Arturo Vidal hasn’t exactly made himself popular. The Chilean midfielder of Brazil’s Club Athletico Paranaense made a comment about German goalkeeper Robert Enke in a live stream on Twitch. Enke suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2009.
The live stream on the platform was about the highlights of Vidal’s career. The now 36-year-old midfielder told how he scored his first goal in Europe. At the time, Vidal was under contract with Bayer Leverkusen and scored against Hannover ’96, with Enke standing under the bar. “It was my first goal I scored in Europe. After a while, the goalkeeper fell into a depression and committed suicide,” said Vidal.
That comment went down the wrong way with many people. The Spanish Mark calls the comment disgusting and according to La Gazzetta dello Sport is ‘this is a sentence you immediately regret after saying it’. Vidal himself reacts shocked to the fuss that has arisen. “I didn’t mean anything wrong by it. I didn’t laugh at all, I never would. I just told the story.”
Enke’s death unleashed many tongues in the football world. His wife, Teresa Enke, set up a foundation together with the German football association DFB to make the topic a topic of discussion in top sport. Enke concealed his depression because he feared that his career would be jeopardized. The regular goalkeeper of the German national team wanted to write a book about his depression with Ronald Reng after his career. This book did come, but Reng wrote it alone.
Related
More sports news