Contributing to a self-determined life

Neven Subotić was born in 1988 in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1990, the family fled to Germany due to increasing political tensions. To avoid deportation to their home country after ten years of residence in Germany, the family emigrated to the USA. There, Neven began to play football in youth clubs, until 2007, when he moved to Germany’s upmost Bundesliga and turned professional. Before the end of his career, he founded the “Neven Subotic Foundation” in 2012, which aims to help the people of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania by means of drilling wells in order to supply them with drinking water and sanitary facilities. Meanwhile between 170,000 people benefit from this.

In his book “Alles geben. Warum der Weg zu einer gerechten Welt bei uns selbst anfängt” (Give it all. Why the path to a just world starts with ourselves) the then 22-year-old successful top athlete describes how he made the decision to turn his back on leading a footballer’s life and devote himself entirely to his humanitarian cause. The book was published on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the foundation.

Strict education with sport at the centre

Neven Subotić first got to know about his home country in the Balkans during a visit there together with his father. The latter had foreseen the war in Yugoslavia and therefore flees with his family to Germany when Neven still is a toddler. The parents are not allowed to work, get by with moonlighting, this with the intention to send aid packages to the homeland. From an early age, Neven and his older sister help their mother clean toilets and their father with all kinds of jobs. They are brought up strictly. Neven plays football, his sister tennis. Both are trained by their ambitious father, a successful amateur athlete. Nine years later deportation threatens, and the family emigrates to the USA. The boy continues to play in various teams and becomes a junior player in the US youth national team.

Success as everyone gives it all
one’s got: Players, coaches and fans

Back in Germany, the seventeen-year-old Neven Subotić becomes over time firmly established in German club football. He achieves this – first with the German Bundesliga club “Mainz 05” and then with “Borussia Dortmund” – thanks to his mentor and coach Jürgen Klopp. In the eyes of Klopp he is “the most extraordinary player I have ever worked with. Not in footballing, but in human terms”. (p. 13) The experiences of the young central defender with his coach gives him the assurance of complete reliability: Klopp: “We’ll do this together, and I protect you. Everything that goes well is thanks to you. Everything that goes badly is on my head.” (p. 110)
  This allows the young professional to outgrow himself: he delivers what is expected of him: Perseverance, reliability, fairness – virtues that already his father and mother taught him. He has arrived at the Olympus of football, enjoys the “togetherness, as if we were all brothers and sisters, to feel support and hope, and to grow together with the next challenge; the will to do your best in a competition; the force that a stadium alone can trigger [...], the feelings, that arise in each individual and make people form a unity – all these are undisputed values for me.” (p. 147)

The other side:
“Performers in an artificial world” …

Luxurious houses, fast cars, changing girlfriends, parties in the trendy clubs characterise life outside the football stadiums. What would come next does not concern him for the time being. “I was deaf to questions of that kind. [...] I did not know what steps I could take in the sense of: improving myself instead of only accumulating; even if I was definitely not the one with the biggest house and the most cars among my teammates. Everything I lived was like a game, and I was like on a race track: Fastest car? Yes, I want it! The character in the game was grabbing at anything that glistered. I sat in it, and I put my foot down …” (p. 92f., emphasis N. S.)

… and coercion to maximise success

But he soon learns about the other side of this system, “which does not see the individual, but only the maximisation of success, and thus exerts a pressure on all those working in it which doesn’t allow them any longer to act humanely. In the unequal power relations between the league and the clubs, between coaches and players, I experienced unfair behaviour and disrespectful dealings with each other.” (p. 147) He feels his dependence, his degradation to a commodity, so that his “love for this sport was unsettled again and again”, the “romanticisation waned” and he became “alienated from the pitch”. (p. 147) What was once exciting becomes boring, he asks the question of meaning, boredom spreads, and he feels an obligation that his growing fortune brings with it.
  He asks himself who he wants to be, what his contribution to a more just world could be. Participating regularly in charity projects as a representative of “Borussia Dortmund”, sometimes helping his parents or his friends financially is all well and good, but he is becoming less and less satisfied.

The establishment of the foundation – the beginning of a success story

Neven Subotić is considering the idea of establishing a foundation. He wants to address the greatest need, where he can bring something about in a sustainable manner. “I had to decide which of the ten million problems that exist in the world I wanted to face.” (p. 176) Inspired by the American NGO “Charity Water” he occupies himself with the fact that billions of people have no access to drinking water. Even during his time as a professional footballer, he immerses himself in specialist literature on the functioning of a foundation and about the water emergency in Africa; in 2012 he establishes the “Neven Subotic Foundation”.
  Under the title “Donating Future” the foundation puts on the record in its mission statement: “For us, it is unbearable that millions of people worldwide have no access to clean drinking water and sanitary facilities. They are thus deprived of elementary necessities of life and the prerequisite for health, education and a self-determined future. This is beneath human dignity.” With education, the foundation gives people the opportunity to lead a self-determined life, and a real perspective for the future. The results are impressive: By now 20,000 donors have enabled the realisation of 484 projects in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. The work has an immediate impact: People’s chances of survival increase because they no longer are infected by contaminated water. Children, especially girls, can go to school instead of carrying water in jerry cans every day.
  In the meantime, Neven Subotić has ended his sports career and devotes himself solely to his foundation. His book concludes with the sentences: “When I compare my life as I lead it now with the way it was during my best time with ‘Borussia Dortmund’ [...], when I see the figure, who, like in a reality TV show, delivers exactly what is expected of her, I feel shame.” (p. 262) In conclusion, he appeals to the readers “to accept the injustice of this world as a task”. (p. 270)  •

Sources:
Biermann, Christoph. Die wahre Geschichte des modernen Fussballs von 1992 bis heute (The True History of Modern Football from 1992 to the Present), Köln 2022, (Kiepenheuer & Witsch), ISBN 978-3-462-00373-4.
Subotić, Neven (with Hartwig, Sonja). Alles geben. Warum der Weg zu einer gerechteren Welt bei uns selbst anfängt (Give it all. Why the path to a fairer world starts with ourselves), Köln 2022 (Kiepenheuer & Witsch), ISBN 978-3-462-00233-1
Neven Subotic Stiftung: https://www.die-stiftung.de/stiftungsprojekte/die-neven-subotic-stiftung-unbeugsam-fuer-wasser-91963/
World’s Drinking Water Unicef: https://www.unicef.org/stories/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-water
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), “Markus Lanz” of 7 September 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCI5tZpXRN0
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF): “Volle Kanne” of 10 November 2022, Neven Subotić as a guest with Florian Weiss