Draft:FC Schüttorf 09

FC Schüttorf 09 e.V. is a sports club based in Schüttorf, Grafschaft Bentheim, Lower Saxony, Germany. The club offers eleven sports disciplines. The football, handball and volleyball departments are particularly successful. The men's football first team played in the Landesliga Weser-Ems, the state league, from 2013 to 2015 and again from 2018 onwards. The men's handball first team plays in the Landesliga Weser-Ems, and the men's volleyball first team plays in the 2. Bundesliga Nord, the second national league.

FC Schüttorf 09 currently has around 3,000 members and is thus the second largest club in the Grafschaft Bentheim district by membership. In 2008, 203 athletes earned the German Sports Badge. Around 800 runners participated in the first Schüttorf OLB City Run, which was first organized by the club in 2009.

Sports Offered
As a broad-based sports club, FC Schüttorf 09 offers Badminton, Archery, Boules, Football (soccer), Handball, Karate, Swimming, Table Tennis, Volleyball, Gymnastics, Water Polo as well as numerous fitness, health and rehabilitation sports courses. With 43 teams, the handball players form the largest department in the club alongside the football players.

History
The football department of FC Schüttorf 09 has a long tradition within the club and can look back on a hundred-year history. Since the 1960s, Schüttorf has played in the Bezirksliga West. At the end of the 1990s, they were promoted to the Oberliga Niedersachsen/Bremen, the fourth tier of German football, and won the Niedersachsenpokal, the Lower Saxony Cup, in 2001. This entitled them to participate in the DFB-Pokal, the German Cup, where they were eliminated in the first round by SSV Reutlingen 05 with a 1-4 defeat.

In 2014 and 2015, a tax evasion trial took place at the Landgericht Bielefeld, the Bielefeld Regional Court. The reason for the court case were findings by the Bielefeld public prosecutor's office for economic crime, according to which between 2003 and 2008, salary payments at FC Schüttorf 09 as well as at SV Wilhelmshaven, both with Sprehe-Gruppe as a sponsor, were processed through a subsidiary of Sprehe Group and were not recorded as salaries but as business expenses. According to the prosecution, this resulted in tax losses of 1.8 million euros. The court case was dropped in return for Albert and Paul Sprehe paying a fine of 2.7 million euros.