Ivory Coast coach slams 'racist' comments made by former Germany star Bastian Schweinsteiger

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Ivory Coast coach Emerse Faé slammed what he considered were racist comments made about his team by former Germany player Bastian Schweinsteiger.

Schweinsteiger made the comments on German broadcaster ARD before Germany played Ivory Coast last weekend, when he spoke about what the German players could expect from their opponents.

“A bit African football, a bit unorthodox, a bit wild, a bit perhaps also not so conditioned by tactics. We have to be prepared for it to be unpredictable,” Schweinsteiger said.

Faé led Ivory Coast into the World Cup knockout round for the first time in national team history with a 2-0 win over Curaçao on Thursday.

Faé said after the win he hoped Schweinsteiger had made a “clumsy statement that's not necessarily reflective of what's in his life.”

“We could call it racist, if we were calling a spade a spade,” Faé said.

Schweinsteiger’s comments were criticized earlier this week as playing into racist stereotypes.

Sports commentator Patrick Schnitzler wrote on Instagram of “racist prejudices that we are all passing on unnoticed,” and journalist Philipp Awounou, who’s Black, wrote in Der Spiegel magazine that the characterizations played on old racist tropes rooted in colonialism. Awounou said he did not think Schweinsteiger is racist.

Faé said the West African team uses smarts and strategy to win just as much as physical toughness to advance this far in the World Cup. He questioned if Schweinsteiger was trying “to create a buzz” in his broadcast career by leaning on outdated racial tropes.

“When I heard his comment, I was disappointed,” Faé said. “Disappointed in the man. It is odd he would speak that way."

See more of AP’s World Cup coverage here

Referee Francois Letexier gestures to Ivory Coast head coach Emerse Fae during the World Cup Group E soccer match between Ivory Coast and Ecuador in Philadelphia, Sunday, June 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Ivory Coast head coach Emerse Fae during the World Cup Group E soccer match between Ivory Coast and Ecuador in Philadelphia, Sunday, June 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Ivory Coast head coach Emerse Fae speaks during a press conference on the eve of the team's World Cup soccer match against Germany, Friday, June 19, 2026, in Toronto. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

Ivory Coast head coach Emerse Fae watches a training session on the eve of the team's World Cup soccer match against Germany, Friday, June 19, 2026, in Toronto. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

They've died from artillery fire, aircraft crashes, gunfire, disease — even by execution — in conflict zones and elsewhere around the world.

Over the 180-year history of The Associated Press, 38 journalists have fallen on the job while working for the independent not-for-profit news organization.

Thursday marked the 150th anniversary of the very first: Mark Kellogg, one of five civilians killed alongside Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Kellogg, 43, was embedded with Custer's troops. He was reporting for The Bismarck Tribune and New York Herald — the AP circulated his reports across the country — when Custer underestimated the size of a Sioux village that he attacked.

Custer and his outnumbered men made a last stand on a hill. There, they were annihilated by Native American defenders. Kellogg's scalped body was found not far away.

His last published dispatch read in part: “I go with Custer and will be at the death.”

It was more of an attempt at poetry than prophecy. “At the death” is a foxhunting term for the end of the hunt, suggesting Kellogg expected Custer to prevail.

Still, Kellogg's final words and fate circulated far and wide through his employers and the AP. It gave the obscure, part-time journalist — a widower who worked a variety of jobs to support his two daughters — fame in death.

He got to know Custer. He covered the campaign. He mingled with the soldiers and interviewed them at their camps, historian Sandy Barnard said.

“While his record as a journalist might be very small compared to modern reporters who go into combat, he certainly was doing exactly what they are doing,” Barnard said.

Yet in other ways, Kellogg was much different from modern journalists. He carried a rifle into action, Barnard pointed out. And he made no attempt to avoid not just bias but racism against Native Americans, whom he called “red devils.”

“During the last stages of the campaign, Kellogg was probably more of a soldier than he was a newspaper man,” said Barnard, author of a Kellogg biography and other books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota preserves Kellogg’s diary and various belongings, including eyeglasses, tobacco, clothing and a mosquito head net. The fragile diary, now digitized online, documents weather, distances covered, who was riding in front and in back, how many antelope they saw and other day-to-day operations, Deputy State Archivist Lindsay Meidinger said. The diary ends before the battle.

“It’s a primary source of the historical event, that not many other primary sources remain from that time period related to the Seventh Cavalry and Custer,” Meidinger said.

Others who have perished while reporting for AP in war zones include:

— Mariam Dagga, a freelance visual journalist who was killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in the Gaza Strip last August;

— Anja Niedringhaus, a photographer shot by a police officer as she sat in her car in Afghanistan in 2014;

— Myles Tierney, a videojournalist killed while traveling in a convoy that came under fire in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1999;

— Joseph Morton, a war correspondent who was the only U.S. reporter known to have been executed by the Nazis following his capture alongside Slovakian partisans in 1944.

This story has been updated to restore correct attribution in final quote to Meidinger, not Barnard.

Associated Press corporate archivist Sarit Hand in New York and Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed to this report.

The eyeglasses and case belonging to Mark Kellogg, a reporter killed during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, are displayed Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

A commemorative marker with the name of reporter Mark Kellogg, who died in 1876 while covering the Battle of Little Bighorn, is displayed with fellow journalists and others who have fallen on the job of newsgathering for The Associated Press, at its New York headquarters, on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison)

State Historical Society of North Dakota Deputy State Archivist Lindsay Meidinger holds pages of the diary of Mark Kellogg, a reporter killed during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck, N.D., Wednesday, June 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Jack Dura