View picture gallery
“I wouldn’t swap any of our players for the whole Rapid team – because you can’t buy character,” said LASK President Siegmund Gruber in 2018 about Dietmar Kühbauer’s Rapid team. Four years later, the coach of this team is the new strong man at LASK.
The 51-year-old should stop the downward trend in black and white – follows Andreas Wieland. In fan circles, the transfer is viewed critically – in the past, Kühbauer was considered an absolute stimulus figure among the athletes’ appendages.
And it is precisely this that is supposed to put the people of Linz back on the road to success. How is that supposed to work? The former Rapid coach is a footballing alpha male from the old school and enjoys high authority in player circles.
“Born with rough edges,” he describes his own childhood. The label of the proletarian pecks at him. But he doesn’t want to get rid of it either. Very few people know that Kühbauer is a music connoisseur with hundreds of albums and a real bookworm.
Escape to Spain
But family is at the top. At the age of 26, he had to cope with the greatest stroke of fate of his life to date: On February 16, 1997, a young woman drove to Vienna-Schwechat Airport to pick up her husband, who was returning from a training camp in Dubai. But she never arrives. Michaela Kühbauer had an accident with her car, was in a coma for seven months and died in a clinic in Innsbruck without ever waking up again. She is 24 years old and pregnant at the time of the accident.
A sensational season at Rapid is followed by the worst time of Dietmar Kühbauer’s life. He visits his wife in the hospital every day and trains with FC Tirol so as not to be too far away from her. But while she was still in a coma, he could no longer stand it in Austria, the expressions of pity were too much, and he embarked on the adventure of a career abroad earlier than planned: in autumn 1997 he moved to the Basque San Sebastian to join the first division club Real Sociedad.
Don’t be afraid of big tasks
In Spain he writes a new chapter: he meets his current wife before the turn of the millennium. Daughter Emily was born in 2004, Kim in 2007. He experienced his sporting heyday (2000 to 2002) with the German Bundesliga club Wolfsburg, before ending his career with the youth club Mattersburg in Austria’s top division.
The 55-time ÖFB team player has proven one thing at all of his stations: he always wanted to assert himself, no matter how difficult it was. A virtue he was instilled in as a child: on the soccer field next to the Mattersburg stadium, his brother Josef always wanted to protect him from the elders. “Didi” didn’t feel like it: he wanted to fight the others until they accepted him.
He has also asserted himself as a coach and celebrated great successes with Admira, Wolfsberg, St. Pölten and finally Rapid. Now the LASK is also building on the straightforward fighter nature.
Source: Nachrichten
