In the debate about the appearance of some TV experts, Steffen Baumgart clearly sided with the often criticized coach around Thomas Tuchel from FC Bayern.
“If an expert’s job is just to piss on everyone at every opportunity, then he shouldn’t be surprised if at some point someone says: ‘Watch out, you’re just not important enough to me,'” he said Coach of 1. FC Cologne from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”.
Tuchel recently publicly defended himself against criticism from Sky experts Dietmar Hamann and Lothar Matthäus. Baumgart found it “understandable that he would say clearly: So and so, they’re completely crazy to me!” The 51-year-old said he wanted “these people not to completely deny their roots and to be willing to understand how the job we do works.”
At the same time, public criticism and all kinds of background noise are part of the business. “We have to accept that people who are really far away from our work are constantly pissing at us,” said Baumgart: “People who have their own problems but then stand up in public and say: We know what what’s going on. With every protagonist, with every club.”
This was also the case in the Union Berlin case. A few weeks before the separation from Urs Fischer, which has now been completed, Hamann had criticized the coach for sticking with him. Baumgart called this “an absolute impudence” that was not justified towards Fischer and Union: “Why is he allowed to make such a judgment? Believe me, I have more insight into Union Berlin than many people assume, and I don’t dare to evaluate separation.”
Baumgart himself wants to ignore public criticism as completely as possible. He doesn’t read anything anymore. “Nothing positive, nothing negative, nothing that would rob me of energy,” this is “the most important thing. There are far too many opinions from people that I don’t want to let into my head,” said the coach of the penultimate team in the Bundesliga : “Often these are people who have far too little information to make a well-founded assessment, so I don’t want to deal with that.”