Death Former football coach Christoph Daum dies
One of the most enigmatic figures in German professional football, Christoph Daum, has died. The 70-year-old lost his battle against cancer.
25.08.2024, 01:28
SDA
After a long battle against cancer, he "passed away peacefully surrounded by his family", the German news agency DPA was informed. Daum died in Cologne on Saturday.
Daum had been battling cancer since fall 2022. He initially withdrew from the public eye, but this changed again shortly afterwards. Daum gave interviews again and appeared on talk shows. "Cancer has chosen the wrong body," was his core message. With his fighting spirit, Daum wanted to encourage other people.
That was Daum: a challenge to Hoeness and the cocaine affair
His battle with cancer was emblematic of his entire life. Even as a child, he got into fights with classmates who were actually much taller and stronger than the slight boy from Duisburg.
As a young and still unknown coach of FC Köln, he made a surprising challenge to the big FC Bayern and its manager Uli Hoeness - and almost toppled the Bundesliga dominator from Munich. Even in his later life, no challenge was too great for Daum.
"You just have to keep getting up"
But the higher he aimed, the lower he initially fell. Shortly after his first Bundesliga championship with VfB Stuttgart in 1992, he missed out on qualifying for the Champions League due to a substitution error. The cocaine affair in 2000, which cost the then Bayer Leverkusen coach his promotion to the post of national coach, became legendary.
But Daum also came back from this. He won further titles in Austria and Turkey, led 1. FC Köln back into the Bundesliga and kept them there. And again and again during his eventful life he said these sentences: "You can fall down. It doesn't matter how often you fall down. You just have to get up again and again."
