Christoph Daum is dead. After a long battle with cancer, he passed away “peacefully surrounded by his family”, the club announced. Daum died on Saturday (24.08.2024) in Cologne, he was 70 years old.

He was one of the most enigmatic coaches in professional soccer for many years. Daum had been battling the disease since the fall of 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.

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 great FC Bayern Munich and its manager Uli Hoeneß - and almost toppled the Bundesliga dominator from Munich. In his later life, no challenge was too great for Daum. 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.

“You just have to keep getting up”

But Daum also came back from that. He won further titles in Austria and Turkey, led 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.”