SC Freiburg 2-1 FC Schalke 04: Bundesliga Match Report, 11 October 2026

A one-goal win over a promoted side is not the sort of result that gets quoted back at anyone, but SC Freiburg 2-1 FC Schalke 04 was the fifth league fixture in a row that Freiburg had come out of without losing, and it was level at half-time.

That 1-1 at the break is the part worth sitting with. Freiburg had arrived third on ten points from four games, plus nine on goals, built on a 4-1 against Werder Bremen, a 1-0 at Paderborn, a 5-0 against Mönchengladbach and a 2-2 at Frankfurt — three wins, one draw, twelve scored and three conceded. Schalke were twelfth on five points from four, minus one, and the shape of their start was the inverse: beaten 0-3 at Augsburg on the opening weekend, then a 0-0 at home to Bayern, a 3-1 win at Union Berlin and a 0-0 at home to Elversberg. Four goals conceded in four matches, three of them in the first of them.

So the interval scoreline fits the away side's record better than the home side's. Schalke had been hard to score against and had already taken a point off the champions without conceding; Freiburg had taken ten points of a possible twelve and had scored four or more in two of the four. Both of those things held for forty-five minutes. Exactly one goal was scored after the break, and it was Freiburg's — the only decisive goal in a game whose first half had split evenly, and the goal that made this the first match since the opening weekend in which Schalke conceded more than once.

These two had never met in the records available here — Schalke's promotion made this a first meeting — so there was no prior fixture to weigh, only two sets of four results.

Freiburg moved to thirteen points from five games and plus ten, which five rounds into the season is a markedly better position than the one they held all of last year: they finished seventh on forty-seven points with a negative goal difference. Nothing about thirteen from five settles anything in October, but it is the difference between defending a European place and chasing one, and Freiburg had been doing the chasing.

Schalke stayed on five points and went to minus two. For a promoted club, taking five from the first four and conceding four is a defensible start, and losing by one at the division's form side does not spoil it. What came next hurt more: a 0-1 at home to Mainz the following weekend, their first home defeat and the first goal they had conceded in front of their own crowd. Freiburg's unbeaten run ended at Leverkusen a day after that, 2-1.

Neither club got a preview from us for this round — the publishing schedule had a hole in it through September and the first half of October, and this is the record being filled in after the fact.