Antonio Rüdiger: ‘Refugees have no other choice – it’s important they be listened to’

A s a child, Antonio Rüdiger would look out of his bedroom window to see whether anyone was playing on the field it overlooked. It was not a big pitch, but it had two goals, enough room for six-a-side and was where a young Rüdiger honed the skills that would take him to the top. He grew up in Neukölln, Berlin, in a community largely made up of refugees, where his parents settled after fleeing civil war in Sierra Leone. It was, by his own account, a tough area, and football kept him out of trouble. Rüdiger, preparing to represent Germany at the World Cup , says: “We didn’t have phones to call each other: ‘Hey, let’s link up.’ No. We just looked out of the window, we saw there are guys playing football, so let’s go. That was the call. This is the nice thing about Germany; you have everywhere those types of fields. Just these days they’re not much used any more because we’re human beings and we changed to a digital life.” The Real Madrid defender has opened up about his upbringing after joining the “Gamechanging Team” of the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) – a group of footballers with displacement backgrounds standing with refugees and challenging stereotypes. Rüdiger does not want you to feel sorry for him for enduring hardships. Far from it. He remembers a vibrant, close community with “a lot of togetherness”. “If someone didn’t have enough food or milk, they visited a neighbour and asked,” he says. “We would share everything. It was this type of feeling. …