When duty calls, but which one?

The Jeremy Doku debate is really about a question we all carry: the job, the nation, the pay cheque, or the family?

It started, as most modern controversies do, with a simple human statement. Jeremy Doku, Manchester City winger and one of Belgium’s most dangerous weapons at the 2026 World Cup, revealed he was considering stepping away from camp for the birth of his first child. His partner Shireen is expecting their baby boy in the second week of July, the same window that sits squarely over the quarter-final stage of the tournament.

“It depends on when it happens,” he told reporters, “but it’s my first child, so I would definitely want to be there.”

A reasonable statement. A human one. And yet, the debate that followed was neither.

The critics

France Pierron, presenter on French sports channel L’Equipe, did not hold back on live television. “Are you seriously telling me these players have sacrificed everything to come to the World Cup, and you’re leaving just to cut an umbilical cord?” she demanded. She went further, calling the delivery room “a disgusting moment” where the father is “useless, just an extra.” To seal her argument, she invoked the ten-hour transatlantic flight, the emotional toll, the physical exhaustion. “Your baby will always be there,” she told her co-panellist. “The World Cup will not.”

The logic, reduced to its bones, is this: you are being paid an extraordinary sum to do a job for your nation. Millions of people are watching. Hundreds of players would kill for your seat. Finish what you started.

It is a position some ordinary fans echoed online, though perhaps less colourfully. The argument is familiar from a thousand workplace conversations: you made a commitment; you see it through.

The defenders

Brahim Asloum was sitting on the same panel. The retired French boxer, an Olympic gold medallist from the Sydney 2000 Games, did not let the moment pass. “A baby is your entire life,” he said directly. “You can win a World Cup or miss it, but once it’s over, it’s over.” When Pierron repeated that “the baby will always be there,” Asloum shot back: “What do you mean, we’re useless? Who’s encouraging us?”

Across social media, the reaction was swift and overwhelmingly on Doku’s side. Pierron was labelled a “Karen,” accused of reducing a once-in-a-lifetime family moment to a sporting inconvenience. By Saturday, she issued a public apology on X: “I was expressing a personal opinion within the context of a contentious exchange. I understand that they may have shocked, hurt, or wounded some of you, and I am sorry for that.”

Even the Belgian football federation, it emerged, already knew about the situation. Conversations were ongoing. Nobody in the dressing room appeared to be dragging Doku to a disciplinary hearing.

“A baby is your entire life. A World Cup is over when it is over.”

– Brahim Asloum, Olympic gold medallist, live on L’Equipe

Now let’s talk about you

Because this debate only feels comfortable as long as we keep Doku at the centre of it. The moment we move the lens, the moment we ask what you would do, the conversation changes entirely.

Doku earns in a week what most people will not see in a lifetime. He represents an entire nation. He carries the hopes of millions. He signed up for this, and surely, goes the argument, a professional must honour that contract above all else.

But strip away the millions, strip away the cameras, strip away the flags and the anthems. What remains is a man with a job, and a baby being born at exactly the wrong moment on someone else’s schedule.

That is a story almost every working parent knows. The shift you cannot swap. The business trip that clashes with the school play. The board meeting scheduled for the same day as something irreplaceable. We do not all earn what Doku earns, but we all navigate the same impossible tension: the responsibility we owe to our employer, and the one we owe to the people we chose to build a life with.

So here is the question this debate has been dancing around:

If it were you, not a footballer, just you, doing the job you are paid to do, and your child was about to be born, what would you choose?

The nation that is counting on you, or the partner who is going through the hardest physical experience of her life?
The pay cheque that demands your presence, or the moment that cannot be paused and will not repeat itself?
Your duty at work, or your duty at home?

Think carefully before you answer. Because the critics of Jeremy Doku are not asking him to be extraordinary. They are asking him to choose work over family at the exact moment most of us, given half a chance, would choose the opposite, and feel no shame in it.

What responsibility actually looks like

There is an older, narrower idea of responsibility buried in France Pierron’s argument. It says: you took the money, you serve the mission, everything else waits. It is an idea that has kept fathers out of delivery rooms for generations, and it has never been a particularly good one.

The more modern understanding of responsibility says something different. It says that a person who shows up for their family at the hardest moments is not less professional; they are, in fact, modelling exactly the kind of character we claim to want from our role models. Dependable. Present. Clear about what matters.

Fatherhood is not a medical function. Asloum understood this instinctively when he asked, on live television, who was going to encourage his partner if not him.

The answer to “the father is useless” is not a list of tasks. It is simply this: being there is the task.

Belgium knew Doku’s situation. The federation was in conversation about it. His teammates have not publicly condemned him. The loudest voices against him have come from outside that dressing room, from people, frankly, who will not be in the room when his son arrives.

The question football keeps refusing to ask

We celebrate athletes for their sacrifice. We praise the ones who “give everything” to the game, who miss weddings and funerals and first days of school in the name of professional commitment. We turn that sacrifice into legend.

But we rarely ask what it costs. Who sat in a hospital waiting room alone. Who watched a child take their first steps on a video call. Whose family quietly absorbed the weight of a career so that the rest of us could watch ninety minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Jeremy Doku, in three quiet words, “No father should miss this”, refused to perform that sacrifice. And rather than admire him for it, a section of the media turned it into a scandal.

Perhaps the real question is not whether Doku is letting Belgium down. Perhaps the question is what kind of world we are building when a man has to defend, in public, his desire to hold his newborn child.

So we ask you, the reader, one final time: the nation, the contract, the millions, or the moment that comes only once? Which would you choose?

Answer honestly. Because your answer says far more about our values than anything Jeremy Doku has done.