Konate’s Remarks About Grief, Depression Are An Indictment Of The Club
Ibrahima Konate recently departed Liverpool after both his team and the club were unable to come to terms on a new contract and his current contract was allowed to expire. Konate is now a free agent, most likely headed to Real Madrid instead. That in and of itself is a blemish on the club, because Konate is 27 and a talent we cannot afford to lose, quite honestly, but here we are.
Since his departure and the announcement of it, Konate has joined the French national team ahead of the World Cup and left for North America, where they’ll be based near Boston for the duration of the tournament. Konate recently appeared on a French radio show and spoke quite frankly about his mental health struggles this season following the death of not only Diogo Jota but the illness and eventual death of his father Hamady. It could be argued both of which likely led to his dip in form for Liverpool.
“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 said.
“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 no, that’s rubbish and you shouldn’t say that.
“Depression is personal; it’s deep inside you. When you’re depressed, it starts in the heart, goes up to the brain and takes over your whole body. For me, that’s what’s hard, and we need to talk about it.”
Not only was Diogo a close teammate and friend of Konate’s, they were also neighbors in Merseyside. Andy Robertson recently said that the devastation was so complete throughout the club that no one wanted to do anything – players didn’t want to train, physios didn’t want to provide treatment – echoing the remarks of Konate that the grief was not just difficult to deal with. It was crushing.
“It devastated me. I didn’t have any interest in anything else at that point,” Konate added.
“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.”
On top of dealing with all of this, Konate’s father was carrying the knowledge that his father was gravely ill, and grappling with the decision whether to take a leave from the club to be with his family or, as he said, uphold his duties and stay to support the club. There was no question that the club needed him either, after losing young center-back Giovanni Leoni to injury and Joe Gomez falling in and out of favor with Arne Slot, and so Konate did the best he could and stayed, even cutting his own compassionate leave short when his father eventually passed to come back to the starting XI.
“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,” the defender explained.
“I didn’t know who to talk to about it, so I kept it all to myself. And this is the advice I’d give to everyone: when you’re feeling down or something’s going on, you need to talk to those around you. It can help you and do you good. I didn’t talk about it and kept it to myself.
“The doctors then told us he didn’t have long to live, but we didn’t know it would happen so quickly.”
Konate’s father passed in January and the defender only took two weeks off before returning ahead of the match against Newcastle at the end of the month to help Liverpool out of the situation they found themselves in. Placing that type of a burden on someone already grieving, making them feel like returning to work early is the only thing they can do because of the management’s inability to work around such an absence, is a glaring oversight honestly. If it happened at any other job, it would look poorly on any upper management positions, and would frankly reveal a quite toxic working environment. Konate himself admitted to never feeling “above water” at all this season due to all the emotional and mental turmoil.
“There was never a moment when I felt like I was on the mend,” Konate finally said.
“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.
“I had the support of all these fans, who are exceptional at Liverpool, my team-mates and especially my family but I also had to learn how to get back on my feet on my own because the team needed me more than ever and I know that my father would have wanted me to get back.”
Frankly, these comments are, at the very least, disheartening to hear as a fan of a club that has long been mindful of mental health challenges and the effects of loss. The club hired a psychologist just to figure out why Luis Suarez kept biting people, for crying out loud.
The very least a club should be doing is taking care of its players. It is one of the only real obligations a club has to its players – to care for them in the best way available so they are able to perform at their best. Players come to a club like Liverpool because of that distinct part of the culture – not just the fans, but that it is backed up by a workplace that allows players to thrive under its care. It was a hallmark of Klopp’s leadership, that everyone felt cared for in a way that allowed them to win. It is 2026, football is increasingly more modern, and to neglect a player’s mental health is to neglect an incredibly important aspect of the game, and their humanity.
For someone like Konate, one of our starting defenders and the subject of so much criticism this season, to say that he was so depressed and didn’t feel like he had anyone to talk to about it, is an incredible indictment of the way the club was handling things behind the scenes. It is not a new development either, unfortunately, as former player David Fairclough has spoken a number of times about how he felt let down by Bob Paisley when the manager wouldn’t allow him proper time to grieve the death of his father in 1977. When I last wrote about grief, and how it may be affecting the team, there was indeed a sports performance psychologist contracted with the club, as a consultant. Why didn’t Konate feel like he could speak to him about what he was struggling with?
What was happening behind the scenes, in the training rooms, gyms, and locker rooms, that made him feel so alone?
We can talk ad nauseam of the men’s mental health crisis throughout the world, that the expectations of masculinity come with stoicism, dealing with your emotional turmoils in hiding, and that likely fed into Konate’s own struggles with expressing his sadness. Even someone as clearly joyful and emotional like Konate, to feel like he had to hide everything away just to function, is a heartbreaking thing to find out.
Regardless of any of these factors, it’s clear that there was something missing in the club this season, and that some players like Konate needed a lot more than physical training time to perform. Will any of that change with our new sensitive and well read Basque coach rather than a brusque Dutchman? Who knows.
The light this has shown on the toxicity within the club is still unfortunate and heartbreaking. Even worse, there is no real solution. Even more unfortunately is the fact that Konate is no longer a Liverpool player, so we cannot fix what was neglected for him, and we can only hope that his next club is better equipped.
We can continue to hope that this light reveals what the club is lacking and they work to remedy this huge issue.
We can only hope that these men have someone to talk to.
Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com
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