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Stadiums can be places where people of different colour come to support their teams, or they can be seen as stagnant areas where healthy people will be infected by racism.
I'm not the kind of person who goes into the dressing room and says: 'I'm the Guv here.' But maybe I give off the aura that I'm the kind of person who can be a big player.
You end up trying to buy happiness. I bought a Lamborghini. Wow! I was happy for a week. After that, I didn't even use the car. Who drives around Loughton in a Lamborghini?
Sometimes I wake up, and I'm a little bit grumpy, and I listen to soul. Sometimes I wake up, and I need some spirit, so I listen to rock n' roll. It depends on the mood I'm in.
Everybody has struggles in life, and mine was to come out of a tough area in Berlin. It helped me a lot on my way to becoming a professional footballer, to being an idol and a good role model.
When you're young, you don't think about what you want to be. I was just playing football because I had fun and enjoyed it. When I reached 16, that's when I was dreaming about becoming a footballer.
Every single person I spoke with, when I said I might perhaps be moving to Modena, told me how great the food is, so much so that I had to say, 'I'm here to play football, not to open a restaurant!'
When I played for Ghana, I learned how to fight malaria. Simple vaccines are not enough. You also have to dry out infected areas where the carriers proliferate. I think that racism and malaria have a lot in common.
We are in the year 2013, and racism is still amongst us and is still a problem. It's not simply an argument for the History Channel or something that belongs to the past or something that only happens in other countries.
I believe it's not 100 percent right to kneel during the national anthem, because you have to respect what many have done for this nation. I think kneeling prior to the anthem, like the Dallas Cowboys have done, is right.
Many sportsmen, like myself and my team-mates, artists, and musicians all have unique chances and responsibilities to make themselves heard. We have the possibility to reach the parts that political speeches will never reach.
In two years, I spent all my money on cars, watches, boots, discos, restaurants, and friends who, in reality, were not friends at all. For a boy like me, who grew up in a poor neighbourhood and without money, it was dangerous.
There are many different types of racism from people of different colours and nationalities. There is no vaccine to fight this and no antibiotics to take. It's a dangerous and infectious virus which is strengthened by indifference and inaction.
I could hear from the crowd some monkey noises, and this went on for about 25 minutes. Every time I touched the ball, I could hear the crowd. I said to myself, 'In this kind of environment, in this situation, I don't want to play football anymore.'
Social networking sites are an easy way to insult people. People have sent me messages saying that they are praying for me to get injured. Such messages are not nice, because I love playing football: I love playing for my club; I love playing football for Ghana.
There are so many people, FIFA or whatever, that can do something against this. They should wake up and do it. If there is a racism, those people should be banned from the stadium forever. They should not even enter the stadium anymore. Never again. That's the first thing they can do.
The most important thing is to help the team to come in front of the goal with one-two passes, I drop down, or I give them space, because for defenders, it's always difficult to have a false nine because they don't have a direct player against them, so they don't know exactly what to do.
I still have a picture: three cars, big house, I'm standing there like I'm 50 Cent. I look at it sometimes and say, 'Look how stupid you were.' But that made me who I am, and I can look back and see it. I've learned. I grew up. I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and thought, 'No, that's not me. I don't want to be that. I'm a footballer.'