The Joël Matip Situation, Explained
Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty
You don’t need a whole lot of hype for the Northwest Derby. Clashes between Manchester United and Liverpool leave emotions running high, and this weekend’s meeting was no different. So when a story comes out right before kickoff that very nearly drowns out the game itself, you know it’s a Thing.
So it was that fans and pundits were worked into a tizzy right before kickoff when Liverpool were forced to drop a bombshell— Joël Matip was out of the team because FIFA grounded him. Details were sparse, but it had something to do with Matip’s ties to the Cameroon national team and whether or not the 25-year-old defender was obligated to link up with them for the African Cup of Nations.
There’s a lot of confusion and hearsay and rabble-rousing in the wake of the story, so we’re going to try and walk you through what happened.
Matip was born in Bochum in 1991 to a German mother and a Cameroonian father. When he started pursuing football seriously as a career at Schalke’s youth academy, he had a choice to represent Germany or Cameroon as an international. The latter tried to call him up in late 2009 to compete in the 2010 African Cup of Nations, but he hadn’t made up his mind about national team affiliation and ultimately declined the invitation. (Germany, meanwhile, held out faint hope that Matip would line up for them instead.) By the spring of that year Matip had made up his mind and was in the Cameroon team for a March 2010 friendly against Italy. He went on to make the World Cup squads in 2010 and in 2014.
But a little over a year ago Matip fell out with national team officials while still with Schalke. The situation hadn’t improved, and last September— soon after his debut at Liverpool— Matip said he considered himself retired from international duty. Cameroon, however, hasn’t accepted his resignation, and insisted they can still recall him at any time. Matip, with the club’s and Jürgen Klopp’s backing, held firm and said he was done with the Cameroon national team. This mean, among other things, Liverpool felt comfortable keeping Matip available for team selection for league and cup fixtures— some good news, given that other key squad members such as Sadio Mané would be out of consideration until after AFCON.