One year ago Robert Huth (35) ended his career almost unnoticed by the public. For half a year the former defensive edge was already there without a club. In an interview with the “Tagesspiegel”, the native Berliner looks back on his career and settles accounts with football.
In the past, the former international (19 international games), he says, football had determined his life. “I used to get everything into it: before training, before the game… I had to know everything there was to know about football. Now I have the feeling: I just have to get away from football. At the end of my career, I was just fed up. I guess that’s a reaction of defiance.
Huth is settling accounts with the football!
The ex-defense player continues: “At some point it got on my nerves to be reduced to the job of a footballer.” Only now does he realize “how unimportant football actually is. When you are still in the middle of it yourself, you think that this business is so incredibly important. But it’s not.”
His last visit to the stadium was therefore some time ago: last season at a Leicester City game. The club with which he celebrated the greatest triumph of his career. Although Huth had previously won two league titles with Chelsea FC (2005, 2006), the title with the Foxes in 2016 was a sensation: “It was a one-off. From last to first in less than two years. Not bad, eh?”
In 2001, Huth dared to take the step into the Premier League, moving from Union Berlin to FC Chelsea.
His motives? “I was young and stupid,” Huth told the Tagesspiegel. “There wasn’t really that one reason. It was more like, “Why not? In any case, money was not an issue. It wasn’t lucrative at all in the first years. Chelsea FC, that sounded good. They had won the European Cup shortly before, Marcel Desailly played there, the 1998 world champion. I just wanted to give it a try. I think that was also the good thing: that I didn’t have any negative thoughts. Otherwise it might have gone wrong.”
Today he would not take the step like that anymore. “Not without education, not without help,” says Huth, who was nicknamed “The Berlin Wall” in England. Of all the youth players in the big academies, one percent could ultimately live from professional football. “Of course, nobody tells you that.”