France defender Ibrahima Konate on Wednesday said that he battled depression following the deaths of Liverpool teammate Diogo Jota and his father while continuing to fulfil his duties as a professional sportsman.
Portugal forward Jota and his brother, Andre Silva, died in a car crash in July last year, while Konate’s father, Hamady, passed away in January after a long illness.
“There are low points, there’s depression. You can suffer from depression in football too; there’s no need to be ashamed to say so,” Konate told France Inter radio. “It’s true that I’ve often heard players say they were suffering from depression and that fans or people on the outside didn’t understand because they were earning a lot of money, but that’s rubbish and you shouldn’t say that.”
Photo: AFP
The 27-year-old, who earlier this week said that he would leave Liverpool this summer, said Jota’s death had taken a heavy toll on him.
“It devastated me. I didn’t have any interest in anything else at that point,” he said. “You go back to football because you have no choice. We’re employees at a club that pays us every month, so we have duties.
“We had no choice but to go back on the field and play for him and his family — as well as ourselves. There’s no way of getting over it, but you learn to live with it,” he added.
At the same time, Konate was coping with his father’s illness, leaving him unsure how to balance personal grief with professional commitments.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether I should go home and stop playing, because the team needed me too,” he said. “I didn’t know who to talk to about it, so I kept it all to myself.”
He lost his father in January and returned early from compassionate leave to help Liverpool through an injury crisis, but said that he did not feel fully recovered.
“There was never a moment when I felt like I was on the mend. All of these tragic events happened so quickly and as soon as I felt like I was getting my head above water, something else happened,” he said.
Konate, who has 27 caps for France, is a part of Didier Deschamps’ 26-man squad for the FIFA World Cup.
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