Why Mental Health Matters - The Bojan Krkic story
We all need to take a step back and look at this objectively.
Footballers are people too.
It seems like an obvious statement, but I think we as fans lose sight of it sometimes, believing their heightened prestige and large pay packet elevate them above the limitations caused by normal human emotion.
We can perceive them as superhumans, part of the 0.01% able to rise above the rest of us, mere mortals. This can lead to fans idolising them… but also resenting them.
Fans feel like they can abuse or harshly criticise players; boo them in the stadium and/or drag them on social media. Tear them down as if they are emotionless statues because they didn’t live up to their lofty expectations.
But often these players sit there and take it.
It could be due to an entrenched culture of toxic masculinity within football; the perception that showing weakness will negatively impact their career prospects or reputation among their peers.
Or maybe it exists for some on a more personal level; the belief that if they allow the fan’s harsh words or feelings of doubt to get to them, they will open up a chink in their mental armour that they will never be able to close.
Regardless of the reason, many accept that this is the unfortunate status quo, the counterbalance that life has given to them in return for being better at kicking a football than others.
And they are also expected to do all this while performing in an incredibly high-pressure environment.
However sometimes that mental chink becomes a crack and then it becomes a lesion, and before you know it the whole player has crumbled away and what could have been a bright shining star becomes a spluttering ember.
And that is the unfortunate tale of Bojan Krkic.
Two weeks ago Bojan retired from football at the age of 32. You may have missed the announcement because Mesut Ozil (Grace Robertson did a great piece on him here) and Emmanuel Adebayor also retired, but he probably expected the lack of fanfare.
Bojan’s career is one of ‘what could have been’. Even in his reaction to the player’s retirement, Barcelona President Joan Laporta specifically referenced his time in La Masia:
"Krkic's name is part of Barça history. Beyond your words, we recall that player from Linyola who broke all the youth records and gave the fans so much hope. Little Bojan was a unique player, a fighter."
‘Little Bojan’ had a much more poignant nickname when he was coming through the ranks at Barcelona, ‘The Next Lionel Messi'‘.
Given he scored 423 goals while part of the Catalan side’s development squads, it seemed like a fitting tag to attribute to him.
His first season followed this narrative. Frank Rijkard would give him his debut in the 2007/08 season and at the age of 17 years and 51 days, he would become the youngest goalscorer in Barcelona’s history1.
He would play 48 games and score 12 goals and this would see him called up for Spain’s 2008 European Championship squad. He had played some games for the national team in February and it was clear that Luis Aragones wanted him to travel to Austria and Switzerland for the competition.
But then Bojan did not go.
The narrative in Spain turned against Bojan. Many fans and media assumed that the reason that the 17-year-old had dropped out of the squad was in favour of going on holiday after the player said in an interview with Barcelona’s media that he had just needed a break.
It wasn’t till 2018, over a decade later, in an interview with the Guardian’s Sid Lowe that Bojan opened up about the reason that he excused himself from international duty:
“There was a pressure here, powerful, never going away. I was fine when I went into the dressing room for the France game but I started to feel this powerful dizziness, overwhelmed, panicked, and they lay me on the physio’s bench. That was the first time but I had nasty episodes like that again.
“There’s medicine, psychological treatment to overcome the barriers you’ve erected, the fear. It started in February and it lasted until the summer. When the Euros came I decided I couldn’t go, that I had to isolate myself.”
Everyone associated with the Spanish FA knew from Aragones to Fernando Hierro, but the headlines read ‘Spain call up Bojan and Bojan says no.’ This hurt the player but he didn’t feel like he could open up about his issues.
Diamonds are made under pressure, but what the old idiom doesn’t tell you is that if you subject it to too much, it will eventually shatter.
Bojan didn’t want to be the next Messi, he just wanted to be Bojan Krkic, but the level of expectation of what he needed to be had been set. This influenced his decision to leave as he also explained in his interview with The Guardian:
“It would have been easy to stay at Barcelona and not play but I needed to go,” he says. “Maybe at times I should have been more patient but I’ve always been honest making decisions [to move]; I always wanted to play. You have your path – Italy, Holland, Germany, England – but Barcelona conditions everything.
“People don’t value what you do. There’s this line: ‘Let’s see if Bojan gets back to his best level.’ But what’s the best level? Every season I’ve reached that level, sometimes more consistently, sometimes less, but I’ve always competed well.”
His next few years after departing Barcelona in 2011, would be ones of instability, and this wouldn’t have helped his mental state. He spent a few seasons in Italy with Roma and AC Milan before returning to Barcelona in 2013 and instantly being loaned out to Ajax.
All big and historic clubs, all expecting to get the Bojan that was once promised rather than the Bojan that was standing right in front of them.
It wouldn’t be until 2014 when he moved to Stoke City for €1.8m that he’d finally find a place he could settle and grow. When he signed for the Potters, then-manager Mark Hughes said:
"Anyone who knows European football will be aware of him as a player and the fact that he sees his future at Stoke City is really exciting."
Ironically we will never get the answer to the question of whether Lionel Messi could do it on a cold night in Stoke, but we got the answer of whether Bojan could do it.
He played 85 games for Stoke (4860 minutes), scoring 16 goals and registering three assists. He may not have racked up the goal contributions but the fans loved him anyway.
During a special tribute to him at Camp Nou, his former captain Ryan Shawcross was put on the big screen and sent the following message:
“You’ve had huge success in Europe and in Asia, and at Stoke City you will be remembered as a hero by the fans. They loved the way you played, your character and how fantastic you were as a player. As a colleague, what a person, what a man? It is a pleasure to be by your side, with your humility and as a great person.”
Bojan echoed this sentiment back in 2022 when he gave an interview with FourFourTwo about the move that many of his friends and peers labelled crazy:
"I felt like it was the right club to go to, and we had amazing seasons. The times in a row, the club finished in the top 10 in the Premier League. We played fantastic football, and the fans loved it. It was one of the best moments of my entire career."
Bojan would go on to play for Mainz in Germany, Montreal Impact in Canada and Vissel Kobe in Japan before his retirement.
He was able to live his dream of playing football professionally and he was able to do it across the world. In the end, he was able to find happiness in the sport he loved, but the cautionary tale that preceded these events should not be ignored.
Conversations about mental health in football are improving. Clarke Carlisle (a man I had the great honour of meeting on multiple occasions at university and who helped me come to terms with my own issues2) has done a lot to raise awareness about the issue in the English game, while high-profile players such as Adriano, Gianluigi Buffon, Andres Iniesta, Michael Carrick and Aaron Lennon just to name the through have spoken out and raised more awareness worldwide.3
But we can still do better.
We need to put our ferocious tribalistic fandom to one side and realise at the heart of this sport we passionately love there are people just trying their best.
Social Media has made it much harder in recent years for players to escape the pressure. What used to be confined to newspaper headlines and jeers in the stadium has now been exponentially amplified and can reach them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In a twisted turn of events, the only time they truly have solace from it comes when they are experiencing a different kind of pressure altogether.
Bojan, like many of his peers, just wanted to play football and was luckily gifted with the ability to play it at the highest level. He did not deserve to feel bad for not living up to the unattainable standards that others had set for him.
So when we remember Bojan, we should not recall him as the first to fall when forced to hold up the weight of Messi’s shadow, but as a player who could do it on a cold Tuesday night, whether it be in Stoke, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Mainz, Montreal or Kobe.
This would later be surpassed by Ansu Fati but he still holds the record for the youngest player to reach 100 appearances.
I know there’s a very slim chance you read this Clarke, but I hope you’re doing alright
While researching this I came across a list on Wikipedia and I did find it comforting that as we approached the present day the cases of footballers coming out and talking about their mental health increased as we got closer to the present day.