The Manchester City captain talks frankly about the wrong path he nearly took as a teenager, ‘lunatic’ politicians and life after football
It is 10am on an early spring day when I pull up at the electric gates of Vincent Kompany’s home. In the drizzle, the Manchester sprawl has given way to the leafy streets of Cheshire, where long driveways announce the grand houses of the affluent. Kompany answers the door in a black T-shirt and jeans, having just finished a workout. It’s March, and Manchester City’s battle-hardened captain and central defender is only now returning to fitness after a six-week layoff for a calf injury. “I wasn’t feeling great today, so an extra session in the gym is the way to get through it,” he says, a towel draped around his neck, his gentle Belgian accent blending with Manc vowels.
At 6ft 4in, Kompany’s stature is reassuring rather than intimidating. He makes green juice in a whizzy little machine that the players are testing. “Sometimes I have a berry one as a treat,” he says, tidying up. We take them into his home office, where we talk for the next two hours. A whiteboard marked out with a football pitch stands against one wall. On the top row of his bookshelves, trophies line up like toy soldiers; below them are biographies of Mandela, Gandhi, Obama; histories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country that Kompany’s father, Pierre, left as a political refugee in 1975; biographies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Kompany’s teammate Sergio Agüero.
Written by Deborah Linton
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/18/vincent-kompany-manchester-city-setbacks-racism under the title “
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