German football heavyweight Toni Kroos has revealed he will continue to live in Madrid following his retirement from football because his home country isn’t what it used to be and he wouldn’t feel comfortable allowing his daughter to roam the streets of big German cities.
In an interview for a podcast with the ZDF public broadcaster, the former Real Madrid midfielder lamented the demise of Germany, a country he left in 2014 to join the Spanish giants.
“I still think Germany is a great country. I like to be there, but it’s not quite the same as it was 10 years ago,” he said.
Asked what he felt had changed, Kroos replied, “If I compare it to Spain. I have a 7-year-old daughter, for example. When she gets older, when she is 13, 14, 15 years old. And if I were to ask someone now, would you let your daughter out in Spain at 2 p.m. or in the German big city?
“I don’t want to be too general, but 10 years ago I would have had a very conscious feeling that she would come home unharmed. I wouldn’t have that now,” he said.
Kroos explained that, after living in Spain for a decade, he did not consider it to be “an aggressive society at all,” but warned that Germany has “become much more aggressive in the last 10 years.”
The German international, who has announced his retirement from football after this summer’s Euro 2024 tournament hosted by Germany, said, “A lot has happened in the last few years which has contributed to the direction [Germany] is going.”
He raised the “big issue of migration” which, while supporting it in principle, warned had been mismanaged.
“In the end, it was just too uncontrolled,” he said, warning that a percentage of new arrivals to Germany did not “do us any good, just like it is with Germans.”
“If you can’t tell from those who don’t do us any good, then it gets difficult in the end,” he added.
Kroos’ concerns regarding safety in German cities are not unfounded with crime stats published by Germany’s federal interior ministry in April revealing that 41 percent of all crime suspects last year were foreign nationals despite representing just 15 percent of the population.
Knife crime jumped 30 percent in one year across Germany with more than half of the suspects being foreigners.
Polling published last week showed a majority of the German public were also concerned about the levels of mass immigration into the country. The Insa survey showed that 74 percent of respondents said the government is failing to take enough action against immigration while 69 percent of respondents called for less migration to Germany, including legal immigration.