Fighting racism shouldn’t just be a trend
After coming through the ranks at Olympique Lyon in 1997 and spending three years in their first team, Franceborn striker Frederic Kanoute took his career to the fastpaced Premier League in 2000. In England, he famously joined forces with Paolo Di Canio at West Ham United, and followed up his three-year spell at the Hammers with two years at Tottenham Hotspur. Although he made an impressive start at the Lilywhites, his relationship with the club’s board became strained when they tried to stop him from representing Mali at the 2004 Africa Cup of Nations after he’d become eligible following a crucial
Kurt Buckerfield: Hi Freddie, how have you been coping during lockdown?
Frederic Kanoute: Ah, I don’t know. We make do. We stay busy. It wasn’t easy, but obviously we’re privileged. We’re not on the front line. We can stay at home and stay with the family, and it’s not so bad, you know what I mean?
KB: Yeah…
FK: So yeah, keeping myself and my kids and my family busy, spending time doing other stuff, so that’s also positive because sometimes you just don’t… there are a lot of things you just never have time to do so we use that time efficiently, or we’ve tried to.
KB: Your former team, Sevilla, is third in the league and nine points behind second-placed Real Madrid, but with teams expected to play two times a week, you wouldn’t write them off, would you? Lots of tired players, loads of rotation.
FK: First of all, it’s very good that LaLiga is coming back. I think it’s going to be possible for Sevilla to catch up, or close the gap on Madrid and Barcelona, but it’s true that in these kinds of situations the teams that have the bigger squads have the advantage because obviously if they’re going to play twice a week, obviously you need a lot of rotation, you need a lot of quality in the squad. I’m not saying that Sevilla doesn’t have that, but obviously a smaller budget team like Sevilla and other teams, maybe they’re going to struggle a little bit more because you’ll have to use rotation. And the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona, I think their squads are much bigger, and also in terms of quality, they can play like two different teams every match with more or less the same quality. But anyway, it’s 11 vs 11 at the end of the day and I’m sure Sevilla can do something interesting.
KB: How did your move from Tottenham Hotspur to Sevilla in 2005 come about? Was playing in Spain something you always wanted to do?
FK: Yeah, there was a little bit of that. I remember I followed LaLiga since I was very young. I always liked LaLiga, I always liked the style of Spanish football. It was a little bit less of kick and rush. Obviously, England is not like that anymore, but I’ve always liked the Spanish style of playing with the ball a little more, being patient in building up, the technical players. I’ve always followed that, that’s one side. I was always happy in England and at Spurs, but by the end my relationship with the club was not so great, and I had the opportunity to join Sevilla. They had followed me, and I took that opportunity because I always wished to try LaLiga anyway.
KB: Forgive me for this, but we remember your red card against Barcelona in 2011. Your first yellow was for kicking the ball off the penalty spot before Lionel Messi stepped up, and your second was for some fights that happened just after that. When Messi missed the penalty, was it worth it?
FK: No, it was not worth it! And I was absolutely not proud of myself. I felt a little bit cheated, you know, at the time, in the heat of the game. They were pushing, pushing, but we were doing fine, and in the last second, it was almost like, I don’t know, there was some help from the referee (laughs), that’s the way I felt at the time. But I must’ve been completely wrong and maybe it was a real penalty, and I felt really frustrated after fighting and running a lot. When you play against Barcelona, you have to be ready to run a lot.
KB: Especially against Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona…
FK: Of course. I felt a little bit frustrated. I did something I should not have done, and that’s the end of the story, and I recognised afterwards that I shouldn’t have done that; kicking the ball, I mean, and after the fight was just because of trash talking, you know how it is sometimes and there are some things that I don’t accept and that’s it, but I’m not proud of that.
KB: You were born in France, but decided to represent Mali on the international stage. What was your thinking at the time? Did you not expect to be picked for France?
FK: Yeah, this is interesting because this is a question I get over and over, and people might be right to think that it’s because maybe I wasn’t being picked for France, but actually I was in the team for
“Teams that have the bigger squads have the advantage because obviously if they’re going to play twice a week, you need a lot of quality in the squad.”
“I felt really frustrated after fighting and running a lot. When you play against Barcelona, you have to be ready to run a lot.”
change of rules. In 2005, Kanoute signed for Sevilla, and it was in Spain where the towering front man became one of the most feared forwards in Europe, scoring 131 times and winning six pieces of silverware at Los Nervionenses over seven years. Today, Kanoute is a family man and an ambassador for LaLiga, and Soccer Laduma international journalist Kurt Buckerfield was fortunate enough to catch up with the retired international ahead of the return of Spanish football on Thursday to talk about his decision to join Sevilla, his controversial sending-off against FC Barcelona in 2011, about why he opted to play for Mali despite being in the France set-up, and about players sending political messages through football, which, coincidentally, was something he got into trouble for as a player.
France when I decided to leave. I was in the pre-selection of 30 players. I was never as close as that when I actually decided to go join Mali, and to be honest I’ve always been a fan of African football since I was a little kid. I always thought ‘ oh, someday I could play for Mali’. And the first time I was introduced to the national team in France… and this is my case and the case for many, many children of African descent, and that is normally at 19 or 20 years old they pick you very quickly when you haven’t even had time to play professional football, and they take you to the national team, which is good, I’m not saying it wasn’t good for me to go to France, I was happy to do so, but I didn’t have the maturity to say ‘I prefer to play there or there’, you know?
KB: Yeah…
FK: Obviously, I played at youth level, at U21 level for France, but I remember Mali was already behind me and they were already looking at me for a long time, but obviously it was impossible because of my earlier selections with France until 2004, which coincides with my time at Spurs. Then the rule changed! As long as you hadn’t played in the first team of your country, you can still choose to play for another country of which you have the nationality. It wasn’t an easy decision because, as I said, I was picked in the France first team, but at the end of the day, I always wanted to play for Mali and I wanted to choose something that lasts. I always wanted to give something back to Mali. You know, things are always going in one direction so I felt that it was time for the likes of me and other kids coming from immigration to give back to their country of origin, and that’s why I followed my heart, and also what I wanted to do, I wanted to invest in Mali. Since then, I’ve been able to do a lot of things in Mali, and if I hadn’t played for the national team it would have been more difficult, so I certainly don’t regret my choice.
KB: That decision paid off when you won the African Footballer of the Year award in 2007, becoming the first player born outside of Africa to lift the individual accolade. That must have been a great moment for you.
FK: Yeah, it was a great moment. After that, there were maybe a couple of players who did the same thing, so yeah, it was a great moment, but I always felt something unachieved because we never won something with Mali, and we had a fantastic team, and we invested a lot into that team. We wanted to make things bigger for Mali and it was a big disappointment that we never won any major trophy with Mali, but apart from that I was obviously very proud to be the African footballer of the year.
KB: This is quite a complicated question, but we saw the horrible killing of George Floyd in the US, and we saw players in the Bundesliga pay tribute to him and pay tribute to the Black Lives Matter cause, players such as Jadon Sancho and Achraf Hakimi. The Bundesliga then announced they were going to investigate those acts as rules state players aren’t allowed to display any political messages, which you actually got into trouble for during your time at Sevilla. Do you think it’s important that sport encourages these types of messages, and do you think we’ll see any of this in LaLiga in light of what has happened?
FK: Yeah, we might see it and I hope we will see it to be honest. And to be honest, I’m not even sure I’m supposed to say that as a LaLiga ambassador, but I’ve never shied away from my principles. For me,
it doesn’t matter whether I’m on a football ground or in another field, I think it’s important to fight for your values, and many times there are things bigger than football, and we can use football as a tool to convey positive messages, as long as they are positive messages, and I think everybody agrees that it is a positive message. I think it would be ridiculous to fine Sancho and Marcus Thuram and others who have shown solidarity following the murder of George Floyd. There are really special causes where I think the leagues should see beyond the strict rules of not showing any support to any cause and so on.
KB: FIFA issued a statement on the matter, in which they called for common sense, and Bundesliga subsequently announced they would not take action on the players in question. It is good news, common sense did prevail.
FK: It’s good news, but I want to add something as well, and obviously I don’t want to bring controversy or whatever, but in my time when I did it, it was for the people of Palestine, which is completely similar. But because maybe it was not politically correct to do so, it was easy to fine me and so on, and I accepted the fine because actually I didn’t really care. This is not about the fine, I wanted to show my support for those people, and if I had to do it today, I would do it again. The thing is, racism will not end unless we have coherence between all the injustice, it cannot be because it’s trendy right now that everybody is anti-racist, that everybody right now accepts this kind of protest and shows this kind of support, everybody accepts it because now it’s so trendy. But what after? The most important thing is what are we going to do after? Are we going to do just a little of talking right now and some hashtags and slogans, and after that, that’s it? I think that after ( the trend), we’ll have to be more coherent and tackle racism across the board. We have to think of what’s going to happen after that. In my case at the time, it was also a big injustice, and I was fined because it was politically incorrect. Now it’s more politically correct because we have more support so we’re not going to fine them, but the thing is we’re going to have a solution for racism when we do more than talking, so that’s just what I wanted to say.
KB: Absolutely. We should not jump on the bandwagon now, and then three or four months down the line, it’s quiet again. Freddie, thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
FK: No problem. Thank you, Kurt. ❐