SC Paderborn is a football club based in Paderborn, North-Rhine Westphalia. The club was formed in 1907, and has enjoyed its best period since the new millenium. It has no major honours to its name, having only recently played in the Bundesliga for the first time.
SC Paderborn are actually a relatively recent creation. Up until the 1980s, the city of Paderborn had two football clubs – TuS Schloss Neuhaus and FC Paderborn. Both clubs were merged to form the current SC Paderborn entity in 1985, with the new club having to play in the amateur leagues. It was only in 1994 that it gained promotion to the German third tier, and then reached the second division for the first time in 30 years at the end of the 2004/05 season.
Reaching professional football allowed for modernization and improvement of the club’s structure and processes, putting the foundation in place for promotion to the Bundesliga, which was achieved for the first time in the 2013/14 season. They were relegated that very season, falling back to the third division, and only recently returning to the top flight for the start of this campaign.
Paderborn’s home stadium is the Benteler-Arena. It is a 15,000-capacity football stadium in Paderborn, and was built in 2005 to account for the club’s promotion to the second tier. The club colours of blue, white and black can be seen on the club crest and the home kit. Owing to their relatively recent formation, and the fact that two direct rivals were merged to form the club, Paderborn are yet to establish any significant rivalries in German football.
Paderborn are currently managed by Steffen Baumgart. He was appointed in 2017, having previously managed FC Magdeburg and Berliner AK 07. The current club captain is Christian Strohdiek, a German defender who has been at the club since 2016, having also previously played for the club from 2007-2015 before leaving for a short-lived one-year spell at Fortuna Dusseldorf.
Paderborn were bottom of the Bundesliga when the current season was suspended, sitting six points away from the relegation playoff spot, and ten points from outright safety.
