About a 30-minute drive north of Old Fadama, opposite the navy hut of the local police headquarters and under the watchful eyes of a man holding a chicken and two tethered goats, waiting for the vet to open, was another ‘illegal’ roadside academy.
The ‘pitch’ was rutted and dusty and narrowed by mounds of earth on one side and trees, providing welcome shade, on the other. The goalposts were rickety and rusting. Despite the modest surroundings, the ebullience of the players was unconfined. The ball, leather missing and scarred from a thousand kicks, was almost as big as they were. It bounded away from them or bounced high up to their necks as if in harmony with their excitement. There were about 40 of them altogether, some as young as ten but most aged 16 to 20. They didn’t all play at the same time. The rest waited in the shade, watching carefully as the dust from red-clay soil was whipped up to veil the ball and their friends’ feet in a pink wisp.
The two coaches, Tino and Derek, stood under the trees also, offering a mixture of encouragement and rebukes. ‘That’s it! Good pass, Richard!’ and ‘Why are you not moving for the ball like I told you? Come on!’ The skill and touch of each boy was surprisingly deft. Skinny legs trapped dead the weighty ball without so much as a wobble. Skipping feet manipulated it from toe to toe. There was a robustness to the play, too. The boys charged into one another and slid on the hard ground. Tino and Derek encouraged them to ‘be strong!’
‘What we do here is about preparing,’ Derek said. ‘We pick boys from various places but no monies change hands. We don’t play in a league system. We train. We train six till nine every morning, Monday to Friday. We are helping those people who are good. We groom them in the basics and techniques. After that, you are a complete player. They can play in a league. Eighty per cent of the people we groom are 16 to 18. The 20 per cent are more senior and maybe have travelled to Malaysia, Vietnam.’
Tino, a former player who had only recently retired and claimed to have played all over the world, interjected, ‘We have one guy who went to Malaysia, one to Thailand.’ He was quieter than Derek and spoke with a hiss.
‘They sign and play for one year, they come back,’ said Derek. ‘We only want them to go for a year so they can be seen by other clubs in Qatar, Oman. Clubs there have money. So if they don’t get signed to there we say, “Come back.” One of our boys has just signed in Kenya. We had a striker here who played for Kaiser Chiefs in South Africa.’
Like every other small academy, Tino explained that if he couldn’t get clubs from abroad to take his players, he would try to sell them to Accra-based teams like Liberty Professionals. But this academy was not actually like every other. You might go to visit Tino to look at his players. But more likely you would go to see Tino because you needed his help. He has a notoriety in Accra. He is part of the city’s underworld; part of a human trafficking network which was ultimately responsible for trying to smuggle almost 150,000 – mostly from Africa – across the Mediterranean in 2014. The migrant boats you read about in the newspapers being abandoned off the coast of Italy, or sinking and leaving their passengers in a watery grave, are the work of such gangs. Sometimes they carry wishful footballers. In photos, if you look past the women carrying babies, you can sometimes see the shirts of Argentina, Brazil or Spain on the backs of the migrants.
It is a long-standing problem. Disasters such as Lampedusa, the tragedy which William Swing, of the International Office for Migration (IOM), gravely reminded everyone of at the UN conference in Geneva, are now, sadly, commonplace. In May 2007 a fishing trawler abandoned by its captain washed up on the shore of a Tenerife beach. On board were 130 young African men, 15 of whom thought they were going for trials at Real Madrid and Marseille.
Tino is connected. If you want to get a boy on one of those boats from the coast of West Africa bound for the Canary Islands – a favoured route of the gangs – then he is your man. But he is far more valuable to the football community than that. He is a specialist. A documents man. Tino can get visas, passports and birth certificates. And that was why I wanted to talk to him.
‘I need your help with documents,’ I told him, having once again explained Scout Network’s aims and ambitions. He didn’t look at me, chewed his gum a little faster, and nodded to Derek. ‘Let’s talk over there.’ The three of us walked to the other side of the pitch to sit on a blue bench, just in front of a crumbling basketball court where kids were throwing around a tennis ball. Tino had yellow eyes and he fixed me with them. He chewed his gum slowly, menacingly. I had been warned that this could be a potentially dangerous situation. Before travelling to Accra I had spoken about such a meeting with a Metropolitan Police chief superintendent who had investigated murder and witchcraft by gangs in the African community in the UK. He had not been encouraging. He said ‘the risk was very high’. In the rather clipped and unemotive language that all officials of his type were prone to using, he added, ‘I suggest that you would probably need to think through very carefully what you are doing. I’m not sure what you mean by undercover, but I suspect this would substantially increase the risks on a number of levels.’
I was also aware of the death threats that had been made to Jean-Claude Mbvoumin when he started to expose the issue. The risk, I reckoned, was worth taking. I thought my undercover story robust (it hadn’t let me down so far) and I had taken the time before going to Accra to print Scout Network business cards and notebooks, both of which I flashed prodigiously at the earliest opportunity. Besides, I had a burly-looking driver provided by a friend at the BBC World Service. And then there was the police station just behind my left shoulder. I could sprint there if required.
I wanted to find out just what was possible on a continent where anyone who had spent time there said ‘everything is possible’. Jean-Claude told me that humans could be purchased. How cheap could a player be bought and moved? I had already found out how much it would cost to buy a kid from the Accra slums. Now I wanted to know the prices to obtain the necessary documentation to move him to Europe. It was a cliché that the African footballer was not as young as he said he was, so could passports and visas really be fixed or produced out of thin air, with the right date of birth to enable them to bust transfer rules?
It had not been smart to sit down. It exposed the tape recorder in my breast pocket as my shirt slackened. Tino could have seen it if he chose to look. But those eyes, which I began to find terrifying, did not budge. ‘We don’t know which country you need a visa or passport for,’ Tino said dismissively. ‘You tell me and then I will phone you and tell you.’ He looked back to the pitch as if to suggest that the meeting was over.
‘I need a regular passport and visa guy,’ I blustered.
‘That’s his area,’ said Derek. ‘He has people on the inside. In the underground in Ghana he can get these deals done.’
‘Of course,’ Tino said, with nonchalance. ‘This is what I do.’
‘He personally has the links,’ added Derek. ‘He knows who he needs to call, who to call inside and make sure that [the player] is going to the UK so he needs a visa as soon as possible. [The player] is going to Mr John for football, so it is reputable.’
Tino began to thaw as I said I would need to move four or five underage boys a year. The stare had softened. It seemed he preferred to let Derek do his talking for him, perhaps because his English was not as good. Emboldened, and having started to chew my own stick of gum quickly and with the arrogance that ‘blond’ scouts were known for in this part of the world, I talked of a scenario. I thought of Frank, the boy who Lois had taken from her Accra academy to Cyprus and had impressed ‘John’ greatly in the illegal match.
‘So there’s this boy, from an academy run by a friend, Lois—’
Tino laughed. ‘I know that team,’ he said. ‘The woman. Lois. I know her. I was in Dubai two to three years ago. An agent took me there and there was no team for me. So my manager called Lois and she called an agent in Cyprus to link me up. I know that lady. She is from Accra. She moved about three players to Cyprus. She will go to Egypt or Nigeria and get them a visa to Cyprus.’
Tino was right. That was exactly what Lois did. Inwardly, I was surprised at the ‘small world’ of Accra football. Outwardly, I gave away no hint and continued with my story about Frank. I said he was 16 and I wanted a passport and birth certificate to show that he was 18 so he could move to Europe to play football, thus sidestepping Fifa’s Article 19.
‘Ah, OK,’ Tino said. ‘You need the passport to say 18. You don’t have a problem, my brother.’
It was $600 for a passport and a further $100 for a birth certificate. ‘I take him to the passport office, they take his picture. On the passport it will not be stated he is a student. He will be a footballer.’
For the birth certificate, Tino said he would need the identity cards of the ‘mother or father’. He would need assurance ‘from the parents’, something which would not be difficult for a bright young thing in Accra if he had been adopted by an academy manager. ‘You need that assurance from the parents,’ Tino said.
As Frank had been adopted by Lois, that would not be a problem.
Visas and work permits were also Tino’s remit. ‘The visa depends on the country. So many visas. My sister is a travel agent so we link together. Italy is not a problem with an invitation [from a club], as soon as you get me that we do a Schengen.’ A Schengen visa allows the holder to move freely between 26 European countries, although not the UK and Ireland. They cost about €150 and are not easy to obtain. There are strict rules and regulations to follow to get one. Tino wanted $7,000 to grease the palms of the black market. That was cheap. In a previous communication with a Ghanaian agent through the Scout Network email, I was told it would cost $8,000 through contacts with the criminal underclass.
The Schengen visa has been exploited by traffickers since its creation in 1995. Gangs have bribed contacts in embassies to ‘rubber-stamp’ applications. In early 2015 there was concern by western intelligence agencies that jihadist groups were using them to smuggle sleeper cells or lone operatives to commit terrorist attacks in Europe.
More money would be needed for Tino to speak to his contacts ‘inside’ to get work permits. ‘Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic,’ he said. ‘I can do work permits for those.’ Tino explained that football clubs would get work permits for players by registering them for jobs as anything but footballers, and with a totally different company. ‘Maybe computer analysts . . . whatever they wish,’ he said. The club would then pay the player his salary through the company. ‘It is fine so long as he is not employed by the club. You need to tell me the country, the charge is different for each one.’ I asked whether I should budget for around $1,000. Tino seemed happy with that figure.
Once the money was paid it would take two weeks for the documents to be ready. They would, Tino said, arrive without fail. They would be legitimate, not fakes. That took me back to what Jake Marsh had said about such visas. They may be illegally obtained but they were genuine. ‘No problem, brother,’ Tino said again. So for as little as $8,700 it would be possible to obtain a passport and birth certificate with a fake age plus a visa and work permit to mainland Europe. Including the paltry fee to buy a kid footballer from his parents in the slums of Accra there would still be change from $9,000. That was the cost of a human being in Accra. To a football club, scouting company, agent, sex trafficker or human-organ harvester, it was nothing. I thought of poor Jay-Jay. Had his abuser visited a man like Tino? Had he paid a similar sum? Everything was possible in Africa.
Lois was not happy. She wore a scowl and her new Mohican-style haircut made her look rather fierce. ‘Everyone I meet is screwing me up,’ she said. ‘It’s annoying, tiring. I keep putting in money, putting in, putting in. I run this whole thing alone. I pay fees for so many boys. Fifteen! Trust me, I had saved a lot of money, I used to have a job. I’m jobless.’ She managed a laugh at that.
We had spent the morning watching three matches, all of them involving her teams – under-12s, under-15s and under-17s. The pitch was dreadful, the standard of play was remarkably good, the boys were careful with the ball and wreckless in the tackle. It was exactly as I had come to expect. The only incongruity had been the boy at the back of the line for the water bottles. His peers were wearing Arsenal, Chelsea, Juventus, Real Madrid or Barcelona shirts. He wore the colours of Oldham Athletic.
‘I used to work,’ Lois continued as we sat in traffic on our route back to my hotel. ‘I used to be a banquet manager for a hotel. I had a degree in hotel management. Maybe I need to go back to that . . .’ She waved away a boy who could have been no more than ten who was walking between the bumper-to-bumper cars selling toilet bleach. ‘I’ve been doing this five years. It is hard work,’ she added.
In those five years, she claimed, she had managed to move ten players to European clubs. I asked her to write down their names, ages now and when they moved. Seven of them had left Accra before they were 18, one was as young as 15. For a small academy manager like Lois that was, despite the probable breach of transfer rules, success. Well, it would be if she had received training compensation for any of them. She hadn’t. Nor was she likely to. Fifa gave clubs or academies two years after the transfer to claim the money they were owed and the time limit on seven of Lois’s players had passed. Making a fuss would be a most foolish thing to do: Fifa would investigate and discover the ages when the players were transferred. So Lois had to rely on the trust and goodwill of clubs and agents paying outside of the system. It was not forthcoming. ‘All these agents I deal with are all thieves,’ Lois said. The ‘h’ in ‘thieves’ was silent.
No wonder Hamid had labelled her in Larnaca ‘the most amateur president of an academy in the world’. She had laughed at that. But it was a laugh born from embarrassment and shyness. She told me she had only met Hamid the day before. Imari, Hamid’s talent spotter and the former footballer from Ivory Coast, had been the conduit for that meeting. Months later Lois regretted ever meeting Hamid. She can hardly have been surprised. She regretted ever meeting Imari, too.
‘Oh, that one,’ she spat as I mentioned him. ‘He was a friend of a friend of mine when I was at school in Cyprus. When one of my players was transferred to Cyprus, Imari and an agent helped with the transfer. They were paid some money, €50,000 and I never got my part. One stupid thing I did was thinking, “We’re friends from school.” I never had anything written down, no contract.’ Hamid, she said, had ‘played me’. She told me that she had sent three of ‘her best boys’, all over 18, to an agent Hamid had said could get them clubs in Greece. Almost six months later they had yet to play a single game.
‘Did I ever tell you about the trial game Hamid staged?’ I said. ‘Twenty or so Africans all in this tiny town in Cyprus. All of them had come over to play football. None of them were playing at all. What was going on?’
‘Something fishy,’ Lois said.
Her ‘best boys’ had run out of time on their visas so Hamid had contacted her asking her to send €3,000 to renew them so the agent could continue a search for a club. She paid. ‘I paid with my own money from my club,’ she said with indignation. I didn’t ask her why. I had begun to feel sorry for Lois. She had been outwitted by Hamid, although it was not a particularly canny manœuvre. Why would you hand over more money when the agent had failed to find a club in six months?
‘I won’t work with Hamid again,’ she said. ‘I told him that. I gave him a piece of my mind.’ She wobbled in her seat at that, as if it had re-inflated her pride. ‘He said, “Send me some papers saying you don’t need training compensation, they weren’t trained.” Of course they were trained. I need the training compensation to run the academy. I said they should send them back or they should let them leave and I can take them to Sweden. I have contacts there. I told them I wanted to take them to Sweden and they intentionally delayed that . . . the agent said he had a plan and we should wait. “So send the money for a visa renewal,” they said.
‘Do you know what they are telling me now? The only option for the boys to play now is for me to declare that they have never played before, declare them first registration. They’ve never played in Ghana. That’s so they can steal the players and so I can’t demand anything. I was confident in the boys I was sending, I sent them with the help of my sister . . .’
Ah, yes. The sister who worked for the Ghanaian embassy in Egypt. She was Lois’s Tino, it seemed. So if I wanted to move players for Scout Network, what could she do for me?
‘Normally she gets me letters from the office of the president [who] has asked for the embassy to give the player the visa. There are too many scammers around so that’s why I have to do that. Sometimes they would see a document and they think I’m moving a player for a scam. There’d be no problem moving a player under 18 so long as we have agreement with their parents. There is no problem with any of my team because I have adopted a lot of the boys. I get the rights from the parents, a letter signed by them. I say, “He is my son.”’
Lois told me she had just ‘adopted’ a 12-year-old. He was her next big hope, and when she talked about his ability as a footballer it was clear her earlier wittering about going back to the hotel trade was all talk. ‘They call him “Maestro”,’ she said. ‘I pay all his school fees. His parents are dead, so the family who have him know I want him to be a footballer. I pay 300 Ghana cedis [£50] per term. I want to invest a lot in that boy. I’m not going to pay anything to the family because one thing about Ghana is if you keep paying, they keep asking. I’m telling you, if he doesn’t listen to me he could end up selling stuff at the traffic lights.’
If Hamid and Imari had shown flashes of their true colours to Lois, I saw the full rainbow. Upon my return from Accra I thought it time to email them as myself, asking why they had discussed with John a scheme to move under-18s from Africa. Hamid, who ignored my question about why he was charging players for visas, threatened to hack my email so he could find out who, and presumably where, I was. Imari was more menacing. ‘You should feel the weight of hands,’ he wrote.