Christoph Daum is dead: Looking back on a fighter

He would never have said it publicly, but Christoph Daum has been anything but well in recent months. There were nights when he could hardly sleep. Days when he lacked the strength to do the simplest things. The chemotherapy drained the former champion trainer’s seemingly limitless energy bit by bit.

Nevertheless, he kept standing in front of every microphone and saying something like: “I’ll keep fighting.” Until the very end. On Saturday, the former loudspeaker of the Bundesliga died of cancer. His family told the German Press Agency. Daum was 70 years old.

“Christoph Daum passed away peacefully surrounded by his family on August 24th as a result of his serious cancer,” the statement said. Daum had already spent the past few days at his Cologne residence with his family and had not recently appeared in public.

“Cancer chose the wrong body”

He had been battling lung cancer since autumn 2022. First he withdrew from the public eye, but shortly afterwards the old Daum came back into the light: He gave interview after interview, appeared on talk shows or appeared in podcasts. “Cancer chose the wrong body,” was his core message. Daum wanted to encourage other people with his fighting spirit.

His struggle with cancer was symbolic of his entire life. Even as a child, he picked fights with classmates who were actually much bigger and stronger than the skinny boy from Duisburg. As a young and still unknown coach of 1. FC Köln, he unexpectedly issued a challenge to the great FC Bayern and its manager Uli Hoeneß – and almost toppled the Bundesliga dominator. Even in his later life, no challenge was too big for Daum.

Christoph Daum never complained

But the higher he aimed, the deeper he fell. Shortly after his first Bundesliga championship with VfB Stuttgart in 1992, he lost the chance to qualify for the Champions League due to a substitution error. To this day, he is one of the best coaches in the history of Bayer Leverkusen, but the legendary cocaine scandal in 2000 prevented him from being appointed national coach, which had already been a certainty.

But Daum came back. Again and again. He won more titles in Austria and Turkey, led 1. FC Cologne back into the Bundesliga and kept them there. And over and over 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 keep getting up.” It was only cancer that prevented him from standing still.

Until the very end, his companions were impressed by Daum’s fighting spirit. In October 2023, Daum swayed to the music of the “Höhner” with many of them at the celebration of his 70th birthday in a Cologne restaurant. Among those present were former world-class player Michael Ballack and DFB sports director Rudi Völler. Even then, Daum’s body was marked by cancer. He never complained about it.

It is “unbelievable how Christoph uses his popularity to draw attention to his serious illness and tries to give people with the same fate a little hope,” said Völler, who once worked with coach Daum as sporting director in Leverkusen. His former player Ballack stressed that Daum is “a role model for many people, even in these difficult times.”

Adored or despised, there was hardly anything in between

In the eyes of many people, the cancer also changed the image they had of Daum up to that point. Based on his biography, Daum was either revered or despised, with little in between. The way he dealt with the illness earned him sympathy beyond the boundaries of sport. Even his former long-standing enemy Hoeneß publicly reconciled with Daum and appeared with him in front of the camera as part of a TV documentary.

And no matter how you remember Daum: as a wisecracker, provocateur, motivational artist, messiah, almost national coach or perpetual runner-up with Leverkusen – it was never boring with him. “Others raise their children bilingually, I raise them ambidextrous,” he once said. Or: “The difference between good and great is often just the tip of a foot.” It is not just sentences like these that will be missing from German football in the future.