ntonio Rüdiger was eight years old the first time he had to ask his father what the N-word meant, because the kids at school were using it. He remembers running over to an old white lady in his neighbourhood, offering to help carry her shopping bags, and seeing the look of pure terror in her eyes. He remembers growing up playing football on the concrete pitches of Berlin, and being told he didn’t belong there, to go back to Africa.
This much, naturally, Rüdiger is already used to. From his earliest days in German football, he was cognisant of the ways in which society’s ingrained racism would be coded and coddled, more creatively framed. “As soon as you have a few bad games, the press starts digging, and now what do they call you?” he wrote in a 2021 Players Tribune article. “Antonio Rüdiger, from Berlin-Neukölln.
Back in March, meanwhile, it was Fingergate. At the start of Ramadan, Rüdiger posted a picture of himself with his index finger raised, wishing “a blessed Ramadan to all Muslims around the world”. For Reichelt, however, it was not a gesture of solidarity but an “Islamist salute, which the whole world has known since the horror of the ISIS terrorists”.
Because so far the racists and nativists have encountered one major issue: Germany are absolutely smashing it. The national flags are billowing from car aerials and apartment blocks. A proudly diverse and forward-looking team have cruised into the quarter-finals playing smart modern football and turning their diversity into a strength. “With every victory,Germany wins,” the journalist Hajo Schumacher declared on a television talkshow on Tuesday night. “Every victory counts.