Bundesliga relegation fight 2026-27: six clubs within one point, Schalke can drop six and Stuttgart two

Six Bundesliga clubs sit on three or four points, from tenth place to fifteenth, and one league point covers all of them. The line that would guarantee each of them a finish clear of the bottom two is just as tight: 87 more points for Bayer Leverkusen, Schalke 04 and 1. FC Köln, 88 for Hoffenheim, Stuttgart and Hamburg. The figure that actually separates them sits underneath. Schalke can drop six points across the rest of the season and still reach their line without help. Köln, level with them on four points, can drop three. Stuttgart and Hamburg can drop two.

Every figure here is as of the September 20 update, which covers 33 of the season's 306 matches through Dortmund's 1-0 win at Stuttgart on Sunday, with Leverkusen against Leipzig still to play. Twelve clubs have played four matches and six have played three, and that gap does most of the work below.

A safety line is not a forecast of what a club will need. It is the total that puts the two relegation places out of reach even if every rival wins every match it has left. Four matchdays into a 34-match season nothing rules that worst case out, so every line on the board comes out near the maximum. Schalke's 87 has to come from 31 matches worth 93. Stuttgart's 88 has to come from 30 worth 90. That is why the column is useless as a target and useful as a measure. The bottom half of the table holds nine clubs. Seven of them are covered by three points, from 87 in tenth to Paderborn's 90 in sixteenth. The other two have no line at all.

Behind each line is the room: the points a club can still drop and reach that line anyway. Schalke and Leverkusen have six. Hoffenheim has five. Köln has three, and so does Paderborn, although Paderborn's version means winning 30 of 31. Stuttgart and Hamburg have two. The spread from six down to two is the real gap in the bottom half, not the one point between the lines.

That spread is a fixture list, not a form guide. Schalke and Köln have four points each, but Schalke have played three matches and Köln four. A match played without a win subtracts three from a club's ceiling and leaves its line exactly where it was, which is the whole mechanism here, and it is why Köln's extra match has cost them half their room. Köln lost 2-1 at Hamburg on Saturday, their second defeat in four. Stuttgart lost 1-0 at home to Dortmund on Sunday, their third in four. Hamburg won that Köln match and are fifteenth anyway, level on three points with Stuttgart and Hoffenheim, and level with Stuttgart on two points of room, while Hoffenheim have five because they still hold the extra fixture.

The same schedule shape governs the other end of these clubs' rows. Schalke's tragic number for the four Champions League places is 31, which is their entire remaining schedule, so that question cannot close early for them at all, while Stuttgart's 29 against 30 remaining closes it with a match still to play. Köln's 30 is their whole schedule as well, and Hoffenheim and Hamburg sit one match inside theirs, as Stuttgart do.

Below the group, two clubs have no safety line at all. Union Berlin, on one point from four matches, could win all 30 of their remaining matches, finish on 91, and 16 clubs would still be able to reach a higher total than that, so nothing they do by themselves guarantees anything. Mönchengladbach, bottom on 0 points from four defeats, have no line either, and they are the only club in the league carrying a relegation number. It is 30, every match they have left, the weakest form that number can take. Neither club is blank in both directions: Union's tragic number for the top four is 29 and Mönchengladbach's is 28.

The two fixtures that move the room column are both on Monday, September 21. Schalke host Elversberg and Paderborn host Hoffenheim. Those are the group's two clubs with a match in hand spending it, and both opponents have played three as well, so all four clubs in those fixtures are on three matches. Schalke's six points of room and Hoffenheim's five are what is on the table. Leverkusen spend their own match in hand on Sunday, at home to Leipzig. After Monday the schedule in the data jumps to Saturday, October 10, when Paderborn host Stuttgart and Union Berlin host Elversberg, the first chance for a club with no line to start building one.

How to read these numbers. A clinch number, here a safety line, is the minimum a club must still collect to guarantee the outcome even if every rival wins every remaining match. A tragic number is the number of further defeats after which the outcome is impossible even if that club wins everything else. A blank does not mean safe. It means no run of that club's own results settles the question. Ties are counted against the club in question, so our clinch can trail an official announcement by a day. The full table is at /bundesliga, the remaining fixtures at /bundesliga/schedule, the qualifying and relegation rules at /bundesliga/postseason, and each club's own figures at its page, such as /bundesliga/team/bGeEZs. To run a set of results yourself, use /bundesliga/whatif.