exhibition
Dream Team

Anthony Yeboah


"Am I supposed to start a campfire in my living room, or what?" said Yeboah in jest to a journalist from Kicker magazine who had written that Yeboah was already living "like a model German citizen“. Yeboah understood when it was right to cast aside his quiet image: "If I weren't a star, I'd have to put up with being beaten up, too. I don't want to have to beg for asylum in Germany." He was confronted by abuse such as "black monkey", "bloody nigger" or "hush, hush, hush, nigger in the bush".

But it was not just the fans who were abusive. Klaus Schlappner, Yeboah's coach at FC Saarbrücken and a former election candidate for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), spoke of his "black forest players" and claimed that "the black man is undisciplined, doesn't tolerate winter and contracts malaria". In 1991 Yeboah, along with Anthony Baffoe and Souleyman Sané, wrote an open letter against xenophobia that later proved to be the impetus for supporters to found the anti-racist Association of Active Football Fans [Bündnis Aktiver Fussballfans (BAFF)] in 1993.

Yeboah began his career in the clutches of shady agents, but twice finished as the Bundesliga's leading scorer while at Eintracht Frankfurt and became the first African to captain a Bundesliga side. He was well respected by the fans, some of whom founded a fan club called the Zeugen Yeboahs (Yeboahan Witnesses) and placed an advertisement in the Austrian Kronenzeitung that read: "We've got nothing against Austrians. But we have against racists". Supporters of Austria Salzburg had monkey-chanted him during a UEFA Cup game.