The man lay prostrate on the road. His body was twisted. Arms and legs pointed and jutted awkwardly as if directing the cars, one of which had just mowed him down. Then sped off. He was dead or dying. No one came to his aid. A group of people stood shouting and gesticulating at the injustice. I was stunned, rooted to the spot. Other cars manoeuvred around him carefully before the rasp of the accelerator drowned out protestations. The police turned up. Bovver-boy-booted and clad in camouflage they got out of their car with all the urgency of an early morning constitution. Life was cheap in the slums of Accra.
It was my first day in Old Fadama, the largest slum in the city, and you could buy anything there. Anything. More than 80,000 people jostled to exist in the space of 40-odd football pitches. ‘This is where it goes dead,’ said Samuel, my guide, as we had passed over the Odaw River, choked with the rubbish and detritus from a community which had bigger concerns than being neat and tidy. Samuel was studying to be a lawyer but he had been previously been a scout, still worked as an agent and had a small stake in lower division clubs in Ghana. He knew football in the country inside out. I was undercover again, posing as John from Scout Network in a bid to understand the footballing culture in West Africa. To understand why so many boys dreamt of playing in Europe.
‘You couldn’t come to this place alone,’ he said. ‘Probably be robbed. I’ve been here at night. Happened to me. They don’t rob their own, though, you know that? That’s because in there,’ he pointed to the slum, ‘they have ways of dealing with you.’
It was the sort of place that a tremulous white man, or ‘blond’ as they sometimes say in West Africa, would reckon he would not make it out of. Was there menace in the air? Something had throbbed and seethed in that intense heat, shimmering off the roofs of the corrugated iron shacks. People there didn’t have homes. After a hard day’s work, they put their head down, sometimes with up to 20 others, in one room. It might be, if they were fortunate, a wooden kiosk. Others had tarpaulin for a roof. The huts and hovels were tightly packed and tessellated into an unfathomable jigsaw. The alleyways and paths were labyrinthine. Sanitation and running water was hard to come by. The gulleys and streams which ran behind the homes, or sometimes through the middle of its ‘streets’, doubled as a rubbish dump and toilet.
The locals called Old Fadama ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’. The prevalence of religious hoardings everywhere suggested it was trying to fight its reputation: ‘The divine finger of God is pointing at you’; ‘Jesus Saves!’ There was another billboard. It was of Asamoah Gyan, the Ghana striker, cajoling the people to support the ‘Black Stars’ in the African Cup of Nations. ‘Jesus saves . . . but Gyan always scores the rebound,’ Samuel laughed.
It would be a cliché to call football a religion in Old Fadama. They love it, of course, crowding round any television set showing a game or packing out the small bars which do the same. But they don’t live for it. It’s an escape from the drudgery or a potential route out.
‘It didn’t used to be that way,’ Samuel said. ‘When Michael Essien – he was from Accra – signed for Chelsea and everyone here read in the paper that he was earning £70,000 a week, everything changed. Everyone wanted to be a footballer. Even the middle-class parents send their kids to a football academy now.’ Samuel was right. The Ghana FA said that in Accra alone there were 240 clubs (holding the registration of 20,000 players), an increase of nearly 20 per cent from the previous decade.
‘That is why we have this trafficking problem. Opportunists. People are very clever. They spot a social or cultural change and they exploit it. People here are desperate. Some are desperate to be footballers.’ That’s what was in the air. Desperation. It was a dumb ‘blond’ moment to immediately think of oneself and feel threatened. People wanted to improve their lives. ‘Football trafficking is bad,’ Samuel said. ‘But is it so bad? Getting out of this place?’
Indeed. The life expectancy for a child born into a place like Old Fadama is 60 and, along with a third of the country’s population, they get by on less than £1.50 a day. The crooks and charlatans, therefore, have rich pickings in Accra’s city of sin.
Before travelling to Accra, I (not John) had spoken to Erin Bowser, who worked for the Ghana office of the International Organisation for Migration, the anti-trafficking charity headed by William Swing, or Willy Swing as our friend Amane called him at the UN conference in Geneva. Having listened to her experiences of the subject, it was clear that football agents were not the biggest problem. There were worse individuals at play. ‘We know about the football side of things,’ she said. ‘But the situations people are trafficked into vary greatly. Often it is sex exploitation and forced labour. Domestic servitude is most difficult to prove. The harvesting of organs is probably one of the worst.
‘What happens is that the parents sell their children to these people because they are desperate for them to have a better life.’ The fee for a child – a life – was nominal according to Bowser. It might be as small as $55 a year, with ‘some cattle, sheep, fish or foodstuffs’ thrown in. ‘It’s also one less mouth to feed,’ added Bowser. ‘There’s a sense they want their children to have more. They are in poverty, they can’t feed their child enough so maybe they can eat regularly if they give them up, they can go to school. It’s not seen as strange to send a child away. It’s the culture here. The traffickers come and they have these great offers – “They’ll go to school, they’ll be looked after, maybe a bit of work.”’
The offer of an education is one that is not often turned down. In Old Fadama around 65 per cent of under-18s do not go to school, and almost 50 per cent will never go. Just like the tantalising dream of football, the prospect of education is dangled like a cynical carrot. The stick is brutal. In Ghana, Bowser said, there have been 1.2 million kids trafficked internally to forced labour. Some of them have ended up at Lake Volta having been promised football trials – a fate worse than an empty hotel room in Paris or Madrid.
Lake Volta is the largest reservoir in the world. It was man-made, after 3,000 miles of forest were flooded in 1965. Children as young as four have been sold to the fishermen who’ve used them to untangle their nets from trees below the water line. ‘They have to dive down to free the nets,’ Bowser said. Some of them get caught themselves and never resurface. Their bodies are buried in the sand by the lake. The daily hardship of Old Fadama is almost a luxury by comparison.
Farook, aged 11, did not go to school. He wears, day in and day out, a fake Barcelona shirt. He works at one of the largest digital waste dumpsites in the world. There’s a fair chance that if you’ve ever discarded a laptop or mobile phone it has ended up here, waiting to be discovered by Farook’s small and scarred hands. The kids of Old Fadama take apart the old electronic devices to sell as bits of scrap metal at the market. They might use a rock to smash and strip out the copper wires or burn away the plastic, exposing them to harmful toxic fumes.
When work allows, Farook plays football with his friends with a ball made from rags and string. For Farook to realise his dream of being a professional footballer, he would need to be spotted by one of the small academies that operate by the roadside, on the beach or any piece of scrubland going. When driving by one of the slums (or more likely stuck in traffic) one can spot them. They are known as ‘neighbourhood teams’ and operate on an informal basis.
On our way to Old Fadama, Samuel had taken me through Jamestown, a slum more famous for producing boxers: seven world champions and counting, including Ben ‘the Wonder’ Tackie. ‘This is where all the next huge football stars will come from,’ Samuel said. ‘Places like this. They have the fight and desire to get out. To improve their lives. They’ll do anything. In Jamestown they are particularly angry. This is the people who used to have all the money in Accra but they wanted the easy life and retreated out to the beach, giving up all their lands. Now look.’ He pointed to a group of 15 or so boys on a training run, dodging the rubbish on the sands, all wearing yellow bibs. ‘Another academy.’
There have been estimates that there were up to 500 academies in Accra alone, but those who’ve worked in the bona fide football industry in the city said the number was exaggerated. They are called ‘illegal’ but only because they are not recognised by any football association. They are not registered with the Ghana FA, so there’s no way of checking what happens to their players or where they might be transferred to. An industry has been created outside of an industry. For example, Lois, who I met in Larnaca, Cyprus, ran an ‘illegal’ academy in Accra.
They are mostly run by chancers with little or no pedigree. The proprietors might claim to have played professional football in Ghana – difficult because 90 per cent of players are amateur – but can rarely produce any proof. The ‘roadside academy’ managers scout players like Farook, hoping their ball skills match the dexterity of their finger-bleeding work. If they do, they might buy the child from the parents for a small fee, offering the exact incentives that Bowser told me about. Many, Samuel said, saw it as a free bet: ‘They want to find the next Essien. The next Gyan. A lot of money can be made, you know? These academies, if they are smart and do things the right way, can receive a big payment from a club or a scout.’
It was, according to Samuel, a misconception that these managers had extorted money from families. Stories that they have conned people out of life savings or houses were wide of the mark. ‘No African would sell their house or give monies to a local person,’ Samuel said. ‘That is done by the criminals, the trafficking scams you read about in the papers. Those people would disappear. You think you could get away with that in Accra if you were from Accra? No. The academy scouts and managers? Everyone knows their business.’
Even Samuel ‘has boys’, the colloquialism for training footballers. ‘You must come and see them,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think.’ He noticed my look of surprise. ‘There is nothing bad,’ he said. ‘They go to school and eat because of me. I can afford it. They might be the next big African star. Play in the Champions League. The money that can be made is huge. Don’t judge us. It’s the way of life here.’
The turf at the Carl Reindorf Park Stadium, home to Liberty Professionals, was hallowed. It didn’t look it. It was patchy, uneven. There were tufts of grass in the penalty area big enough to cause embarrassing ‘bobbles’ for a striker. But it was where Michael Essien, Asamoah Gyan and Sulley Muntari, who plays for AC Milan, learnt their trade. ‘They are like gods those players,’ Samuel said. ‘So here is very special to the people of Accra.’ Essien trained there every day when he was in Ghana.
Liberty are a Premier League club but they have never won the title. They don’t care. They are not even that bothered about winning games. In 2014 they just about staved off relegation. All they want to do is produce young players to sell to Europe. ‘That is what football in Ghana is all about,’ Samuel said.
It is a simple concept to grasp, albeit an anathema to a supporter of a Premier League club in England where a top-four finish is utopia, mid-table mediocrity is considered success and relegation a fate worse than spending August to May in purgatory. The Premier League in Ghana is the top echelon but it is not the promised land.
‘If a player plays in the Premier League in Ghana for too long it is bad,’ Samuel said. ‘Some of the big players barely played. I think Sulley Muntari might have played less than five games. If they play in the Premier League they have not been scouted, no one wants them. The best players we never see in Ghana.’
There is little incentive to play in the Premier League. A professional contract, which is rare indeed, is worth no more than $200 a month. Instead, the rewards go to young players. In Ghana’s under-17 and under-20 World Cup campaigns, Samuel said players had been paid $1,000 and $2,000 respectively if they won a match. The message is clear. It is aspirational in Ghana not to play for the Premier League but to be the next young emerging talent, one who could move abroad and inspire a new generation. These players dance in the dreams of the youngsters resting their weary heads on the bare ground in Old Fadama. The coaches at Liberty share the reverie. If they find the next Essien or Gyan it means, at a base level, they are paid. Their families eat. The bills are taken care of and they are not sucked into the slums. Liberty Professionals survive to unearth more talent next year. That is the circle of footballing life in Ghana.
George Lamptey had been round and round. He is the grizzled old coach of Liberty. As Samuel and I sat on a bleacher watching the morning training session, he barked and growled at players taking part in a one-touch exercise. He had to stop it on two or three occasions to deliver an Alex Ferguson-style ‘hairdryer’ rebuke. ‘Simple! Simple,’ he shouted. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ He pumped his fist to denote how he wanted the ball to be passed quickly.
‘They are showing off,’ Samuel said. ‘Because they see a white man and they know you are a scout. George is furious with them. He knows that.’
Most of the players had come from the ‘roadside academies’ or teams in the north of the country. Liberty call them their feeder clubs, paying up to $500 a season and sending kit and balls to have first refusal on the talent.
Samuel pointed out some of the players. By the corner flag, diligently going through his exercise routine was Daniel Adjei. He was the third-choice goalkeeper for the national team and had been in the squad for the World Cup in 2010. His equivalent in Italy, England, Spain, Germany would be a millionaire, training at state of the art complexes. Among the throng was a young midfielder who had been hailed as ‘the next big thing’. He had played Major League Soccer in America with Dallas. ‘He was big news when he came back to Accra,’ Samuel said. ‘In all the papers. We thought he was the next Beckham but he was the next David Bentley. He doesn’t know where his career is going.’
There was an air of desperation even at Liberty. In the corner of the training ground is a half-built mosque. ‘The last owner of the club started to build it but then he died,’ Samuel said. ‘You would have thought they’d have finished it in his honour. But no. Cruel, cruel, cruel. They have no money for that. They are dying. George knows that. It is a struggle to survive. Look in his eyes when you speak.’
George looked in his mid-fifties. He still had energy and passion when he spoke but there was more than a hint of panic at where the next pay cheque was coming from.
‘It is a team that we started to develop young players,’ he said. ‘We have no programme for the Premier League, we don’t need to win. We are having problems, we don’t have the basics. I need to get two or three out to make some more money.’
The money would come from Fifa’s Training Compensation Scheme. It is the lifeblood of Ghana football. A club like Liberty can fund itself for several years off the back of moving one player to Europe. The compensation, also known as a solidarity payment, is due to the team which develops a player from the club where he signed his first professional contract. A payment is due for every year the team honed the player from ages 12 to 23. Each player has a ‘player passport’ which records the clubs he has played for, and for how long, so compensation can be calculated. Often, however, academies have to waive their right to a payment, instead preferring to take a smaller lump sum, because they are not registered with a football association. At the lowest level, a roadside academy might take the money Liberty pay, or the offers of balls and kit. Liberty, operating in the middle ground, might instead agree a one-off transfer fee with a club. Agents have also been known to ‘buy up’ the economic rights of players on the cheap, exploiting an academy or club desperate for quick cash. ‘A club might agree to that because they don’t think they will get the payments,’ Samuel said. ‘They are just ordinary people without the expertise to fight the big clubs in the courts. So they take the easy option.’
Eby Emenike, the London-based Nigerian agent and lawyer, told me she had been working on five cases of European clubs not paying solidarity money due to Ghanaian clubs and academies. She said the clubs ignored the ‘player passport’ data.
The European Club Association said that according to Fifa’s regulations, solidarity contribution paid by clubs for international transfers between 2011 and 2013 should have been ‘approximately’ $257 million, equal to five per cent of the overall transfer fee(s). The actual amount of money paid was $57.9 million (1.15 per cent of the transfer fees). That’s a financial hole the size of $199 million. By contrast, in the same period $254 million was paid to agents. African clubs or academies received only 0.9 per cent of the five per cent rate due, lower than Oceania (4.6 per cent), Asia (1.9 per cent) and South America (1.5 per cent).
It was more than likely that due to the academies and clubs like Liberty giving up their right to training compensation, Africa was missing out on a greater chunk of monies, a sum that could be even bigger when one considered the possible impact of European clubs bankrolling academies in Africa. A former coach who used to work for a West African academy said: ‘They fund some academies so they don’t have to pay any compensation. Everyone is happy with the arrangement.’
Winning is not the be all and end all in Ghana but the anatomy of football in England, or other major European leagues, is matched in some regard. The rich clubs get richer and have the pick of the best players, leaving the sprats to scrap for survival. There is a three-tier system: at the bottom lie the ‘roadside academies’; clubs like Liberty reside in the middle; at the top are academies with serious financial muscle provided by European clubs and corporate sponsors. This had led to a raft of academics and charities arguing that the European-style academy system in Ghana, which has been, by and large, replicated across Africa, is responsible for a new wave of neo-colonial exploitation. And it was these academies that incurred the wrath of Sepp Blatter in 2003 when he called the recruitment by European clubs of children in Africa ‘despicable’. ‘They are neo-colonialists who don’t give a damn about heritage and culture but engage in social and economic rape by robbing the developing world of its best players,’ he said.
One of the first such academies was Feyenoord Fetteh which was launched in 1999. It was a joint partnership between Feyenoord, the Dutch club, the Ghanaian Sports Ministry and tribal chiefs. In the article ‘Football Academies and the Migration of African Football Labor to Europe’, published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues by three academics in 2007, Feyenoord were accused of adopting ‘a classic neo-colonial industrial strategy by seeking where it could institute a facility that would provide a steady stream of raw talent’. Feyenoord had admitted as much on their website. They made no apologies. Feyenoord Fetteh no longer exists and has been subsumed, along with the Red Bull Academy (the same ilk as Red Bull Salzburg and Red Bull New York), by the West African Football Academy, or Wafa for short.
There have been other similar ventures: the Aldo Gentina academy in Senegal was a partnership between the Senegalese football federation and AS Monaco; Ajax bought 51 per cent of Cape Town Spurs in South Africa in 1999, renaming the club Ajax Cape Town, and the same year they bought the same stake in Obuasi Goldfields, a Ghanaian club, investing €5.8 million before selling up four years later.
Arsenal have been linked to an academy in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, called ASEC Mimosas. It was established by Jean-Marc Guillou, who was a close friend of Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager. Wenger was Guillou’s assistant when he was in charge at Cannes and together they had signed players from Africa. When Wenger was manager of Monaco, the club invested money in ASEC. In the early years of 2000s, ASEC was essentially a feeder club for the Belgian side Beveren, which would field an all-African XI. The academy recruited 12-year-olds. Graduates included Salomon Kalou, who played for Chelsea, Kolo Touré and Emmanuel Eboué, who both played for Arsenal, and almost half the Ivory Coast squad. Yaya Touré, the younger brother of Kolo, also played for both the ASEC academy and later Beveren between 2001 and 2003.
In 2001 an investigation by the BBC’s Newsnight programme found that Arsenal had made secret payments of £1 million to Beveren. It also found that Wenger was listed as investor in ASEC and had expected to make £100,000 from a £30,000 stake. ASEC’s stated aim was to make money by selling players from their academy to Europe. Arsenal, under Wenger, bought Kolo Touré directly from the academy for £150,000 in 2002. He was sold to Manchester City for £16 million in 2013. Kolo was the perfect example of the money that could be made from the African talent pool by Europe’s big clubs. He was stronger, faster and cheaper.
Fifa asked the Football Association to investigate Arsenal’s relationship with Beveren with relation to conflict of interest and fair play rules. They were also asked to probe Arsenal’s connections with ASEC. They found no evidence of any wrongdoing ‘in relation to their dealings with Beveren’ specifically to any breach of existing FA or Premier League rules. Newsnight responded by asking why the FA had not investigated the partnership with ASEC. The FA’s position was clear. They did not have the power to probe that link as ASEC did not fall under their jurisdiction. The FA said it was Fifa’s job to look into the relationship between the two.
Clubs in England have remained active with academies in Africa. Sunderland, in the lower reaches of the Premier League at the time of writing, has ‘lent its expertise’ to the creation of an academy in Tanzania. At the other end of the spectrum, Manchester City have ‘an arrangement’ with the Right to Dream Academy in Ghana. Its founder is Tom Vernon, a former Manchester United coach, who in 2000 started off with a handful of boys on a small dusty pitch. It has grown to be considered one of the most successful academies in the world and boasts a $2.5m purpose-built facility south of Akosombo in the east of the country. Its main backer is African oil giant, Tullow Oil. Vernon would not disclose the nature of Right to Dream’s relationship with City: ‘We have an arrangement with many clubs and partners but those arrangements are confidential. But if you look at where some of our players have gone it’s not rocket science to work out.’
Manchester City admitted they were involved with Right to Dream and would not deny that they provided funding for the operation. By 2013 City had signed six Right to Dream graduates: Razak Nuhu, Dominic Oduro, Bismark Adjei-Boateng, Thomas Agyiri, Enock Kwakwa and Godsway Donyoh. Oduro, Adjei-Boateng and Donyoh are the only three still with City. All of them, however, had been loaned almost immediately to clubs in Scandinavia or Portugal. Those are notable destinations because of the looser visa and work-permit requirements for African nationals. The players, of course, had no chance of appearing for City because they had never played international football and would not have obtained a work permit. In 2012 Right to Dream commissioned a research paper into what effects the loosening of those work-permit restrictions might have on the coffers of the Ghana Football Association. ‘Our research was quite interesting in highlighting huge financial losses made by the FA,’ Vernon said.
Vernon was adamant that Right to Dream, Tullow, Manchester City – and whoever its other partners and investors were – were not guilty of neo-colonialism: ‘I believe many academies have fallen down due to trying to impose European football systems, values, culture and structures in Africa that have failed. Could this be described as a neo-colonial approach to operating in Africa? Possibly, in terms of believing what works in Europe should simply work in Africa, and failing to tailor the model as we have – but I do not believe the wider business model is neo-colonial exploitation. The European clubs that have invested in setting up academies here, from what I understand, have had social objectives also, and the majority of clubs have been Dutch, where the minimum salary for a non-EU player is €250,000 per annum, so I’m not sure how the argument really holds up. These academies have also all offered a better standard of education to their pupils than the African FAs or professional clubs ever have.
‘[Right to Dream] is an entirely different model and we were not set up by and do not belong to a European club, as the Feyenoords, Ajaxs and Red Bulls did/do; neither have we surrendered our executive power to any club or sponsor. We were born in Ghana and have built a culturally relevant school and academy.’ Manchester City were asked for their view on neo-colonial exploitation but they failed to respond.
Ghana is one of the top five exporters of African players, which is an unsurprising statistic. Its society, culture and football structure could be said to provide the perfect ecosystem for the exploitation of minors. It would be no consolation to Blatter that Fifa bore its share of responsibility for the scourge. It was a pestilence which was Africa-wide as the conditions for it to thrive could be found in almost every nation on the continent.
It all began with poverty and desperate young men. For the fortunate few, like Michael Essien or Kolo Touré, football had been a route out. Their rags-to-riches stories had inspired and offered hope. A false hope, of course. The footballer who made it to the top was, literally, one in a million. Boys like Farook, fingers numb from splitting old laptops apart, and going slowly dumb from the acrid fumes, had little else to aspire to. An education was not a tangible dream. Football was. It was there, on the television sets, on the billboards. And it was easy to enroll in a club or roadside academy.
As we know, boys are easy, cheap prey to exploit. In a wider context, the very future of African children is under threat. Herbert Adika, a Ghana Football Association executive has said: ‘Everybody wants to play football but all of us cannot be footballers.’ Too many young men believe the future is at their feet, rather than their hands or minds. They believe their saviour will arrive one day by the side of the football pitch, holding a contract to a top club in Europe.
The men who run the roadside academies can be charged with the same naïvety. James Esson, a lecturer in human geography at Loughborough University, who has written extensively on football slavery, said that partly the problem is driven by either unemployed or ‘precariously employed’ men in their twenties who see themselves as entrepreneurs. It’s an important point, which could easily be missed. ‘They view owning a Colts team as more than a recreational activity or hobby,’ Esson wrote in his paper, ‘Modern Slavery, Child Trafficking, and the Rise of West African Football Academies’. ‘It is a window of opportunity, a chance to be self-sufficient and economically active. They take financial risks and invest in colts football in the hope of making a profit.’
Profit. Those young boys, like Farook, are no longer seen as human beings. They are seen as capital. And for that Blatter and Fifa could be blamed. Although Blatter would argue the Training Compensation Scheme exists to prevent rich clubs exploiting poor, the average boy on the street had been monetised. With one, just one, capable of netting thousands of dollars, it is no wonder there has been a boom in youth football in Ghana.
Despite the ‘do-gooder’ intentions of the super academies, like Right to Dream, who get due credit for educating kids to a higher standard than is available in Ghana, it is hard not to believe investors want a return. European clubs are also using the academies as ways to circumnavigate transfer rules. In effect they are ‘holding pens’ where clubs come along, view and then brand the stock they want until they are mature enough to be transported.
The compensation scheme has also been responsible for negating competition, or stripping a continent of its talent. This, it could be argued, has hampered the development of a footballing continent, something hopelessly at odds with Fifa’s ambition to develop the game globally. The majority of players need in Africa to be playing with the best standard available – as it is, only a minority are taken away to play at the highest level in Europe. Football in Ghana, as George, the coach of Liberty Professionals said, is no longer about winning matches or titles. It is about finding the next big star to sell.
That is a problem. That ‘big star’ can only shine at its brightest out of Africa. So players, coaches and academy managers all have a desperation to move, which puts them in contradiction with another Fifa ruling: Article 19. ‘Problematically, this migratory disposition is accompanied by a realisation that obtaining a visa to enter a European country is easier said than done,’ James Esson said.
But it is far from impossible. When these rules and regulations need to be broken so a kid can be trafficked, so a profit can be realised, help is at hand. And it is the criminal underworld and human trafficking gangs who offer it.