Antonio Rüdiger Joins UNHCR’s Gamechanging Team With Refugee Message
Antonio Rüdiger has joined the UNHCR’s Gamechanging Team and used his platform to say refugees “have no other choice” but to flee. The Real Madrid and Germany defender tied that message to his family’s own path from Sierra Leone, turning a personal history into a public appeal before he represents Germany at the World Cup.
Rüdiger and the UNHCR Team
The Gamechanging Team brings together footballers with displacement backgrounds who stand with refugees and challenge stereotypes. Rüdiger fits that brief closely: he grew up in Neukölln, Berlin, in a community largely made up of refugees, and said that experience shaped how he sees people who have been forced to leave home.
He said his parents came to Germany “for us young ones to have a better life.” That family move began after civil war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front tried to overthrow the government. The conflict lasted 11 years and displaced about 2.5 million people, roughly half the population.
Neukölln and Sierra Leone
Rüdiger is the youngest of six siblings. Only he and one sister were born in Germany; the rest of the family escaped Sierra Leone soon after the war began. His father, Matthias, and mother, Lily, settled in Germany, and he has said that growing up in that environment left him with a clear view of how tightly football and community were linked.
“We would share everything. It was this type of feeling. It was one of the best experiences in my lifetime,” he said of life in Neukölln. He also described how football connected children who did not speak the same language: “If someone couldn’t speak the language, the football language we all understood. It was great and this follows until today. Today you play with so many people from different backgrounds: black, white, whatever – it doesn’t matter.”
Refugees and stereotypes
Rüdiger’s comments put the human cost of displacement ahead of the usual talking points around migration. “You have the utmost respect for them. It’s not easy to leave somewhere behind and start somewhere new. Especially as it’s not that people are seeking refuge because they want to – no, because they have to. They have no other choice. Because this happened to my family I can understand those people and feel with them. It’s important that they be listened to,” he said.
He also pushed back against one-size-fits-all views of refugees, saying: “In everything we have good and bad.” That is the line he is carrying into the UNHCR role, with his own family story giving the campaign a direct connection to displacement rather than a distant slogan.
