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Sustainability week
How professional soccer player Neven Subotic became a water activist
Came to Germany from the Balkans, grew up in the USA and returned to Germany: soccer player Neven Subotic
© Neven Subotic Foundation
The former BVB star founded the “Neven Subotic Foundation” nine years ago. It mainly supports people in Ethiopia with well projects. The work changed his life.
Professional soccer player Neven Subotic has seen so much in the 32 years of his life that his story could fill a book. And not just his sporty one. His parents fled the turmoil of the civil war from Bosnia to southern Germany in the early 1990s, when he was a toddler. And when the residence permit expired and they were threatened with deportation to their old homeland, the family moved on to Salt Lake City in the Mormon state of Utah. There he matured into a good football player, was appointed to the American youth national team – and returned to Germany. His career afterwards was rapid: Subotic played for Mainz 05, followed Jürgen Klopp to Borussia Dortmund, won two German championships with BVB in 2011 and 2012, triumphed in the cup final at the legendary 5-2 over Bayern, and lost in the no less legendary champions the following year League final at Wembley against Munich.
He wondered what to do with his life
Subotic, it can be said, was one of the best central defenders in Europe at the side of Mats Hummels. But even then, at the zenith of his young career, he was also interested in things beyond the square. He got involved here and there, but at some point, that was almost ten years ago, that was no longer enough for him.
This story is part of one Bertelsmann Content Alliance theme week. Under the motto “Let’s tackle it – so that it still works tomorrow!” are dedicated to RTL Germany, UFA, RTL Radio Germany, the Penguin Random House publishing group and the publishing house Gruner + Jahr, in which the stern will be published from October 4th to 10th on the topic of water. The aim of this theme week is awareness of the value and threat to our water resource to increase.
On a Sunday at the end of September you can reach Neven Subotic at home via Skype. And talks about: water. It was so that at the time he asked himself what “I want to move with and in my life”. It was a process of self-analysis, as he says. And at the end of this thought process from a privileged status and living in one of the richest countries in the world, it was clear to him that it had to be about global justice, “very unromantic, more of a logical approach”. What does a person need to live: oxygen. That is available. “And the next thing we need for air is water.”
That’s how it started. He established a foundation named after him.
Water. No resource is even remotely distributed as unevenly. Almost 800 million people have no or inadequate access to clean water, and more than two billion live in countries with high water stress. More than two thirds of the earth is covered by water, but not even one percent is usable as fresh water. Seven percent of this one percent is consumed by humans, 23 percent flow into industrial use, and the overwhelming 70 percent seeps away into agriculture.
On this autumn afternoon, Subotic says that he first had to delve into the subject, “I wasn’t an expert”. Today he is very much an expert. He repeatedly interviews experts and politicians for the website of the “Neven Subotic Foundation”. He and his employees have financed and built hundreds of wells in Ethiopia, and recently also in Tanzania and Kenya. He travels to the regions himself twice a year. And when he talks about these trips, about the encounters with the children and the immediacy of help, enthusiasm resonates in his voice. It is also the case that water flows indirectly into education. The girls and boys can attend school and no longer have to walk for hours to the nearest watering hole to meet their daily needs. So one results in the other.
It is not uncommon for celebrities to get involved in social issues. Also football professionals. The world champions Per Mertesacker, Philipp Lahm and Lukas Podolski have been doing this for years and very seriously in various projects. With Subotic things are a little different. It has long been more than a passion. It is the center of his life. He used to look for the truth on the pitch. He found them apart from that in the arid regions of Africa.
“I think I’m starting to say that. I actually filled my position like a full-time position.” That wasn’t always easy to reconcile with his professional career, “that came on top of football”. Because he has taken one thing with him from his active time in sport – “always one hundred percent”. And by this hundred percent he does not mean the “administrative costs that I bear”, several hundred thousand euros per year, but in particular “that we constantly question ourselves one hundred percent self-critically what we do and how we do it.” The partners are all local organizations and the employees come from the respective country.
Twelve helpers from a partner organization were murdered
And the local situation is complex, especially in the Tigray civil war area in northern Ethiopia on the border with Eritrea. A humanitarian catastrophe looms there, hundreds of thousands are on the run or are suffering from hunger because fewer and fewer aid deliveries are arriving. As Subotic relates, one of the foundation’s partner organizations has lost twelve employees, “although they were clearly marked as helpers and were therefore actually considered inviolable”.
That burdens him. He says: “When we talk and write with our partners, then of course we also have the responsibility to do something and not fall into a state of shock. In our area that means specifically that we are because of the dynamics of the conflict and because there are no clear boundaries and there is no exact course of the front, have to plan very variably. From day to day. ” Tigray is not doing well.
Subotic has become an activist over the years. Borussia Dortmund and Neven Subotic were real love. The foundation and Neven Subotic are real life. Most recently he played in the Austrian Bundesliga. He has been without a contract since the summer. This is how he found his calling. Neven Subotic says: “I don’t know if my career will continue. But I know one hundred percent that the foundation will continue.”
