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Dream Team

Gerald Asamoah


Bundesliga professional Gerald Asamoah followed his parents from Accra to Hanover at the age of twelve. His father William fled the military putsch in 1978 as a supporter of the opposition and arrived in Germany via Italy and Poland.

In Hanover he worked as a road sweeper and as a labourer in a tyre factory but actually wanted to be a journalist.

"Unfortunately", explains son Gerald, "he still encountered racist prejudice. A black man as a journalist? Unthinkable for many people. And so he gave up." Asamoah himself has often faced racism in football. Through a change in the Citizenship Act he became a German national in 2000 and was the first African-born player to play for the national team. The Asamoahs - a migrant family. When Gerald Asamoah scored his first goal for Germany on his international debut one of his aunts was living in Nigeria, one in Saudi Arabia, one in New York and another in Hamburg – with one uncle in Nuremberg and two in London.

But even having a German passport does not protect him from racism. "I don't like blacks in the German national team. Other fans think exactly the same. But you're not allowed to say it out loud because of the past" was a representative quote from a fan printed in the taz newspaper. Proud to be German? – "That's a Nazi slogan."

During the international against Slovakia in September 2005 he was the butt of racist abuse from his own fans. And in 2006 neo-Nazis gave him their answer on the internet: "No, Gerald, you are not Germany."