Musiala – The Human Being

For a Few Seconds, Only the Human Being Remains

There is hardly anything left in modern football that cannot be measured. Running patterns are tracked, sprints counted, physical loads compared, sleep monitored, nutrition optimised. A player’s body is observed, trained, protected and analysed in areas a coach thirty years ago probably did not even know could be measured. And eventually, the human being himself is given a number. In Jamal Musiala’s case, that number reaches well into the hundreds of millions of euros.

We have grown used to this. Perhaps far too used to it. We say a footballer is worth 20, 50 or 140 million euros, and hardly anyone finds the sentence particularly strange. We speak about human beings almost as though they were works of art at auction, while of course meaning not the person himself, but his sporting and economic value. Everyone understands the distinction. Even so, there is something unsettling about that language the moment the person behind the number suddenly no longer functions as expected.

For Jamal Musiala, it lasted only a few seconds. Seconds in which all those figures became meaningless. No market value, no league table, no contract and no upcoming match could change the simple fact that there was suddenly a 23-year-old man on a football pitch whose brain, for a brief moment, was doing something beyond his control.

Ever since I saw those images and began reading more about what lay behind them, one question has stayed with me: What remains of a €140-million footballer when, for a few seconds, all that remains is the human being?

Perhaps that is precisely why Musiala’s story interests me more than the diagnosis itself, or the question of when he will play football again. Of course I hope that his doctors find the right treatment, that his medication works and that one day he returns to the pitch – provided that is what he himself wants. But that is his story. There is another one unfolding around it.

It is the story of the people around him: the club, his teammates, the supporters, the media and perhaps, at some point, those who will begin thinking about contracts, squad planning and market values. It is the question of what happens to our concern for another human being when what first appeared to be a brief interruption threatens to become something longer.

There Is No Reason for an Indictment Yet

At the moment, there is little reason for pessimism. I want to say that clearly, because it would be easy to take Musiala’s illness, build a ready-made critique of society around it and then simply search for evidence to prove it. That would not only be unfair; it would also be intellectually convenient.

What we have seen so far has, if anything, been encouraging. Teammates protected Musiala at a moment when he was hardly in a position to decide which images of him should travel around the world. Supporters called his name. Bayern Munich has so far given no impression of looking at a valuable asset that needs to be repaired as quickly as possible, but rather at a young man whose health needs to be assessed, treated and protected.

Perhaps we really have learned something. Perhaps the way elite sport deals with illness has become more humane. Perhaps we have moved beyond the time when physical performance was too easily mistaken for inner stability.

I would like to believe that.But memory makes me cautious.

The Memory of Sebastian Deisler

I remember Sebastian Deisler. An extraordinarily gifted footballer who also played for Bayern Munich, and whose depression, more than twenty years ago, encountered a footballing world that had far fewer words for mental illness than it has today.

Depression was not an unknown illness even then. But there was still a great distance between knowing that depression existed and understanding what it could do to a human being. A footballer was allowed to tear a cruciate ligament. He could suffer a muscle injury. Those injuries produced images, diagnoses, operations and, eventually, some approximate date on which everyone could expect him to return.

An illness that could not be pointed to on an X-ray, yet could still prevent a person from doing the very thing for which he seemed almost born, fitted far less comfortably into that world.

Deisler became one of the first prominent footballers through whom many people began to understand that an elite athlete could suffer from mental illness too. That talent, money, success and public admiration form no protective shield against depression. That a person can be privileged and ill at the same time.

Much of this seems obvious to us today. It was not obvious then.

Then Came Robert Enke

A few years later, that lesson acquired a dimension no one could ignore.

Robert Enke was Germany’s national goalkeeper, a Bundesliga professional and, from the outside, a man who functioned. That is perhaps what remains so disturbing about his story. A human being can perform, practise his profession and stand in front of tens of thousands of people while living, inwardly, in a reality almost no one else can see.

On 10 November 2009, Robert Enke took his own life.

An event like that demands restraint. It should never be used merely to create drama, still less as an emotional device in an essay. But neither should we pretend that his death changed nothing about football and the way mental illness was perceived.

Enke forced a world to look at something it had been very good at overlooking: a world highly skilled at judging physical performance, but much less skilled at recognising human suffering. Suddenly, the old equation was no longer enough. Someone who plays is functioning; someone who functions must be fine.

Perhaps that equation had always been wrong.

Deisler had shown that an extraordinary footballer could become ill. Enke demonstrated, in the cruellest imaginable way, that outwardly functioning tells us almost nothing about what may be happening inside a human being.

A great deal has changed since then. Clubs employ psychologists. Depression is discussed differently. Players can speak publicly about mental health problems without automatically being regarded as weak. Neurological disorders, too, are better understood and surrounded by less fear and ignorance than they once were.

That is progress, and it should not be diminished.

But I wonder how deep it really goes.

Knowledge Is Not Yet Humanity

Perhaps we have learned to use the right words. Perhaps we now understand that depression is not a failure of will, and that a neurological episode has nothing to do with whether someone is strong enough. But knowledge and humanity are not the same thing.

We can understand perfectly well that someone is not responsible for being ill and still, eventually, begin to regard that person as a burden. We can understand depression and still become irritated when a colleague is absent yet again. We can sincerely wish someone with a neurological condition a speedy recovery and, a few months later, begin asking whether it is still possible to plan professionally around them.

Greater awareness does not automatically erase prejudice. Sometimes it merely gives prejudice a more polite vocabulary.

Perhaps that is where my mistrust comes from. I do not want to accuse Bayern Munich of something that has not happened. Nor do I want to condemn supporters for reactions they have not shown. Quite the opposite: I hope that everything we are currently seeing in terms of support and care is exactly as genuine as it appears, and that it remains so.

But I keep wondering how resilient that humanity really is.

What happens if days become weeks? What happens if medication has to be adjusted and nobody can say whether the next treatment will work? What happens if a decisive match is lost and the player who might have decided it is the one who could not be there?

At some point, a perfectly reasonable phrase may enter the conversation: the need to plan with certainty.

A coach needs that. A sporting director needs that. A football club operating with hundreds of millions of euros needs that too. None of it makes anyone a bad person.

And yet that may be precisely where something begins to change.

Jamal Musiala may first become a player whose return is uncertain. Then a player around whom it is difficult to plan. Eventually, perhaps, a risk on the balance sheet. Every step can be rationally explained, and every one of them may even be necessary.

But somewhere between all those perfectly reasonable sentences, there is still the same 23-year-old man.

Dehumanisation rarely begins with cruelty. More often, it begins with a perfectly reasonable sentence in which the human being is no longer present.

One Illness Can Carry Many Different Lives

I do not know epilepsy from textbooks. I know it from people close to me, and perhaps that is precisely why quick certainties make me uneasy.

A good friend of mine has lived with epilepsy for years. His doctors found a medication regime that works so well that the illness has become almost invisible in his everyday life. For a long time now, he has been essentially seizure-free. If you met him without knowing his history, you would probably never suspect that epilepsy is part of it.

His twin sons also developed epilepsy when they were young. Their reality could hardly be more different. In their case, the illness is not something that quietly exists in the background. It can mean frequent seizures, injuries, uncertainty and a life repeatedly interrupted by something that has no interest whatsoever in what had been planned for the day.

One of the two was even robbed at an underground station after suffering a seizure.

Perhaps those three lives have taught me more about epilepsy than any short medical definition ever could. The same diagnosis, or at least the same broad medical label, can mean something almost silent in one life and something profoundly disruptive in another.

That is why I hesitate whenever people try to turn a handful of public facts about Jamal Musiala into a finished story.

An illness may have a name. But it lives a different life inside every person.

Musiala himself has spoken about brief absences linked to a neurological dysfunction. Absence seizures can occur in connection with epileptic disorders. Beyond that, we on the outside simply do not know enough to draw reliable conclusions about what this means for his future.

That may feel unsatisfying. We have grown accustomed to answers arriving almost immediately after the question. What does he have? How serious is it? When will he return? Can he continue playing? What is the risk? What does this mean for Bayern?

But perhaps that hunger for immediate certainty is part of the problem.

Illness is not always orderly. It does not always arrive with a neat diagnosis, a predictable course and a date written beside it on which life returns to normal. Sometimes doctors and patients have to proceed step by step, adjusting treatment, observing what works and accepting that certainty may come slowly.

Perhaps Musiala’s medication will be adjusted and the situation will stabilise quickly. Perhaps several attempts will be necessary. Perhaps the condition will accompany him for years without substantially affecting his career. Perhaps it will prove more complicated.

I do not know.

And the longer I think about it, the more important those words become.

There is an odd pressure in public debate to fill every gap in knowledge with an opinion. If certainty is unavailable, probability must take its place. If the future is unknown, someone is expected to predict it anyway.

Yet sometimes “I do not know” is not a weakness. Sometimes it is the most respectful answer available.

Respect for an illness whose course we cannot see. Respect for doctors who know vastly more than we do. And above all, respect for a human being whose body and brain do not become public property merely because millions of people watch him play football.

The Body Does Not Sign Contracts

Perhaps one of the cruellest things about illness is its complete indifference to the rules by which we organise our lives.

A football club can negotiate contracts, prepare transfers, calculate training loads and plan an entire season down to the smallest detail. It can monitor a player medically, measure his physical condition, optimise nutrition and recovery, and do everything possible to reduce uncertainty.

And then the human body intervenes.

It does not care about contracts. It does not know the fixture list. It has no interest in whether there is a decisive league match on Saturday or a Champions League game three days later.

Musiala makes that contradiction particularly visible because his profession is built on an extraordinary mastery of his own body. Watching him play can feel almost unreal. He controls a ball in situations in which most of us would probably be struggling merely to stay upright.

And then there are those few seconds in which control disappears.

Not because he has failed to train hard enough. Not because he lacked concentration. Not because his will was insufficient. But because the human body sometimes follows rules of its own.

That is difficult for anyone who becomes ill. For an elite athlete, however, there may be a particular severity to it. His body is not merely the place in which he lives. It is also his profession, his instrument, his economic foundation and a central part of the identity the outside world has built around him.

What does it mean for a 23-year-old man when the very instrument on which almost everything depends suddenly no longer feels entirely predictable?

I cannot answer that for Musiala, and I do not want to place fears in his mind that he has never expressed. But the question itself is difficult to avoid: what happens when your body no longer does exactly what your life has always required it to do?

Perhaps this is another peculiarity of elite sport. Many people can continue working with illness, sometimes with adjustments, sometimes with limitations. A footballer at the highest level exists in a far narrower margin. Fractions of a second, perception, reaction and physical reliability can separate brilliance from failure.

It would therefore be naive to pretend that there is no sporting or economic dimension to Musiala’s condition.

Of course there is. But the order matters. The human being must come first. The illness comes next. Football can wait until much later. That should sound self-evident.

I am simply no longer certain how long self-evident truths remain self-evident once they begin to cost something.

When a Person Begins to Measure Himself by Performance

Perhaps the greatest pressure does not come from where we first expect it. Not from the club, not from the media and not from the supporters. It may begin much earlier and much more quietly, inside a person who has spent most of his life learning that performance and value are somehow connected.

An elite player like Jamal Musiala does not simply arrive in this world by accident. Anyone who reaches this level in his early twenties has already spent years in an environment built around development, discipline, competition and constant improvement. In that world, the body becomes more than part of life. It becomes the condition on which almost everything else depends.

Perhaps that is unavoidable in elite sport. But perhaps it also carries a danger.

What happens when a person begins to judge himself according to whether he functions?

That question concerns me almost more than the possible reaction of a club. A player can be told a hundred times that his health matters more than any match. But if he begins to feel that he is letting down his teammates, failing expectations or losing his place, the real pressure may already have moved inside him.

I do not know whether Musiala thinks that way, and I do not want to attribute fears or doubts to him that he has never expressed. But I know this logic well enough from the society around us to recognise how easily it can take hold. We tell children that they should develop freely and then begin measuring their performance almost from the moment they enter school. We tell adults that health is the most important thing in life while organising large parts of working life around reliability, availability and resilience.

A person is allowed to be ill, but preferably not for too long.

That may sound cynical, perhaps even unfair. Yet sometimes I have the impression that this expectation has become so deeply embedded in us that no one needs to say it aloud anymore. The employer does not have to tell the employee that he has been absent too often. The employee may already be telling himself. The coach does not have to say that the team needs its star. The player knows perfectly well that a place in an elite team does not wait forever.

At some point, something subtle can happen. The person begins to speak the language of the system himself. Instead of asking only, “How am I?”, he begins to ask, “When will I be available again?” Instead of asking what he needs, he begins to wonder when he can deliver again.

Perhaps that is the most subtle form of dehumanisation in this entire debate. Not the moment when others reduce a person to a balance-sheet item, but the moment when a person starts to look at himself in exactly the same way.

Do We Love the Person, or What He Does for Us?

Football makes this question especially visible because the affection surrounding it can be so intense. Supporters wear players’ names on their backs, children hang their posters on bedroom walls, and entire stadiums sing for them. They defend them in arguments, celebrate their goals as though they themselves had contributed to them and attach memories of their own lives to moments created by someone they have never met.

None of that is false. The emotions are real.

And yet I sometimes wonder what, exactly, they are directed at.

Do we love the person, or do we love what he gives us?

A footballer can move from idol to irritation within a matter of weeks. A few poor performances, a missed penalty, an ill-timed transfer, and the language changes. The genius becomes someone who is “not delivering”. The player who once carried a team is suddenly standing in its way.

Perhaps some of that belongs to sport. Performance is judged. Competition demands comparison. A professional footballer knows that his work will be assessed publicly and sometimes mercilessly.

But illness is not a dip in form.

It is not a tactical weakness.

And it cannot simply be trained away.

That is why Musiala’s story may become so revealing if his absence lasts longer than expected. Today supporters call his name. Today people wish him well. Today his humanity is more visible than his sporting value. But what happens if his absence begins to affect results, if another player takes his position, or if one day people start calculating how much salary is being paid to someone who cannot regularly appear on the pitch?

Then we may discover whether our affection was really for the human being, or whether it was tied far more closely to his usefulness than we like to admit.

Perhaps compassion is not measured by how warmly a society receives someone when he falls ill, but by how long it is willing to wait for him.

That may be one of the most uncomfortable questions in this entire story, because waiting does not fit particularly well with the age in which we live. We are used to speed. Information arrives instantly, decisions are expected immediately, deliveries come the next day, reactions appear within seconds. Even patience seems to have become something we would like to optimise.

Illness is unimpressed by all of that.

It may need time.

And time is a peculiar currency in a society built around performance. As long as it costs nothing, we give it generously. The moment it begins to cost money, success, convenience or certainty, it becomes noticeably scarcer.

Empathy Can Fade. Dignity Must Not.

Perhaps that is why empathy alone is not enough.

We use the word constantly. We demand it, praise it and complain when it is missing. And of course empathy matters. It allows us to recognise another person’s pain, to imagine something of what he may be experiencing and to resist the temptation to judge too quickly.

But empathy is still a feeling. Feelings change.

Today one person’s fate may move us deeply. Tomorrow another story takes its place. A few days later, the intensity is gone, not because anyone has become cruel, but because no human being can remain emotionally consumed by every suffering he encounters.

Dignity is different.

Dignity should not depend on whether we still feel deeply for someone. It should not depend on whether a person is healthy, useful, productive, reliable or economically valuable. A human being does not lose dignity because his body fails him. He does not lose dignity because others have to plan without him. And he does not lose dignity because his illness takes longer than everyone had hoped.

Perhaps we ask too little of society when we ask only for empathy. The more important question is whether respect remains after the emotion has faded.

That is when we find out what lies beneath all the good wishes.

If there is respect, much has been preserved. If there is dignity, perhaps everything that really matters has been preserved.

And perhaps this is where the story reaches far beyond Musiala. The real test is not whether we can feel with someone in the first days of a crisis. It is whether we can continue to recognise the same human being when the crisis becomes ordinary, inconvenient and expensive.

That is a much quieter form of humanity. And perhaps a much rarer one.

Perhaps This Is What Our Humanity Is Really Worth

The longer I think about Musiala, the less interested I become in the question of when he will play again. Of course that question will eventually need an answer. A club has to know whether one of its most important players will return, a coach has to plan, and a team has to be built around the players who are actually available. But I increasingly think the more important question is not when Musiala will function again. It is what happens to the way we see him if, for a while, he does not.

Perhaps this is where my own pessimism becomes harder to ignore. I have the growing impression that our societies have become very good at emotional extremes. We admire or despise, embrace or reject, care intensely or move on. What seems to be disappearing is the space in between: the quiet, unspectacular patience required to live with uncertainty, with contradiction, with people who do not fit neatly into the categories of strong or weak, healthy or ill, useful or burdensome.

Illness places us exactly in that uncomfortable space. It asks more of us than sympathy. It asks us to continue seeing the same person even when recovery takes longer than expected, even when plans have to change, even when there is no clean timetable for a return to normality. It asks us to resist the temptation to attach value to speed.

That may be more difficult today than we like to admit. We have made almost everything faster: communication, work, decisions, outrage, attention. The human being has not become faster. A body does not heal according to the rhythm of social media. A brain does not follow a fixture list. Fear does not disappear because someone has pencilled in a return date. And human dignity cannot depend on how efficiently someone manages to re-enter the expectations of everyone around him.

Sometimes I wonder whether we have really become more humane since the days of Deisler and Enke, or whether we have simply become more careful with our language. Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable possibility: that some of the old hardness has not disappeared at all, but has learned to speak politely. Indifference becomes professional distance. Impatience becomes the need for clarity. Rejection becomes economic responsibility. No one has to be cruel, and yet the person can slowly disappear from the centre of the conversation.

When Human Value Becomes a Question of Availability

Perhaps that is why modern football is such a revealing mirror of the society around it. In football, things are said openly that elsewhere are often hidden behind spreadsheets, performance reviews and organisational language. A player is valuable while he is available, important while he performs, desirable while he makes a difference. That is the logic of elite sport, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The danger begins when that logic slips almost unnoticed into our understanding of the person himself.

A human being is not worth less because he cannot play. He is not worth less because he is ill, because others have to plan around him or because his return is uncertain. And yet many people know exactly what it feels like when the world around them begins to treat them differently after a prolonged illness. Sympathy remains, at least for a while, but somewhere in the background the language changes. Someone becomes an absence, a reliability problem, a workload for others, a cost.

That is why Musiala may be only the most visible version of something much larger. A football star makes visible what millions of people experience quietly: the fear that belonging is conditional, that usefulness has an expiry date, that compassion may last only as long as it does not disrupt too much.

This is why one thought keeps returning to me: empathy is easy while it costs nothing. It becomes meaningful only when it asks for patience.

Patience with a body that does not cooperate. Patience with a mind that does not simply become “normal” again. Patience with someone whose path back takes longer than the timetable we would prefer.

Perhaps empathy is not enough after all.

Empathy is a feeling, and feelings fluctuate.

Dignity must not.

Dignity cannot depend on whether someone is productive, reliable, healthy or economically useful. It cannot shrink because a person becomes inconvenient. It cannot be suspended until performance returns.

Maybe that is the more demanding standard. Not whether we feel deeply for someone at the beginning of a crisis, but whether we continue to recognise the same human being after the emotion has faded and only the consequences remain.

Perhaps We Have Simply Learned to Express Compassion More Beautifully

I do not want to sound cynical. There is no reason to be cynical about the way Musiala has been treated so far. Much of what we have seen appears thoughtful, careful and humane. His club seems to be protecting him, supporters are behind him, and the public language surrounding his condition is far removed from the crude ignorance that once surrounded many mental and neurological illnesses.

But perhaps a society should not be judged by the first days. Perhaps it should be judged later.

When the cameras have moved on. When the next fixture arrives. When the league table becomes more urgent. When a name slowly turns into a question mark and someone eventually starts calculating.

That is when the real test may begin. Whether “Take all the time you need” quietly becomes “How long will this take?” Whether “Health comes first” becomes “We need certainty.” Whether the young man gradually turns into a problem that has to be managed.

None of that requires open cruelty. In fact, that is precisely what makes it so difficult to recognise. Open harshness is obvious. The polite form of dehumanisation often sounds sensible, responsible and professional. It rarely announces itself. It simply removes the person from the sentence, one reasonable phrase at a time.

Perhaps that is what worries me most about the society we are becoming. Not that we no longer feel compassion, but that we spend it too quickly. Today a human story moves millions. Tomorrow attention has already migrated elsewhere. Today we carry someone emotionally through a crisis. Tomorrow we begin to expect that person to function again.

Not because we have all become heartless. Perhaps because we have become impatient.

And Perhaps, in the End, This Is Not About Musiala at All

Jamal Musiala may soon return to football. This may prove medically far less dramatic than it currently feels. A year from now he may be dribbling past defenders, scoring goals and being discussed in terms of a market value even higher than the one attached to his name today.

I hope that is what happens. But even if it does, the question his story has opened will remain.

What is a human being worth when, for a while, he cannot perform? When he is unavailable, unpredictable, difficult to plan around and expensive in ways that cannot be reduced to money?

The answer should be obvious. His value has not changed. And yet societies repeatedly fail at precisely this point.

Perhaps the coming months will therefore tell us less about Musiala’s neurological condition than about ourselves. About whether our greater awareness is more than better terminology. About whether our empathy survives when it begins to cost time, money, success or convenience. About whether we still recognise the human being once performance is no longer the first thing we see.

Perhaps the question is no longer what remains of a €140-million footballer when, for a few seconds, only the human being remains. Perhaps the more unsettling question is this:

What remains of us when that human being no longer performs enough for our liking?

What Remains of Us in the End

Perhaps I have moved a long way from Musiala in the course of these thoughts. Or perhaps I have not. That may be precisely what interests me about his story: it refuses to remain only a football story. A young man experiences something beyond his control, and suddenly questions become visible that are far larger than one club, one team or one season.

We speak a great deal about empathy today. We know more about illness, about mental strain, about neurological disorders and about the simple fact that human beings cannot always function on demand. We have learned to speak more carefully, to judge less quickly and to express concern more openly. All of that matters, and I do not want to diminish it.

And yet a doubt remains.

Sometimes I have the feeling that compassion and indifference have moved much closer together than we would like to admit. We can identify deeply with another person’s fate within hours and then, a few days later, already be absorbed by the next story. Empathy can be enormous today. But it can also be frighteningly brief.

I do not know whether that was ever better. Probably not. People may once have been harsher, less informed and far more unjust towards illnesses they did not understand. But perhaps something different is disappearing today: the space between intense sympathy and complete detachment.

For me, that space is called patience.

It is the patience not to force someone immediately back into a function. Not to measure a person by the speed of his recovery. To allow time without eventually turning that time into a debt he is expected to repay. That may sound like a modest demand, but perhaps in our age it is already a larger one than it appears.

At some point, the first wave of concern around Musiala will inevitably become quieter. That is normal. No one can remain emotionally absorbed by another person’s suffering forever. The more important question is what remains once the emotion has faded.

If respect remains, much has been preserved. If dignity remains, perhaps everything that really matters has.

Jamal Musiala may be back on a football pitch within weeks. Perhaps the €140 million attached to his name today will one day become €160 or €180 million, and we will once again discuss those figures as though the value of a young man could genuinely be expressed in numbers. I would wish him that return, if it is the return he himself wants. More than anything, however, I hope he never has to discover how quickly language changes when a prodigious talent begins to be described as a risk.

And I hope we never have to discover it either.

Because perhaps Musiala’s story will one day tell us less about how successfully medicine treated his absences than about how resilient our humanity has become.

I am not especially optimistic about that. Sometimes I feel we are living in an age that seems to recognise only two social temperatures: burning empathy and icy indifference. What disappears in between is not emotion itself, but something quieter and more difficult to sustain.

Constancy.

Not the constant intensity of feeling, but the decision to continue recognising a person’s worth after the drama has passed, after the headlines have moved on and after sympathy has ceased to be effortless.

Perhaps that is why the question is no longer simply what remains of a €140-million footballer when, for a few seconds, only the human being remains. Perhaps the question that troubles me more is this:

What remains of us when that human being no longer performs enough for our liking?

Featured Image

The featured image was created by ChatGPT based on a prompt by me. The concept, visual direction, and accompanying quote were developed specifically for this article.

English Translation

The English version of this article was created with the assistance of ChatGPT. Rather than translating the German original word for word, we worked on the language together to preserve its tone, rhythm, and reflective character, ensuring that the English version carries the same thoughts, nuances, and human perspective as the original.