Trafficking in (football) dreams

I was saddened to read this article in the International Herald Tribune the other day.

While Kofi Annan might envy the World Cup and wish the UN was run more along its lines (though one would hope the UN’s referees would be a little more together), the world game has its darker side too. And, no, I’m not talking about diving here.

It seems the popularity of the game in Africa is leading to a new form of exploitation (neo-neo-colonialism perhaps) in which young and often times naive boys with some soccer skills are being lured to Europe under false pretences and dumped.

The way it often happens, according to the Tribune, is that an “agent” from a European club will attend a youth tournament in Africa and afterwards approach a skilled player with an offer to play with a major club. The only catch is that the family will have to scrape together several thousand dollars to pay for plane tickets and other expenses. The family is told that the money will be a great investment. The young boy then heads for Europe with the tout, head full of dreams of stardom and money, only to be dumped in a dodgy hotel in Paris and left to fend for him self.

Apparently some of these so-called agents are actually bonafide, but that doesn’t stop them from dumping players that don’t make the cut rather then flying them back to their families.

The article outlines the story of Stéphane K., an 18 year old from Cameroon, who fell victim to soccer trafficking.

In April last year, he had just scored 12 goals in a two-day soccer tournament in western Cameroon when a tall man with a Congolese accent and a winning smile walked up and asked: "Would you like to come to Europe and become a professional soccer player?"

Four weeks later Stéphane was homeless in Paris, his one-month tourist visa expiring and, with it, his hopes of a meteoric career.

"I trained for one week with an Italian team in Genoa," he recalled this week. "Then the agent put me on a plane to Paris, paid two nights in a hotel and I was on my own. He just stopped answering his phone."

You could say that Stéphane was one of the luckier ones, since he actually did get to train with a real club, but in the end his situation is the same – he’s stuck in a foreign country, with no visa and no hope of getting home. The article goes on to show how easily these agents can dupe families:

Stéphane's face hardens when he recalls the agent telling his mother that he would need €3,000 to cover expenses. "She said: 'If what you say is true, then so be it. Sometimes one has to trust people one does not know,'" Stéphane said. "Then she went around to all her friends to borrow the money."

When he has a few coins to call her in Cameroon from time to time, he tells his mother that he is training and that things are going well. "I can't go back before I have got the money to pay back my mother," he said

For kids like Stéphane the world game and the dreams that it engenders have turned to nightmares.

While the game at its highest levels is a thing of beauty (most of the time), it’s worth remembering that there is an ugly underbelly of corruption and greed that elevates some to the level of superstars while destroying the dreams and ruining the lives of thousands of others.