Magath leaving Wolfsburg for Schalke

FRANKFURT (AP) -Coach Felix Magath is leaving Bundesliga leader Wolfsburg at the end of the season to take over at Schalke.

Schalke confirmed the move Wednesday and said Magath will sign a four-year contract to act as both coach and manager. Earlier, Wolfsburg had confirmed Magath's departure but did not say where he was going.

Schalke's board chairman Clemens Toennis said Magath was the "first-class solution'' the club had been seeking since firing coach Fred Rutten and manager Andreas Mueller in March. Former assistant Mike Bueskens has been coaching the team on an interim basis.

The departure was announced after Magath met with members of Wolfsburg's board last week, although it had been Germany's worst-kept secret.

"We owe Magath a great thanks already now, four rounds before the end of the season, for the development of the team over the past two years,'' Wolfsburg's chairman of the board, Hans Dieter Poetsch, said in a statement.

"He's achieved an extraordinary sporting success in very short time. We wish him all the best in his future coaching career,'' Poetsch said.

Magath said he was leaving a team that is "young, capable of developing and with a potential'' for the future.

"We achieved our goals a lot faster than we set out to do when I took over in the summer of 2007,'' Magath said in the statement.

"I am glad the decision is out in the open,'' Magath said later, speaking to reporters in Wolfsburg.

At the same time, Magath regretted that the move became known before the end of the season, although he confirmed that his deal with Schalke had been sealed weeks ago.

"I had been hoping to keep it from the team until the end of the season,'' he said.

"There are grounds for my decision. But the main reason is that what we'd set out to do, to bring Wolfsburg to the top, has been achieved,'' Magath said.

In two years, Magath completely overhauled the team supported by the giant auto maker Volkswagen, bringing in more than 30 players at a cost of more than ?55 million ($73.72 million). He made stars out of players previously unknown in Germany, such as strikers Grafite and Edin Dzeko, who have combined for 42 league goals this season.

The former Hamburger SV star, who scored the only goal when Hamburg beat Juventus in 1983 to win the Champions Cup, could bring Wolfsburg its first Bundesliga title before departing. Wolfsburg has won 11 of its last 12 games.

Magath is likely to earn more at Schalke, a club with a long and colorful history but which has not won the championship since 1958. It won the German Cup in 2002 and the UEFA Cup in 1997. Schalke is currently seventh in the Bundesliga.

By combining the jobs of coach and manager, Magath will have a free hand to revamp Schalke in the same way he did in Wolfsburg, which narrowly escaped relegation the season before Magath's arrival.

By deciding to leave now, Magath may have felt that it would be hard to repeat such a successful season with Wolfsburg again.

Magath, 55, also coached Bayern to two successive domestic doubles before getting sacked in January, 2007.

Wolfsburg was the seventh Bundesliga club Magath has coached. Apart from Bayern, he also led Stuttgart, Eintracht Frankfurt, Werder Bremen, Nuremberg and Hamburger SV.