https://theathletic.com/2886695/2021/10 ... o-benitez/
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Raphael Honigstein Oct 14, 2021 37
A sunny October, a green-velvet-clad hotel restaurant just off the Champs-Elysees and sharply-dressed clientele who look as if they’ve just wandered in from the “Call My Agent” set… it’s a scene that couldn’t be more Parisian if it tried.
But Demba Ba is somewhere else for a moment, a million and 558 miles away, right back at the happiest place he’s ever been to as a footballer.
“When you go to St James’ Park, through the tunnel and you turn around to see that massive stand, and you hear that noise for the first time, it gives you the chills,” he says, gazing into his Tyneside memories. “It’s that feeling that I miss most since retiring from football last month. I have experienced other joyful times, especially at Besiktas, but the connection with the Newcastle supporters was so deep, the bond inside the dressing room so strong, and I scored many goals… it was the perfect combination. I have so much love and respect for them, and they have love and respect for me, until today. They’re grateful for what I did for them, and so I am, for what they did for me.”
When Ba agreed to look back at an eventful 16-year career at those two sides as well as at Hoffenheim, Chelsea, Istanbul Basaksehir and Shanghai Shenhua a few weeks ago, neither he nor The Athletic had any idea that Newcastle would find themselves the most talked-about club in Europe in due course. As a Paris native, the former Senegal international knows all about the transformative power of money from the Gulf.
“I was lucky because I was already a fan of Paris Saint-Germain before their takeover, and I’ve been a fan of Newcastle since signing for them in 2011. No one can call me a glory hunter,” he laughs. “I’ve struggled all those years. Now I’m buzzing. I’m buzzing twice, actually. First, because of the takeover and secondly, when I read that they’re thinking of Ralf (Rangnick as a sporting director), I thought: ‘Oh, Newcastle are about to become something special.’ When you see how he built Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig from scratch, taking on Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, spending money in a way that creates value and leaving behind structures that will sustain the success for years to come, it’s crazy to think what he could do, starting from a much higher base at Newcastle.”
Ba is, admittedly, unashamedly biased when it comes to his former Hoffenheim coach. Rangnick recently set up his own consulting company, working with clubs, players, coaches as well as officials, and Ba has signed up to be his first mentee. “I shadow him, learning how he operates,” he says. “We also do weekly lessons on Zoom. At the same time, I try to help him in terms of dealing with players, because I’m only 36, and closer to that generation.” Ba has also set up his own firm providing psychological training for professional players, the idea being that all 25 members of a squad will be supported individually, with the help of AI.
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Ba celebrates scoring for Hoffenheim against Bayern Munich (Photo: Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images)
But an even bigger aim is to become a sporting director one day. “My dedication to that job will be the same as a player because when I do something it has to be excellent. This is my definition of enjoyment. I want to impact the individual and collective performance of players and clubs in all areas. For the last few months, I’ve been defining my vision. I believe it all starts with a vision that needs to be implemented. Once you have a vision, you can hire the right coaches and make the right signings. That way, you don’t have to change 20 players every time you hire a new coach.”
Rangnick gave Ba his big break as a player, signing him from Belgian side Mouscron in 2007, even though the Hoffenheim scout who’d been dispatched from Germany to watch him in action had come back with a devastating verdict. “He told me years later that he’d written down, ‘Good movement, good pace, good technique’ and so on, but then ripped up his report when he heard a big bang on the pitch.” Ba had broken his shin in that challenge, shortly before the end of the game.
“I knew that I had a stress fracture before but I was so hungry to succeed that I didn’t think I could afford to sit out matches,” he says. “I kept playing, that’s why it happened.” It took him eight months to get going again. Luckily, Hoffenheim came back in, enabling him to make “real money” for the first time in his career, aged 22. “My first contract at Rouen (in the French fourth division) had been for €1,063 net, per month, and I had to borrow €300 in the first month for food,” he recalls of a difficult start to professional football that included many failed trials in France and elsewhere (Watford, Barnsley, Swansea, Gillingham) as a teenager.
“Ninety per cent of the time, the feedback I got was, ‘We have the same quality of player in the squad already.’ They didn’t realise that I was training twice a week with amateurs at the time, not six times a week with professionals. I was told, ‘You’re not good enough’, but I didn’t want to hear that that, to me it was, ‘You’re not good enough for me’. I just refused to give up. I remember writing letters to the top 40 clubs in France, by hand, asking for a trial. I never thought about rejection, only the next chance.”
At Hoffenheim, Ba was part of a superb front three, comprising of himself, Bosnia & Herzegovina international Vedad Ibisevic and Chinedu Obasi from Nigeria. Their goals won promotion to the Bundesliga for the village club and then propelled them to the top of the league at Christmas. They lost 2-1 at Bayern Munich in December 2008, a game that set new standards for pace and intensity in the league. A bad injury to Ibisevic meant that they couldn’t sustain the challenge in the second half of the season, but they still finished a respectable seventh.
Rangnick resigned on January 2, 2011, over disagreements with Hoffenheim benefactor Dietmar Hopp about transfer policy. Ba was out of the door the next day, albeit without the club’s blessing. He absconded to London to force a move to West Ham. “The club had promised me that I could leave if an offer came in but went back on their word,” he says. “Everyone was killing me in Germany. (Bayern Munich general manager) Uli Hoeness said, ‘No club should ever sign him’.”
West Ham were unperturbed, offering £6 million for his services. David Moyes, then at Everton, also made an approach but Ba had given Avram Grant his word that he would go to Upton Park.
Hoffenheim, however, wanted more money. Stoke City were suddenly in pole position with an offer of £12 million. “I didn’t want to go and play Tony Pulis football,” Ba says with a smile. “But Hoffenheim said it’s either that or me coming back to play for them.”
Yet there was another twist. Stoke’s medical discovered some fluid in Ba’s knee. The deal fell through. West Ham returned with a much lower bid, with Ba’s contract being contingent on his ability to play.
The club, deep in a relegation fight at the time, were so worried news of the transfer might break before all boxes were ticked that they asked Ba to hide in the boot of a friend’s car on his way to the training ground. “They said they didn’t want journalists to find out, so I obeyed,” he laughs. “It wasn’t the biggest boot. It was like ‘boom, boom’, I’m hitting my head at every corner.”
Ba scored seven goals in 12 matches but it wasn’t enough to save West Ham from the drop. “It was a good dressing room but ultimately we didn’t have the necessary quality,” he says.
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Ba celebrates a goal for West Ham against Liverpool at Upton Park (Photo: Stephen Pond – PA Images via Getty Images)
Relegation meant that he was out of contract at the end of the season. Newcastle only offered half of West Ham’s wages as a guaranteed salary, the other 50 per cent being on a pay-per-play basis. “I raised my hand and said: ‘Why does everybody think I’m finished?’,” Ba recalls. “But I thought of St James’ and I said: ‘OK’. Moving there turned out to be one of three best moments of my life for me, in football and outside football.” Why? “Because it all clicked. We had this big French-speaking group — Yohan Cabaye, Cheick Tiote, Papiss Cisse, Gabriel Obertan and a few others — and the mentality was top. We spent a lot of time with each other off the pitch and we all really got on with the English boys as well. That bond we had brought that synergy on the pitch. That was the key to that team. We felt unbeatable at times.”
Newcastle finished fifth that season. Ba left as a crowd favourite in January 2013, having scored 29 league goals in 54 games.
Next up, Chelsea, during a civil war where the very much unloved Rafa Benitez had taken over from Champions League winner Roberto Di Matteo halfway through the season. “It was weird because Rafa was getting booed by the Chelsea supporters at every game,” Ba says. “To see your manager getting booed all the time is crazy. But he stayed focused. He managed to get us into the Champions League, we finished third, he won the Europa League, and we went to two semi-finals in the domestic cups. So he must have been good.”
Ba also credits strong personalities in the dressing room for stable performance during this tumultuous time. “Big players will take responsibility on the pitch but also off it when things don’t go the right way. I remember when we lost 2-1 to Manchester City in the FA Cup semi-final, Rafa was criticising our lack of intensity after the game. But John Terry went: ‘No gaffer, the problem is that our training lacks intensity.’ Rafa’s training was mostly tactical, but the players wanted it to be more full-blooded. So the two of them had a frank exchange of views in front of everyone, and the next day, the whole team got together to talk things through as well. We didn’t lose any more games after that.”
The season ended with Chelsea winning the Europa League, Ba’s first major trophy, but it didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t been eligible in the competition after playing for Newcastle in the group stage.
“They give you the medal, and I don’t want it, because I hadn’t played. It took me a while, six years perhaps, to consider myself a winner. I figured out that being part of the group is more than just playing. If I hadn’t played in the league, maybe Fernando would have been too tired to perform as well as he did in the Europa League. Teams who win have more than 11 players doing their bit. Even training well, making sure the starters are not too comfortable and stay on top of their game, makes a big difference.”
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Ba loved his time at Newcastle when the club finished fifth in the league (Photo: Ian Horrocks/Newcastle United via Getty Images)
More drastic change was to follow, as Benitez’s rather technocratic style was replaced by the abrasiveness of second-spell Jose Mourinho. “A real character,” Ba says. “He would use any means to win. Any means.” Including messing with people’s heads? “That comes first!” he laughs. “He uses a lot of psychology on players, to see who are the strong characters. One day he told us: ‘If you have a confidence problem, that’s your problem.’ I think the players he originally had — Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Michael Ballack — were tough guys. They responded well to that kind of management. The younger generation need more encouragement and support. Their self-esteem isn’t built up as much. They’re affected by social media and other things, they might not respond to pressure that well.
“But Jose is the kind of guy who throws a bomb into the dressing room and sees who comes out alive. At Chelsea, it was like, which mask is he going to put on today? Will he be the happy one, the sarcastic one, the sad one, the angry one? At a point, you don’t mind anymore because you know, he’s just playing with you. He plays the game very well.
“Is he really like this? I don’t know. I hope that in my process of learning about the game, I’ll have an opportunity to meet him again. Did he give me a hard time? No, he didn’t. He didn’t give me anything, because I never played!”
Ba only started three games in all competitions between August and February that season as Mourinho alternated between Torres and Samuel Eto’o in the centre-forward spot. “I had no reason to fight with him — so I made one up,” Ba says. The chance “to have it out with the boss,” as he says, presented itself when Chelsea were due to play West Brom.
After training that Friday, Ba’s name was not included in the match-day squad. But then the list was taken down again, and word got around that Torres had been injured. “So I’m thinking: ‘My name will be on the list’. I went out of the shower so quickly and dressed as quickly as I could and left the training facilities. I’m on my way home, and the team manager calls me: ‘Demba, where are you?’
“I say: ‘On my way home, I’m not in the squad.’ ‘No, no, you have to come back, Fernando is injured.’
“‘When I left, my name was not on the list, I’ve planned my day, I need to pick up my daughter, and go to mosque…’
“‘No, you have to be here in 30 minutes.’
“Half an hour later, he calls again. ‘Where are you?’
“I say: ‘I’ll come, but I have to speak to the boss.’ So we talked, and we argued, outside his office. Jose said, ‘You’re not performing. A player who’s not performing doesn’t play.’ But I had prepared for this. I showed him the stats: I had played half the minutes of the other two but scored more than half of their goals in that time. Jose said, ‘OK, but it’s my decision. Now let’s go.’
“I replied, ‘It’s your decision, but it’s my decision to go home.’ I went down, past the bus, jumped in the car and drove off. That was me then (laughs). I was nuts. I missed the game. But you know what? From that moment on, our relationship really picked up! He suddenly played me a lot more. On the day of the Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid, he asked me to stay for another season. But I was impatient. I wanted to play regularly.”
One of the three games he did start before the end of the season was a certain away fixture at Anfield. “I remember Jose saying: ‘They think we’re a Mickey Mouse team! But we will show them!” And we went out fighting. I was up against Martin Skrtel and Mama (Mamadou Sakho) and I played an unbelievable game. I felt like I did at Newcastle. This was the game that changed Jose’s view of me, I think.”
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Ba wheels away after scoring at Anfield in 2014 following Steven Gerrard’s slip (Photo: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Ba’s goal shortly before half-time, after Steven Gerrard’s slip, ushered in a 2-0 win that cost Liverpool the title. “I only realised how big a deal that was a couple of years later, when people still talked about it. They still talk about it! It was traumatic for them. But we didn’t enjoy the fact that we killed their dream, we simply enjoyed winning.”
Does he feel in any way sorry about inflicting that much pain on the Liverpool faithful, and on Gerrard, especially? “No, not really. Because that’s the game. You make errors and others take advantage. What Steven Gerrard has done for the world of football is tremendous. But this is life, unfortunately. Not all stories can end in fairytales.”
Ba’s own story continued at Besiktas, with whom he won the Super Lig in 2016-17, and well-paid spells in Shanghai. Football-wise, Turkey was “fireworks, with crowds going wild and tactics being less important,” whereas, in China, players felt obliged to implement a manager’s ideas to the letter, “a bit like robots”. Exposure to new cultures taught him the importance of empathy. “You have to look at people for who they are and come from to understand them, instead of judging them,” he says.
As a professional footballer, he was largely shielded from racism in its crassest form but he still encountered a fair amount of “BS,” as he says, in terms of thoughtless prejudice. “I remember a team-mate looking at a picture of my son and saying ‘He’s mixed (race), right?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Great! Perfect mix between power and intelligence!’
“I put him on the spot, by asking him if that made me the dumb one in his equation.”
Another colleague once told Ba that he shouldn’t complain about the bad food in a team hotel because he was African. “And I looked at him. Why? Because some people struggle for food in Africa? How many struggle in Europe or the US, the richest country in the world? I try to educate and not let things like that slide. Because it’s too easy to just say, ‘OK, they don’t know any better’.”
Ba’s determination to challenge casual racism saw him at the centre of one of European football’s biggest stories last season. He confronted Romanian fourth official Sebastian Coltescu over referring to Basaksehir assistant coach Pierre Webo as “the black one” during the Champions League game with PSG last December. Both sets of players decided to walk off in protest and the game was replayed the next day (PSG won 5-1). A subsequent investigation by UEFA ruled that Coltescu had behaved “inappropriately” but not in a racist way.
“I asked a question which was never answered,” Ba says. “Is it OK to call somebody by their skin colour? Can you imagine an English referee referring to Son Heung-min as the ‘yellow one’? It’s unthinkable. But somehow, when it comes to the black community, it seems to have less of an impact, because subconsciously, that’s how people think. They see a colour, not the human being. But when you have millions of people watching, and you wear a badge that says ‘Equality’ and ‘Respect’, there must be a million better ways to refer to a person.”
As his defence, Coltescu later told Ba that he had a lot of “gipsies” as friends. “I realised then that he was totally lost and didn’t know what the problem was,” Ba continues. “But he did say that he was sorry and that he understood what he had triggered in me, what it meant. So I left it at that.”
Coltescu and assistant referee Octavian Sovre were cleared of discriminatory behaviour following an investigation from UEFA’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body but were both suspended for “inappropriate behaviour” until the end of the season.
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Ba’s determination to challenge casual racism saw him at the centre of one of European football’s biggest stories last season, in a match between Basaksehir and PSG (Photo: Xavier Laine/Getty Images)
As the players were deliberating whether they should continue the game, Ba told them they should do what felt right for them. “Mehmet Topal, a big figure in Turkey, said, ‘Demba, if you don’t want to play, we all won’t play. We are all together in this. So we told the president and went back to the hotel.”
Three hours into the conversation, it’s time for Ba to go pick up his daughters from school. We continue to talk on the street but it’s not that easy, as he’s twice being stopped by tourists asking for a selfie. After posing for them happily, he is suddenly in pensive mood once more. “This might shock a few people when they read this but I never had the biggest confidence in my footballing abilities,” he says. “I started some games doubting myself: ‘Am I technically good enough?’. I think that came from growing up outside the academy system and becoming a pro quite late. I often asked myself: ‘Am I legit?’. I made up for that lack of confidence with courage, but courage has its limits.
“With more confidence, I could have gone a lot further. I believe I’ll be a better sporting director than a player — because I have more faith in my cognitive, psychological and emotional abilities than I ever had in my football qualities. And I had a tremendous career. So can you imagine what’s coming?”
Something tells me that we’ll find out soon.
A sunny October, a green-velvet-clad hotel restaurant just off the Champs-Elysees and sharply-dressed clientele who look as if they’ve just wandered in from the “Call My Agent” set… it’s a scene that couldn’t be more Parisian if it tried.
But Demba Ba is somewhere else for a moment, a million and 558 miles away, right back at the happiest place he’s ever been to as a footballer.
“When you go to St James’ Park, through the tunnel and you turn around to see that massive stand, and you hear that noise for the first time, it gives you the chills,” he says, gazing into his Tyneside memories. “It’s that feeling that I miss most since retiring from football last month. I have experienced other joyful times, especially at Besiktas, but the connection with the Newcastle supporters was so deep, the bond inside the dressing room so strong, and I scored many goals… it was the perfect combination. I have so much love and respect for them, and they have love and respect for me, until today. They’re grateful for what I did for them, and so I am, for what they did for me.”
When Ba agreed to look back at an eventful 16-year career at those two sides as well as at Hoffenheim, Chelsea, Istanbul Basaksehir and Shanghai Shenhua a few weeks ago, neither he nor The Athletic had any idea that Newcastle would find themselves the most talked-about club in Europe in due course. As a Paris native, the former Senegal international knows all about the transformative power of money from the Gulf.
“I was lucky because I was already a fan of Paris Saint-Germain before their takeover, and I’ve been a fan of Newcastle since signing for them in 2011. No one can call me a glory hunter,” he laughs. “I’ve struggled all those years. Now I’m buzzing. I’m buzzing twice, actually. First, because of the takeover and secondly, when I read that they’re thinking of Ralf (Rangnick as a sporting director), I thought: ‘Oh, Newcastle are about to become something special.’ When you see how he built Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig from scratch, taking on Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, spending money in a way that creates value and leaving behind structures that will sustain the success for years to come, it’s crazy to think what he could do, starting from a much higher base at Newcastle.”
Ba is, admittedly, unashamedly biased when it comes to his former Hoffenheim coach. Rangnick recently set up his own consulting company, working with clubs, players, coaches as well as officials, and Ba has signed up to be his first mentee. “I shadow him, learning how he operates,” he says. “We also do weekly lessons on Zoom. At the same time, I try to help him in terms of dealing with players, because I’m only 36, and closer to that generation.” Ba has also set up his own firm providing psychological training for professional players, the idea being that all 25 members of a squad will be supported individually, with the help of AI.
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Ba celebrates scoring for Hoffenheim against Bayern Munich (Photo: Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images)
But an even bigger aim is to become a sporting director one day. “My dedication to that job will be the same as a player because when I do something it has to be excellent. This is my definition of enjoyment. I want to impact the individual and collective performance of players and clubs in all areas. For the last few months, I’ve been defining my vision. I believe it all starts with a vision that needs to be implemented. Once you have a vision, you can hire the right coaches and make the right signings. That way, you don’t have to change 20 players every time you hire a new coach.”
Rangnick gave Ba his big break as a player, signing him from Belgian side Mouscron in 2007, even though the Hoffenheim scout who’d been dispatched from Germany to watch him in action had come back with a devastating verdict. “He told me years later that he’d written down, ‘Good movement, good pace, good technique’ and so on, but then ripped up his report when he heard a big bang on the pitch.” Ba had broken his shin in that challenge, shortly before the end of the game.
“I knew that I had a stress fracture before but I was so hungry to succeed that I didn’t think I could afford to sit out matches,” he says. “I kept playing, that’s why it happened.” It took him eight months to get going again. Luckily, Hoffenheim came back in, enabling him to make “real money” for the first time in his career, aged 22. “My first contract at Rouen (in the French fourth division) had been for €1,063 net, per month, and I had to borrow €300 in the first month for food,” he recalls of a difficult start to professional football that included many failed trials in France and elsewhere (Watford, Barnsley, Swansea, Gillingham) as a teenager.
“Ninety per cent of the time, the feedback I got was, ‘We have the same quality of player in the squad already.’ They didn’t realise that I was training twice a week with amateurs at the time, not six times a week with professionals. I was told, ‘You’re not good enough’, but I didn’t want to hear that that, to me it was, ‘You’re not good enough for me’. I just refused to give up. I remember writing letters to the top 40 clubs in France, by hand, asking for a trial. I never thought about rejection, only the next chance.”
At Hoffenheim, Ba was part of a superb front three, comprising of himself, Bosnia & Herzegovina international Vedad Ibisevic and Chinedu Obasi from Nigeria. Their goals won promotion to the Bundesliga for the village club and then propelled them to the top of the league at Christmas. They lost 2-1 at Bayern Munich in December 2008, a game that set new standards for pace and intensity in the league. A bad injury to Ibisevic meant that they couldn’t sustain the challenge in the second half of the season, but they still finished a respectable seventh.
Rangnick resigned on January 2, 2011, over disagreements with Hoffenheim benefactor Dietmar Hopp about transfer policy. Ba was out of the door the next day, albeit without the club’s blessing. He absconded to London to force a move to West Ham. “The club had promised me that I could leave if an offer came in but went back on their word,” he says. “Everyone was killing me in Germany. (Bayern Munich general manager) Uli Hoeness said, ‘No club should ever sign him’.”
West Ham were unperturbed, offering £6 million for his services. David Moyes, then at Everton, also made an approach but Ba had given Avram Grant his word that he would go to Upton Park.
Hoffenheim, however, wanted more money. Stoke City were suddenly in pole position with an offer of £12 million. “I didn’t want to go and play Tony Pulis football,” Ba says with a smile. “But Hoffenheim said it’s either that or me coming back to play for them.”
Yet there was another twist. Stoke’s medical discovered some fluid in Ba’s knee. The deal fell through. West Ham returned with a much lower bid, with Ba’s contract being contingent on his ability to play.
The club, deep in a relegation fight at the time, were so worried news of the transfer might break before all boxes were ticked that they asked Ba to hide in the boot of a friend’s car on his way to the training ground. “They said they didn’t want journalists to find out, so I obeyed,” he laughs. “It wasn’t the biggest boot. It was like ‘boom, boom’, I’m hitting my head at every corner.”
Ba scored seven goals in 12 matches but it wasn’t enough to save West Ham from the drop. “It was a good dressing room but ultimately we didn’t have the necessary quality,” he says.
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Ba celebrates a goal for West Ham against Liverpool at Upton Park (Photo: Stephen Pond – PA Images via Getty Images)
Relegation meant that he was out of contract at the end of the season. Newcastle only offered half of West Ham’s wages as a guaranteed salary, the other 50 per cent being on a pay-per-play basis. “I raised my hand and said: ‘Why does everybody think I’m finished?’,” Ba recalls. “But I thought of St James’ and I said: ‘OK’. Moving there turned out to be one of three best moments of my life for me, in football and outside football.” Why? “Because it all clicked. We had this big French-speaking group — Yohan Cabaye, Cheick Tiote, Papiss Cisse, Gabriel Obertan and a few others — and the mentality was top. We spent a lot of time with each other off the pitch and we all really got on with the English boys as well. That bond we had brought that synergy on the pitch. That was the key to that team. We felt unbeatable at times.”
Newcastle finished fifth that season. Ba left as a crowd favourite in January 2013, having scored 29 league goals in 54 games.
Next up, Chelsea, during a civil war where the very much unloved Rafa Benitez had taken over from Champions League winner Roberto Di Matteo halfway through the season. “It was weird because Rafa was getting booed by the Chelsea supporters at every game,” Ba says. “To see your manager getting booed all the time is crazy. But he stayed focused. He managed to get us into the Champions League, we finished third, he won the Europa League, and we went to two semi-finals in the domestic cups. So he must have been good.”
Ba also credits strong personalities in the dressing room for stable performance during this tumultuous time. “Big players will take responsibility on the pitch but also off it when things don’t go the right way. I remember when we lost 2-1 to Manchester City in the FA Cup semi-final, Rafa was criticising our lack of intensity after the game. But John Terry went: ‘No gaffer, the problem is that our training lacks intensity.’ Rafa’s training was mostly tactical, but the players wanted it to be more full-blooded. So the two of them had a frank exchange of views in front of everyone, and the next day, the whole team got together to talk things through as well. We didn’t lose any more games after that.”
The season ended with Chelsea winning the Europa League, Ba’s first major trophy, but it didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t been eligible in the competition after playing for Newcastle in the group stage.
“They give you the medal, and I don’t want it, because I hadn’t played. It took me a while, six years perhaps, to consider myself a winner. I figured out that being part of the group is more than just playing. If I hadn’t played in the league, maybe Fernando would have been too tired to perform as well as he did in the Europa League. Teams who win have more than 11 players doing their bit. Even training well, making sure the starters are not too comfortable and stay on top of their game, makes a big difference.”
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Ba loved his time at Newcastle when the club finished fifth in the league (Photo: Ian Horrocks/Newcastle United via Getty Images)
More drastic change was to follow, as Benitez’s rather technocratic style was replaced by the abrasiveness of second-spell Jose Mourinho. “A real character,” Ba says. “He would use any means to win. Any means.” Including messing with people’s heads? “That comes first!” he laughs. “He uses a lot of psychology on players, to see who are the strong characters. One day he told us: ‘If you have a confidence problem, that’s your problem.’ I think the players he originally had — Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Michael Ballack — were tough guys. They responded well to that kind of management. The younger generation need more encouragement and support. Their self-esteem isn’t built up as much. They’re affected by social media and other things, they might not respond to pressure that well.
“But Jose is the kind of guy who throws a bomb into the dressing room and sees who comes out alive. At Chelsea, it was like, which mask is he going to put on today? Will he be the happy one, the sarcastic one, the sad one, the angry one? At a point, you don’t mind anymore because you know, he’s just playing with you. He plays the game very well.
“Is he really like this? I don’t know. I hope that in my process of learning about the game, I’ll have an opportunity to meet him again. Did he give me a hard time? No, he didn’t. He didn’t give me anything, because I never played!”
Ba only started three games in all competitions between August and February that season as Mourinho alternated between Torres and Samuel Eto’o in the centre-forward spot. “I had no reason to fight with him — so I made one up,” Ba says. The chance “to have it out with the boss,” as he says, presented itself when Chelsea were due to play West Brom.
After training that Friday, Ba’s name was not included in the match-day squad. But then the list was taken down again, and word got around that Torres had been injured. “So I’m thinking: ‘My name will be on the list’. I went out of the shower so quickly and dressed as quickly as I could and left the training facilities. I’m on my way home, and the team manager calls me: ‘Demba, where are you?’
“I say: ‘On my way home, I’m not in the squad.’ ‘No, no, you have to come back, Fernando is injured.’
“‘When I left, my name was not on the list, I’ve planned my day, I need to pick up my daughter, and go to mosque…’
“‘No, you have to be here in 30 minutes.’
“Half an hour later, he calls again. ‘Where are you?’
“I say: ‘I’ll come, but I have to speak to the boss.’ So we talked, and we argued, outside his office. Jose said, ‘You’re not performing. A player who’s not performing doesn’t play.’ But I had prepared for this. I showed him the stats: I had played half the minutes of the other two but scored more than half of their goals in that time. Jose said, ‘OK, but it’s my decision. Now let’s go.’
“I replied, ‘It’s your decision, but it’s my decision to go home.’ I went down, past the bus, jumped in the car and drove off. That was me then (laughs). I was nuts. I missed the game. But you know what? From that moment on, our relationship really picked up! He suddenly played me a lot more. On the day of the Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid, he asked me to stay for another season. But I was impatient. I wanted to play regularly.”
One of the three games he did start before the end of the season was a certain away fixture at Anfield. “I remember Jose saying: ‘They think we’re a Mickey Mouse team! But we will show them!” And we went out fighting. I was up against Martin Skrtel and Mama (Mamadou Sakho) and I played an unbelievable game. I felt like I did at Newcastle. This was the game that changed Jose’s view of me, I think.”
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Ba wheels away after scoring at Anfield in 2014 following Steven Gerrard’s slip (Photo: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Ba’s goal shortly before half-time, after Steven Gerrard’s slip, ushered in a 2-0 win that cost Liverpool the title. “I only realised how big a deal that was a couple of years later, when people still talked about it. They still talk about it! It was traumatic for them. But we didn’t enjoy the fact that we killed their dream, we simply enjoyed winning.”
Does he feel in any way sorry about inflicting that much pain on the Liverpool faithful, and on Gerrard, especially? “No, not really. Because that’s the game. You make errors and others take advantage. What Steven Gerrard has done for the world of football is tremendous. But this is life, unfortunately. Not all stories can end in fairytales.”
Ba’s own story continued at Besiktas, with whom he won the Super Lig in 2016-17, and well-paid spells in Shanghai. Football-wise, Turkey was “fireworks, with crowds going wild and tactics being less important,” whereas, in China, players felt obliged to implement a manager’s ideas to the letter, “a bit like robots”. Exposure to new cultures taught him the importance of empathy. “You have to look at people for who they are and come from to understand them, instead of judging them,” he says.
As a professional footballer, he was largely shielded from racism in its crassest form but he still encountered a fair amount of “BS,” as he says, in terms of thoughtless prejudice. “I remember a team-mate looking at a picture of my son and saying ‘He’s mixed (race), right?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Great! Perfect mix between power and intelligence!’
“I put him on the spot, by asking him if that made me the dumb one in his equation.”
Another colleague once told Ba that he shouldn’t complain about the bad food in a team hotel because he was African. “And I looked at him. Why? Because some people struggle for food in Africa? How many struggle in Europe or the US, the richest country in the world? I try to educate and not let things like that slide. Because it’s too easy to just say, ‘OK, they don’t know any better’.”
Ba’s determination to challenge casual racism saw him at the centre of one of European football’s biggest stories last season. He confronted Romanian fourth official Sebastian Coltescu over referring to Basaksehir assistant coach Pierre Webo as “the black one” during the Champions League game with PSG last December. Both sets of players decided to walk off in protest and the game was replayed the next day (PSG won 5-1). A subsequent investigation by UEFA ruled that Coltescu had behaved “inappropriately” but not in a racist way.
“I asked a question which was never answered,” Ba says. “Is it OK to call somebody by their skin colour? Can you imagine an English referee referring to Son Heung-min as the ‘yellow one’? It’s unthinkable. But somehow, when it comes to the black community, it seems to have less of an impact, because subconsciously, that’s how people think. They see a colour, not the human being. But when you have millions of people watching, and you wear a badge that says ‘Equality’ and ‘Respect’, there must be a million better ways to refer to a person.”
As his defence, Coltescu later told Ba that he had a lot of “gipsies” as friends. “I realised then that he was totally lost and didn’t know what the problem was,” Ba continues. “But he did say that he was sorry and that he understood what he had triggered in me, what it meant. So I left it at that.”
Coltescu and assistant referee Octavian Sovre were cleared of discriminatory behaviour following an investigation from UEFA’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body but were both suspended for “inappropriate behaviour” until the end of the season.
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Ba’s determination to challenge casual racism saw him at the centre of one of European football’s biggest stories last season, in a match between Basaksehir and PSG (Photo: Xavier Laine/Getty Images)
As the players were deliberating whether they should continue the game, Ba told them they should do what felt right for them. “Mehmet Topal, a big figure in Turkey, said, ‘Demba, if you don’t want to play, we all won’t play. We are all together in this. So we told the president and went back to the hotel.”
Three hours into the conversation, it’s time for Ba to go pick up his daughters from school. We continue to talk on the street but it’s not that easy, as he’s twice being stopped by tourists asking for a selfie. After posing for them happily, he is suddenly in pensive mood once more. “This might shock a few people when they read this but I never had the biggest confidence in my footballing abilities,” he says. “I started some games doubting myself: ‘Am I technically good enough?’. I think that came from growing up outside the academy system and becoming a pro quite late. I often asked myself: ‘Am I legit?’. I made up for that lack of confidence with courage, but courage has its limits.
“With more confidence, I could have gone a lot further. I believe I’ll be a better sporting director than a player — because I have more faith in my cognitive, psychological and emotional abilities than I ever had in my football qualities. And I had a tremendous career. So can you imagine what’s coming?”
Something tells me that we’ll find out soon.
