Wycombe Wanderers of England striker, Adebayo Akinfenwa has come out with details of racist abuse he suffered while playing professional football in Lithuania as a teenager, as he sought a new lease of life after being let go by Watford.
Megasportsarena.com gathered that Akinfenwa was released by Watford in 2001 and, with interest from clubs in England not forthcoming, a chance move to Lithuania offered the then-18-year-old an opportunity to continue his development.
It was one opportunity he took with both hands, but what happened next completely blindsided the teenager straight out of multicultural London; overt, explicit racist abuse and hostility.
While recalling his ordeal in Lithuania, the bulky star, fondly called ‘The Beast’ and ‘World’s Strongest Footballer’ recounted how he came out the other side and how it shaped him into the person he is today.
Akinfenwa told Sky Sports: “This situation in Lithuania came about when I was 17, 18. I’d just been released from Watford and my agent at the time was married to a Lithuanian woman. The president of a club in Lithuania – FK Atlantas – came to watch one of my games at Watford. After I got released, he approached my agent.
“It was sold to me that they played UEFA Cup football, but I’d never even heard of the country of Lithuania. When you’re young, you’re fearless, I didn’t take into account that I didn’t speak the language, that I didn’t like the food, or the colour of my skin – I just wanted to play football.
“There were no red flags until the first game. The first game we played was a pre-season game, and like most pre-season games we played the local team, so we didn’t play in a stadium, we played on a pitch where all the fans were very close around.
“We kicked off and I went out to the wing, so we could play diagonal. I chested the ball down, went down the line and straight away heard monkey chants. In my head I thought that couldn’t be. Then, when I got the ball again, monkey chants. The second time I definitely knew it was monkey chants.
“I went to chest the ball down again, and then the chants started. ‘Ziga, ziga, ziga, shoot the ******* ******’. I stopped and looked around and was like, ‘what?’. And then what made it worse, of the 1000 people singing it, 500 were from the away team and 500 were my own team. The away fans started it, and then the home fans – my home fans – joined in.
“I got through to half-time. My team captain played in Poland, so he spoke a bit of English, but everyone else, even the manager, only spoke Lithuanian, so I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. I was sitting there steaming and asked the captain what ‘ziga, ziga’ meant, and he nonchalantly said it was nothing, they just rhymed it with the n-word.
“The second half came, and they started doing again, so I signalled to the manager I was coming off. As I came off there was a massive roar. As I came off, I took the president’s phone and called my older brother. This was 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
“I told him I was coming home, he asked me what happened, and I told him they were being racist. He said he wouldn’t tell me to stay anywhere I didn’t feel comfortable, but if I left, they would win. That was all he said.
“It was funny because I would like to say it was like a film, and music started playing and I went to go and beat them, but as soon as I came off the phone I still wanted to go home. I didn’t care, they could win.
“I went to bed that night – call it divine intervention, God speaking to me – but I woke up thinking nobody was going to kick me out of anywhere. The thing that disappointed me was that I allowed them to make me come off that pitch in the second half, it still crumbles me to this day.
“Some people will say it wasn’t weakness but for me it was weakness. I get I was young and that hadn’t gone through those experiences. What I went on to learn was that I was the first black person in the entire league, one of maybe 10 black people in the city of Klaipeda.
“A month into my stay, my girlfriend at the time and my brother, who was 14, came shopping with me and the whole place shut down as three black people entered. To this day, brother still tells me how uneasy he felt, but I had got so used to the uneasiness, which should never be the case. You should never get used to that, but I did.”
