Tottenham player Emmanuel Adebayor writes crushing Facebook post about what happened to his family when he got rich
Adebayor, who was once one of the highest-paid players in the league at $270,000 per week while at Manchester City, moved to France from Togo when he was 15 years old and has played in Europe ever since.
His Facebook post is heartbreaking. He says he gave his mother money for a cookie business and paid for her to spend a week with a famous Nigerian faith healer, but she left after two days. She also hung up on him when he called to tell her about the birth of his daughter, he says.
He accuses his sister of kicking his half-brother out of the $1.2 million house in Ghana that he let them stay at, and then renting out the rooms for profit. On his brother Kola, he wrote:
My brother Kola Adebayor, has now been in Germany for 25 years. He travelled back home about 4 times, at my expense. I fully cover the cost of his children's education. When I was in Monaco, he came to me and asked for money to start a business. Only God knows how much I gave him. Where is that business today?
When our brother Peter passed away, I sent Kola a great amount of money so he could fly back home. He never showed up at the burial. And today that same brother (Kola) is telling people that I am involved in Peter's death. How? He is the same brother who went and told inaccurate stories about our family to "The Sun" in other to take some money. They also sent a letter to my Club when I was in Madrid so I could get fired.
About why he was writing the letter, Adebayor wrote, "It's true that family matters should be solved internally and not in public but I am doing this so that hopefully all families can learn from what happened in mine."
"I organized a meeting in 2005 to solve our family issues. When I asked them about their opinion, they said I should build each family member a house and give each of them a monthly wage."
It's a crushing account, and it gives you an idea of the types of pressures players face when they suddenly hit it big.
Here's the entire post: