Edin Džeko Gets Schalke Deal Aged 40
The German transfer window has reached its pre-season phase, which means the business getting done is the sort that clubs would rather frame as a coup than a compromise. Schalke 04, newly promoted and light up front, spent Monday confirming that Edin Džeko, the 40-year-old Bosnia and Herzegovina striker who captained his country at this summer’s World Cup, has signed a one-year extension and will keep the number 10 shirt.
Džeko turned 40 in March. He is about to play a top-flight season in a division he last appeared in fifteen years ago. The question is not whether he can still score, because he plainly can, but why a club whose realistic ambition is survival has built its attack around a man born in 1986. What is Schalke actually buying?
Image: edin dzeko, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Deal
According to Get German Football News, the extension runs to the summer of 2027 and keeps Džeko in the number 10 shirt he wore through the promotion run. Sport Bild reports a base salary of around €900,000, rising to about €1.3 million with bonuses, which puts him amongst the club’s best-paid players alongside Robin Gosens, Kenan Karaman and Loris Karius. For a side just up from the second tier, that is a huge slice of the wage bill spent on a player who will be 41 before the contract runs out.
Another year for Edin Dzeko 🤝
The former Man City forward has signed a one-year contract extension after helping Schalke regain promotion back to the Bundesliga ⬆️ pic.twitter.com/Y16nREZpyo
— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) August 3, 2026
The football case is easier to make than the accounting one. Džeko arrived from Fiorentina in the January window and scored six goals with three assists in 11 appearances, despite missing weeks with a shoulder injury, and the Royal Blues went up as champions. He last played in the Bundesliga for Wolfsburg, whom he left in the January of 2011 with a title and a scoring crown behind him and 66 goals in 111 top-flight games. English readers will know him better for the four years spent at Manchester City and for the header that made it 2-2 against QPR seconds before Sergio Aguero did the rest.
Why Now & What Could Go Wrong
Timing explains part of it. Schalke spent the same day confirming a thigh injury to Gosens and watching a move for Napoli’s Jesper Lindstrom collapse over the structure of a €5 million option to buy, so a proven finisher already inside the building was the path of least resistance. Youri Mulder, the director of professional football, called Džeko ‘a leader, a fan favourite, and a role model’.
The risk is the lack of pace. Miron Muslic will have to ration the minutes of a striker who, on Get German Football News’ reckoning, is about to become one of the ten oldest players in Bundesliga history, in a season where Schalke are favourites for nothing except a relegation scrap. Best guess is that it works in flashes, that Džeko reaches double figures and drags them clear with about as much comfort as that QPR afternoon gave City, which is to say: almost none.