The night of the Boateng: brothers … but enemies

A modest Ghanaian ex-footballer named Prince came to Germany to play for the regional category Reinickerdorfer. It was the 80s. From his relationship with Christina, his first wife, his son Kevin Prince was born in 1987. A year later, as a result of his relationship with another woman, Nina, the second of his offspring, Jerome, was born. No one could imagine then that both, Kevin Prince and Jerome, would be protagonists two decades later in Johannesburg and with football as a background.

But it was so. At Soccer City Stadium the two brothers measured each other with two different teams: Kevin Prince with Ghana, his father's country; Jerome with Germany, his mother's. Such an incredible circumstance that the spotlights focused on them before, during and after their confrontation. The situation was tense, with a very cold greeting in the preamble to the crash, and everything has an explanation. Despite sharing a father, the two brothers have never had a good relationship.

In addition to the family problems, there were details that further deteriorated the relationship between the two. One had to do with the injury of Michael Ballack, the great emblem of German football in the first decade of this century. In a match of the English Cup, just a few months before the World Cup in South Africa, Kevin Prince seriously injured the captain of the German team and left him out of the World Cup. That Portsmouth-Chelsea was followed by Jerome, who never understood the violence of the entrance and so he told his brother. Kevin Prince did not like his own brother publicly reproaching him for it, which immediately made him a number one public enemy in Germany.

Different choice

Before that, he had already decided to play with Ghana and not with Germany, pulling much more for his father's roots than for his mother's. Quite the opposite of Jerome, who chose Germany considering it the country that had given him everything in his career, in addition to the fact that both he and his mother were born there.

The game ended 1-0 for Germany with a lone goal from Özil. Before the end, Jerome was perhaps substituted to avoid another photo at the end of the crash as the one from the beginning. A historical photo. An ungrateful greeting between brothers …