Mike Büskens has already experienced a lot with FC Schalke 04 – especially in this year, which is now coming to an end. The club legend looks back.

At FC Schalke 04, Mike Büskens is a legend – as a player he was part of the Eurofighters who won the Uefa Cup in 1997, and as a coach he led the Königsblauen back into the Bundesliga in 2022.

Nevertheless, the year had not only highs for him, but also lows. Around the dismissals of coaches Dimitrios Grammozis (March) and Frank Kramer (October), Büskens was part of many discussions – and they were not always positive for him. “What happened, and in what way, that affects me. It still stirs me up,” Büskens said in an interview with the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe.

Specifically, Büskens denied that he had not supported Grammozis. “Everyone involved knows that I always tried to protect him in difficult phases,” said the 54-year-old Büskens. After the accomplished promotion, he said, he never thought about becoming a permanent boss after all. “You won’t find anyone to whom I have said something like that,” Büskens explained. “I sleep too badly for that in this position. If I had absolutely wanted it and had formulated it like that in the media, the pressure for the club would most likely have been great.”

Büskens’ bitter summary: “In the end, the worst thing that could have happened to all the discussions that arose was that we were promoted. It might have been better for me personally if we had lost six of the nine games.”

Read the whole interview with Mike Büskens at WAZ.

He admitted his share of responsibility for the fact that Kramer’s tenure was not successful. “You are always part of the big picture. I don’t have everything to do with the promotion and nothing to do with it,” Büskens said. He had been responsible, for example, for the division in opponents’ standard situations.

Büskens is no longer on the bench under Kramer’s successor Thomas Reis. He had already offered to do so in the summer, Büskens said: “I said in the summer: if it’s an issue that I sit behind the coach, then I won’t do it anymore.” Büskens is a liaison coach between the professionals and the Knappenschmiede. “I want to look at: What’s going on in the U17s, U19s and U23s? I want to dedicate myself to the talents from the professional squad, work with them on the pitch and analyse their games. “