom of the table, they were given an "extra chance" to stay in the league a few weeks later at the end of May in the relegation play-off against Austria Klagenfurt, but lost out to the Carinthians.

This was probably one of the reasons why the collaboration was not really under a good star right from the start. Eighth place in 2022 and third place in 2023, where they still led the table after 26 rounds before the sporting collapse, were the meagre results in the fight for promotion. This season, they are even further away from that. There are currently no players on loan from Wolfsburg in the squad. One of the players who played the longest at St. Pölten was the American Ulysses Llanez, who scored eleven goals and seven assists in two seasons between 2021 and 2023.