Meet the Czech player chasing his dream
|Image: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez
Czech player David Rehor, 23, saunters over to the media tent in his grey fluffy slippers with a film producer in tow. He smiles and jokingly says, “this is going to cost $500 a minute – that’s ok right? You are speaking to a professional athlete, not just some ex-addict who is playing football!” A film crew have been following the Czech team in their lead up to the Seoul 2024 Homeless World Cup and David is taking it all in his stride.
The confident young man from the Czech Republic is very much at home at the Homeless World Cup but is very aware of the unique opportunity which has been given to him: “it’s an unbelievable experience – for me Seoul is like a different world. I’m very grateful for this experience.”
He’s also not shy about speaking about what led him to join the team and how organisation SANANIM helped to reignite his childhood love of football after he found himself deep in drug addiction.
Looking back to two years before, life was very different – he laughs when he thinks what his reaction would have been if someone had told him he’d be playing for his country at an international tournament – “I would have been like – that’s some fever dream! I couldn’t believe that I’d be in this position – I’d be playing for Czech – that’s insane.”
|Image: Anita Milas
“For me, I was – I don’t want to say, a bad person, but something was controlling me.”
What was controlling him was an addiction to prescription drugs. David and his friends had been experimenting with drugs for a while – while he was chasing the next high, he felt invincible. So, when his friend suggested trying prescription drugs – ‘they’ll make you feel great and no one will even notice’, he didn’t hesitate. After all, he’d been ‘fine’ up until now, and these were ‘safe’.
“With these pills I didn’t see the danger of it,” David explains, “it’s pills where you know exactly what’s in it, it’s from a pharmacy – but that’s where it started and what started as experimenting quickly took me down and turned into addiction.”
Things for David started to spiral, where he once felt in control, the pills were dictating every aspect of his life – his relationships, where he lived, how he spent his money.
For a long time, David hid his addiction from his close friends and family but in the final three to four months, his family found out and many of his good friends started to cut ties with him – fed up with his demands for money to fund his lifestyle.
“I used to be very comfortable, to buy nice clothes – to look good – to be able to live normally. At the end of my addiction, I had no money for anything other than the pills. I was kicked out of the house and living with friends and paying rent which was stupid because we were both addicts.”
|Image: Travis Torres
Realising that things were at a breaking point, David turned to his dad for help and was enrolled in a residential drug rehabilitation programme, where he was surprised to reignite his childhood love of football.
David always played football growing up, living out his father’s dreams which had been cut short after he was injured as a teenager, he played for some of the top teams in Prague. However, his father’s dreams didn’t have the same effect on David, he felt that he didn’t have the talent, and after repeatedly being left on the bench in games, leaving his confidence in tatters, he left the top tier youth teams and joined a local team.
At 15 he stopped playing football all together and changed his lifestyle: “I was just chasing – I wanted to look good – clothes, fashion, girls – something to mask the fact that I was lonely.”
In this period, David would still watch football regularly – avidly supporting Liverpool from Prague – but he thought his playing days were over.
However, his love of football was reignited when he was given the chance to represent the Czech Republic for the first time – at the Wroclaw Cup in Poland.
Playing in the centre of the idyllic Polish city, David found his confidence and decided this was something he could commit to. He had a new focus – to be the best footballer he could be, which led him to being invited to represent the Czech team at the Seoul 2024 Homeless World Cup.
At home, David has completed his rehabilitation and is in his final year of college studying project management. He wants to use his qualification to create a tournament for people who struggle with addiction, giving them the chance to experience what he has in Wroclaw and Seoul.
“To me it felt special, being part of something bigger. We love the game, everyone here struggles with something different, but everyone is here as human beings that play football and have that passion for it.”
So, now David has a new thing to chase – a dream of using football to change people’s lives and what could be better than that?
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Words: Rebecca Corbett
Images: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez