His story is really sad — Rudiger names Super Eagles star alongside 5 footballers that suffered before success
Antonio Rüdiger acknowledged five footballers with heartbreaking backstories, lauding them for overcoming adversity
Real Madrid defender Antonio Rüdiger has selected former Chelsea teammate Victor Moses in his ultimate 5-a-side team composed entirely of players who have overcome profound personal hardship.
The German international highlighted Moses’s heartbreaking backstory, which earned him a place on Rudiger’s ‘Game-changing 5-a-side.”
In November 2002, when Moses was just 11 years old, his parents, Austine and Josephine, a Christian pastor and his wife, were tragically murdered during the religiously motivated Miss World riots in Kaduna, Nigeria, an outbreak of violence that claimed the lives of an estimated 250 people.
Hidden by an uncle for a week, Moses subsequently fled to the United Kingdom as a child asylum seeker, where he was placed with foster parents in South London.
Despite his harrowing struggle to settle in a foreign country without his family, he found salvation in football, climbing through the local amateur ranks to sign for Crystal Palace before forging a stellar professional career.
Moses’s resilience culminated in a remarkable trophy haul, winning the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations with Nigeria, alongside the 2016/17 Premier League, the 2017/18 FA Cup, and two UEFA Europa League titles during his time at Stamford Bridge.
The rest of Rudiger’s Game-changing squad
Rüdiger experienced his share of familial adversity; his parents, Matthias and Lily, were forced to flee the devastating civil war in Sierra Leone in 1991, eventually settling in Neukölln, a notoriously rough neighbourhood in Berlin where the defender learned to battle through poverty.
This shared understanding of survival shaped the rest of his game-changing lineup, beginning with goalkeeper Asmir Begović, who fled the Bosnian civil war for Germany and eventually Canada before remarkably representing Bosnia at the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Defensively, Rüdiger included Alphonso Davies, who was famously born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his parents escaped the Second Liberian Civil War, alongside Real Madrid teammate Eduardo Camavinga, who was similarly born in a refugee camp in Cabinda, Angola, to Congolese parents before finding refuge in France.
Rounding out the inspirational squad is Iraqi international forward Ali Al-Hamadi, who fled his war-torn home country for the UK as a one-year-old toddler and was specifically praised by Rüdiger for his recent heroics in firing the Lions of Mesopotamia to qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.