Steve Zakuani - Personal Life

Personal Life

Zakuani has five siblings. An older brother, Gabriel Zakuani, currently plays for Peterborough United in England and is a member of the Congolese national team. Steve considers London his hometown but also considers himself Congolese.

As a teenager in London, he began "mixing with the wrong crowd." Zakuani was distracted from playing football by girls and parties. He said in an interview: "A lot of the people I grew up with ended up in prison, taking drugs, and never made it to university." He has strong feelings about the increase of knife crime in London since one of his friends was killed. In Seattle, he spends time with his teammates off of the field and has beaten several of them at the Pro Evolution video game. Zakuani enjoys reading and watching African comedies.

In 2010, he founded a non-profit organization called Kingdom Hope to run camps and provide scholarships. The project runs camps in the greater Seattle area. Zakuani has said that his ultimate goal is to open an academy to teach life coaching and soccer to teenagers in an effort to be a "bridge between talent and actually making it".

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