The former defender spoke about the books that changed his life.
Article edited by Christian.
During the summer of 2019 I was in Berlin to take an intensive German course. Every morning, waking up very early, I walked down the four floors of my apartment building, located in the center of the Kreuzberg district, and walked along Adalbertstraße, skirting the shops of Turkish greengrocers who were already ringing out at that hour with shouts “Offer! Offer!” with which the owners announced the offers of the day (occasionally, on Monday mornings, on the street I could pass hungover guys looking for open kebab shops). At the end of the street, I took the U-Bahn, the green line of the subway that from Kottbusser Tor – affectionately called To the bag from Berliners – it took me to Warschauer Straße and from there to the tram stop for school.
That route that I traveled every morning, for me who grew up in the province of Southern Italy, seemed to me varied and absurd as if it contained the whole world: I remember the strange sensation I felt looking out the window at the river, on my twenty-fourth birthday , the first one I passed alone; or that homeless man sitting on the floor in the station rummaging desperately through his stuff until he found half a cigarette. Or again, I remember the guys outside the station with signs “I need money for LSD”, and the Warschauer Straße which in the morning was populated by tourists heading towards the ruins of the “Mauer”, the wall that once divided the world in two, and which with its fall contributed to the final disintegration of the USSR.
Who knows if Neven Subotić, in his years in Germany, ever went to visit the ruins of the wall, and if there before he wondered about that world that he has not lived but which nevertheless belongs to him; who knows if he felt as small as I felt, a grain of sand flown from the Adriatic coast to that place where history has passed, in the center of the most transgressive city in Europe.
I think about it now that Subotić’s interview a A book for lifea rubric of Arte.tv. Subotić sitting comfortable and relaxed, in a living room that could be the window of a furniture store, his feet there almost motionless on the Persian carpet. Subotić who talks about football as if it were a superfluous outline of his life, a skeleton that he keeps in the closet with a little embarrassment, but which he also talks about with surprising intellectual honesty: «[Il calcio] It took up all my time and attention. Even when I wasn’t at work and came home, I played Fifa. At some point, I discovered that I wasn’t happy and that the world out there was more interesting and I knew almost nothing about it», racconta Subotić alla sua interviewatrice, Jagoda Marinić.
In each episode of A book for life a person from the world of entertainment or culture is interviewed about the books he believes have been important for his own existence. It is a program with a sober tone and a long duration by the standards of the format – an interview for two, with a slow pace and a cultural content –: each episode lasts from 45 to 70 minutes. It is a program in which the culture – the books – are not treated in the romantic and ultimately superficial way usually reserved for mainstream talk shows; in reverse A book for life he takes the necessary time to dig deep into the history of the books and subjects interviewed, with the presenter Marinić who also feeds this excavation process by subjecting the guests to complex and intimate questions.
In this context Subotić is surprisingly at ease. While he speaks with fluent speech, his figure conveys an unbreakable tranquility, an ascetic calm highlighted by the sober look and neutral colors he wears. He says he is a curious person by nature, and that it was precisely his curiosity about the complexity of things that prompted him to want to deepen his knowledge of the world. That is, he made him realize that stopping at the surface at a certain point was no longer enough for him: «In everyday life I realized that something was missing. I didn’t know many things. For example, I didn’t know what labor law was. I didn’t quite understand what football culture and fan culture was either», says Subotić, who then adds that his curiosity also concerned more banal and everyday subjects: «For example, how a car worked, that sort of thing interested me too. One of my best friends is a mechanic and he could explain everything to me. I realized I didn’t know a damn thing, but I was interested in him, and his eyes sparkled when he told me about it. There were people around me who showed me how big the world is, how amazing it is. And I knew I was far from owning their knowledge of things. And that was just what I wanted».
“Wanting to possess the knowledge of things” is the key phrase around which Subotić’s entire interview revolves. A phrase that is so strange to hear in the mouth of a footballer. Subotić, on the other hand, feels sincere wonder in the discovery of things, to the point of finding himself envious of a philosophy student friend who «he asked himself such complex questions that I at his age would never have been able to formulate; I was just wondering: who are we playing against next Sunday?».
In fact, this is precisely the point: we are often led to think of footballers as something as close as they are far from us. Off the field, our idols, our favorites, those who are part of the team we support, suddenly appear awkward and awkward in relating to the outside world. We passively accept to separate their role from their person, after realizing that they are obliged not to express anything other than empty comments on the game that has just finished. “If I don’t expose myself, everything goes well, what does it matter to me” seems to be their average thought. Subotić basically confirms this cliché, admitting that he too was a victim at the beginning of his career, when the dream holidays, the cars and the luxurious villas that he could afford seemed enough to fill his existence. At least until he realized that he wasn’t like that, and that he was missing something to really feel “in the world“, and that was the knowledge of the world itself.
Subotic knew nothing of the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. Until he decided to deepen it through reading, at least. He says his parents never talked about the subject, it was something of a past they left behind after they emigrated from Bosnia – where Subotic was born in 1988 – to Germany and then to the United States. Finding out more about the conflict and the dissolution of Yugoslavia was a way to learn more about his family’s history, to learn more about himself.
While talking about it, Subotic reveals the emotion of someone who believes they have wasted too much time in their life, even if it is privileged; of those who now want to devour it at the same rate as how she suddenly shortened on the opposing attackers. Subotic’s interview is the manifesto of a former footballer who wants to free himself from the footballer label. Someone who wants to show – perhaps to himself before others – that it is possible for a footballer (a sportsman) to develop a social conscience, to wake up from the torpor of the superficial.
Subotic is well aware that “having a social conscience” is not only an individual but a collective fact, just as privileges are not individual but mass, at least if one is lucky enough to be born in a wealthy community such as Europe. Subotic understood this by reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, one of the books that changed his life. In the book the author retraces the history of European colonialism, and how Europe has been exploiting Africa’s resources for centuries to build its own well-being. «We still enjoy the effects of exploitation today», says Subotic, who through Rodney’s book understood how the prosperity of Europe rests on the underdevelopment of other areas of the world, according to a colonial and post-colonial mechanism that moves wealth from the poor to rich ones. Based on this awareness, Subotic decided to found his own NGO which is very active in the Tigray region, Ethiopia. What he does is help local people to have access to education, clean water and a slightly better life perspective: a way to give back to those people a small part of what history has taken away from them. .
Perhaps the influence of having been part of a system, the German one, where sensitivity to certain issues is more widespread than in other areas of Europe has influenced this particular social sensitivity to grow in Subotic. This is demonstrated every Sunday by the fans of the Bundesliga teams with their politically engaged banners, or even the direct commitment that some teams carry out in the social sphere – just think of what clubs like St. Pauli or Union Berlin represent (in which Subotic also played), for example.
The history and activities of Subotic’s NGO are also chronicled in this documentary by DW.
The German national team and clubs are often the first in football to speak out in defense of civil rights. The last episode in the last World Cup, when the German national team posed for the team photo with their hand in front of their mouth, to protest against FIFA’s ban on wearing the One Love armband in support of the rights of the LGBT+ community. One of the players in that squad, Leon Goretzka, one of the most active in supporting progressive causes, during the electoral campaign for the last German general election had explicitly sided against Alternative für Deutschland, the main German far-right party, by having himself photographed with a flag that reads “No football for the fascists”.
These stances sound strange especially if contextualized in a sporting universe that seems to do everything to deprive players of the right to express themselves. A universe that increasingly urges sportsmen to “think only of playing”, and to repress any attempt at political exposure. Just recently, the BBC suspended Gary Lineker for expressing his disgust at the Tory British government’s latest immigration bill on Twitter.
Indeed, Subotić points out that he had to overcome many prejudices before coming to expose himself in this way. Subotic’s attitude – who today has no problems criticizing the current social-economic system, expressing his concern for climate change, despising the global value chain in the capitalist system – is essentially at the antipodes of the dominant opinion , the one for which “if you are a millionaire your only job is to spit blood on the pitch and sweat your shirt”. An opinion which unfortunately is also supported by many sportsmen and women themselves: the statement by is famous Zlatan Ibrahimovic in which he said that «I play soccer because I’m the best at playing soccer, I’m not a politician: do what you’re good at, do your job. This is the first mistake anyone who becomes famous makes.”
On the other hand, taking awkward positions is scary, and for this reason it is unlikely that players will immediately be able to regain that social conscience that the system does everything to remove. In the meantime, it’s nice to listen to someone like Neven Subotić who goes against the tide. Subotic has burst the bubble that surrounds the lives of footballers. With her thirst for knowledge of things he has not only looked into the complexity of the world: he has also understood that part of the beauty of the world lies precisely in its complexity. Also for this message, as well as for his activism, it would be nice for Subotic to become a source of inspiration for the new generations.