In 2010 the worldwide transfer market was described as a ‘jungle’, a lawless mass where money laundering, people trafficking, exploitation of minors, tax evasion, third-party ownership and pretty much every other brand of fraud and deception was rife. That portrayal came from Mark Goddard who, as the general manager of Fifa’s Transfer Matching System (TMS), which ratified all international transfers, was akin to football’s Tarzan. With a virtual machete, he had cut a swathe through the unregulated, unkempt undergrowth of a market which produced up to 30,000 transfer deals a year totalling more than $1 billion. Goddard, a no-nonsense Western Australian, was proud of his work. Via a Skype call he told me with all the chest-beating brio of a lord of the jungle that the TMS was the stellar registration tool for sportsmen: ‘It’s the best one on the planet . . . by a country mile.’ He had elongated mile for emphasis.
On the face of it, the TMS, a web-based system, is impressive. It is responsible for one of the most stunning regulatory rebukes in football history. In December 2014 Barcelona were handed a 14-month transfer ban for signing six players (between 2009 and 2013) from overseas under the age of 18 to their La Masia academy, which had produced the likes of Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Cesc Fàbregas. A breach of Article 19, trafficking of minors, a slave trade – call it what you want – Barcelona had been shamed.
Before Goddard and the TMS had finished with them, Barcelona were the behemoth which bestrode the game with apparent impunity. Thanks to their wealth, titles, vast global-support base and a carefully nurtured cultural and ideological superiority, the club was football royalty; keeping the proles in check with the outside of its left boot, gorging at the top table of the sport’s establishment, an embodiment of the sort of pre-eminent sense of entitlement present at the biggest clubs or teams in most sports.
This was what made the carpeting of Barcelona so significant. It was proof, Fifa believed, that it did not fear reputation.
Barcelona reacted as one would have suspected. Before their match against Real Betis in April 2014, they unfurled a giant banner which stretched to cover the first two tiers of the mountainous Camp Nou. ‘No Es Toca La Masia’, it read. Do not touch La Masia. The club president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, refused to recognise Barcelona had done anything wrong and insisted they would not be changing their policy. A statement read: ‘With all respect for the sports authorities, the club has expressed its utter nonconformity with the resolution.’
A lack of responsibility was a theme. Unicef, the world’s largest children’s charity, would not condemn Barcelona’s child-welfare policy either. But then again Unicef would receive $2 million a year from its association with Barcelona until 2016, and was the first organisation to be carried on the famous blaugrana shirt.
‘If you fail to follow the rules there should be consequences,’ Goddard said. ‘That’s what we’ve done.’
The rules were quite simple. Article 19, in case you needed a reminder, prohibited the international transfers of players under the age of 18. In 2009, Fifa amended the small print of Article 19 to ensure that clubs used the Transfer Matching System. For the first time since the rule was drawn up, Fifa were able to police it. Until TMS was launched in 2010 – it took five years to design, build and test – there had been nothing to stop clubs and agents behaving as they wished. International transfers had been conducted by the light of the moon; clubs or agents did the deal and agreed the paperwork. This was sent to Fifa who checked it and then sent it, often by fax or post, to the national association of the buying club. The ‘buying’ association would request the national association of the selling club to send them the player’s registration. Once it had been received, again by fax or post, the documentation would be sent back to Fifa, who would give the green light for an International Transfer Certificate (ITC) to be issued. It was during this arduous and chaotic process that corruption took hold. For example, a player might not actually exist and the transfer was purely to move money from one continent to another. Or a chunk of the transfer fee might disappear into the wrong bank account leading to disputes between clubs and agents which Fifa did not have the time, organisation or manpower to solve.
‘Football was without a practical way to make sure regulations were being followed,’ Goddard said. ‘If you’re asking other people to follow your rules but you have no way to check whether that’s the case or not then things aren’t working very well. That was realised when we went round the planet to roll the system out and started to see behaviour that was not actually allowed. But because there was no way of saying it was wrong or stopping it, they thought it was OK. It’s not like many clubs or associations were deliberately breaking the rules. They would do things and no one would say, “You can’t do that.”
‘Say you have a speed limit of 120 kilometres an hour and you put a sign up saying, “That’s the speed limit.” But if you have no way to check whether that’s being broken, eventually you might go and sit on the freeway, start checking and see people driving at 160 kilometres an hour. Now the sign is up and we’re checking. You now have an online real-time platform where both parties can see the status of the transfer at any point in time or anywhere they are on the planet. That’s a huge jump in technology from fax machines and a courier service. We can now count the number of transfers. No one had an idea how much money was involved [before]. We can also see the number of clubs who were active. All of this was previously unknown as it was being handled in an unstructured fashion on a club-by-club basis.’
For a transfer to take place, the buying and selling club must log in to the TMS’s online server and both input up to 30 pieces of data. These include the date of birth of the player, length of contract, bank details, the fee, how the fee will be structured, the currency, and who the agents or intermediaries are. If the data supplied by each club does not match, then the transfer does not go through. It can take as little as seven minutes.
‘Our record is 371 in one day, I think,’ Goddard said. ‘Once the data is correct then it goes to the member association and they are responsible for handling the international transfer certificate (ITC) process, so the computer supports the stakeholders. In no way does it make the final decision or validate the final situation.’
So what the TMS does is give a green light to the member association to conduct a transfer, having ratified that both parties agree on who is being sold, for how much and for how long. What it cannot do during the seven-minute online process is check whether the information provided by the clubs is legitimate. It means that the system is potentially open to abuse by collusion on the part of clubs or member associations, particularly with regard to minors.
For example, there is little to prevent two clubs ‘agreeing’ that a player is over 18 when he is not. Granted, the TMS is robust enough to demand that a grand deception is one of the only ways to fool it, but it is a loophole none the less. And, as I had discovered, there are people more than willing to try to get away with it. Christopher Forsythe, sitting by the pool at the Mövenpick hotel in Accra, said the TMS was no impediment to moving minors. ‘TMS over here?’ he said. ‘We are not into the system properly. We take care of them. Don’t worry about those areas. Every player we move we can get ITCs.’
‘Regardless of age?’ I queried.
‘Yeah.’
That offered a hint of collusion between the buying and selling clubs and the football association whose job it was to issue the transfer certificate. Nor could the TMS track transfers from the illegal academies who were not registered with an FA. The TMS did have a team of investigators who could demand to see any relevant paperwork or documents for players, such as birth certificate or passports, but when it is possible to employ people like Tino to get the documents required from his underworld connections, or Lois using her sister’s embassy connections for visas and letters of support, it is easy to fear that little can actually be done.
‘The lengths at which people will go to go round any system is extraordinary,’ Goddard said. ‘The options are endless. It’s human nature. There’s conflicting agendas, but the misrepresentation of information, forging of documents, these are the kind of things we encounter. We have a good success rate of determining whether the documents are accurate because we can follow up with the stakeholders. “Do you have this form? Is this your letterhead? Is this your signature?” That’s what we try to determine.’
Goddard admitted, however, it was hard to envisage the TMS making sure that the incidents of trafficking, like those suffered by Sulley, Ben or Didier, would be a thing of the past. For a start, no regulations needed to be met to take a child for a trial. If that trial was successful, only then would they need to satisfy the system: ‘Does it prevent it from happening completely? It would be naïve to think any system is perfect but over the last year we’ve proved we take things very seriously in using the platform to make sure the rules are being followed. It’s a global situation. You are dealing with immigration topics, political instability in countries which are causing people to move, and nations that are dealing with the topic from a different angle. So it’s much broader than saying an under-18 is moving for football only. Are they a refugee? Are they seeking political asylum? Are there wars going on? It’s a big thing.’
As big a ‘thing’ is changing attitudes within football. Despite there being a better understanding of Article 19, clubs are still trying to sign minors, whether legally or illegally. The legal route involves asking Fifa for an exemption. There are three exceptions to the rule: when the player’s parents move to the country where the club is located; when the transfer takes place within the European Union or European Economic Area; and when the player lives less than 100 kilometres away from the club. The TMS investigators might be called upon to ascertain whether documents are legitimate with reference to the first exemption: ‘One of our messages was, “Please don’t look past the current rule.” If they’re under 18 they’re not meant to go anywhere. That’s the rule. That was lost. There was always a want to not follow the rule so we really did reinforce Fifa’s stance which is, “If you’re under 18 stay with your family unit and when you reach 18 do what you want.” I think those kind of principles had been lost and clubs and associations needed to be reminded of their responsibilities. You do realise that exceptions are, by definition, an exception. There’s a very good reason why the exceptions are there, but there’s a very good reason why football has the rules there in the first place. You don’t want football being used to break up families, or under-18s moving to other parts of the planet because it can potentially go very wrong.’
There was evidence, however, that exemptions were encouraging clubs to try to sign minors, which rather contradicted Goddard’s confident stance. Goddard said ‘thousands’ of applications were received every year, and there had been a marked increase in the number in recent years. In 2011 the TMS recorded that there were 1,500, rising to just under 1,800 in 2014. Most disconcerting is that the overwhelming majority of those cases involved moving amateur players; the naïve, the impressionable, the dreamers. The clubs, conversely, saw potential and profit. In 2014, amateurs accounted for 89.5 per cent of applications for exemptions. This was a consistent trend. In 2013 it was 89.3 per cent, 90.1 per cent in 2012 and 90.2 per cent in 2011.
The reason for clubs making so many applications for exemptions was simple: they were almost always granted. In 2014 only ten per cent were rejected, and since 2011 Fifa had never dismissed more than 12.5 per cent. Which heavily suggests that either Fifa are not as serious about the protection of minors as they said they were, or clubs and agents have been employing the tactics talked about by Forsythe or Didier’s ‘agent’ in Argentina, who asked his mother to fake a death certificate so he could sign for a club. The majority of exemptions from 2011 to 2014 were granted because of parents moving to a country for other reasons than football. In 2014 that excuse was used in 42 per cent of successful applications for exemption from Article 19. In which case, how robust is that exemption? Call me a cynic but, given what I’d heard and seen from Geneva to Paris, Larnaca to Accra, what is there to stop a club who desperately want to sign a 16-year-old from West Africa – reckoning he is the next big thing – from making sure his parents have a job at one of the board of directors’ firms? Absolutely nothing. It is, of course, a slightly dubious tactic, but it is the one exemption that makes a mockery of Article 19. It gives the clubs a get-out clause. All they need to do is pull strings, call in a favour and get the kids’ parents a job. And if a club really, really want a player, it seems they would get him – as evidenced by the application statistics.
In 2014 Spain was the country that made the highest number of applications for exemptions to Article 19, a whopping 352 compared to the next best, Portugal, with 168. Only 48 failed, which was two fewer than the previous year. English clubs made 112 applications for exemptions, with 23 being rejected.
The numbers from Spain made Barcelona’s failure to follow the rules even more extraordinary. Surely a club with such might, sway and resources would have been able to convince a Fifa transfer sub-committee that they satisfied the Article 19 exemption? The answer to that is hinted at by the nature of their defence against the charges. They blamed an ‘administrative error’, argued they had done nothing wrong under Spanish law, and suggested skulduggery. ‘Why we got singled out first and not others is a question for Fifa,’ said Josep Maria Bartomeu, the club president. ‘It all came about from an anonymous complaint surrounding [a] player. We don’t know who made this official complaint, they don’t want to supply this information. But it’s clear that there are other clubs involved.’
Furthermore it appeared Barcelona tried to convince the Court of Arbitration for Sport they were a special case because La Masia, their much-vaunted youth academy, was exactly that. It had been a production line of talent, so why should Barcelona change it? Messi, the jewel in their crown, signed at La Masia at just 13 from Argentina. Students played football for only one hour and 45 minutes per day, spending the majority of their time at school. It was this claimed dedication to the education and development of children, some from impoverished backgrounds, that formed the foundation stone of their argument. The headteacher of the school gave evidence, as did Fabrice Ondoa, an 18-year-old goalkeeper from Cameroon who had been at La Masia since he was 13, and Elohor Godswill, a 19-year-old right-back from Nigeria who arrived at the age of just six. The pair talked about the life-changing opportunity that La Masia had provided and how they had been rescued from a future of poverty and strife. Neither Ondoa or Godswill was on the list of players Barcelona had been accused of illegally signing.
As it happened, Barcelona were not ‘singled out’. In 2014 Fifa announced that Real Madrid, Atlético de Madrid, Valencia CF and Rayo Vallecano were also under investigation for similar breaches. Emilio Butragueño, the Real Madrid director of institutional relations, said Fifa had asked for information about 51 underage players signed by the club since 2009. One was thought to be the Japanese player Takuhiro Nakai, who arrived from Tokyo in 2013 to play for Real Madrid’s under-12 team. ‘We will continue to work with Fifa in every aspect they ask of us. We are absolutely relaxed about the procedure involving Real Madrid,’ said Butragueño.
Other clubs have been sanctioned too. The first was FC Midtjylland, the Danish side. In 2007, FifPro, the worldwide players’ union, filed a case against them and the Danish FA for importing 17-year-olds from a feeder club in Nigeria, FC Ebedi. Midtjylland had also argued, unsuccessfully, that the players had gone to Denmark to study. Two years later Fifa banned Chelsea from signing players for two transfer windows for inducing Gaël Kakuta, a 16-year-old from RC Lens, the French club, to break his contract. Didier Roudet, the Lens general secretary, said Chelsea ‘offered the player’s family a lot of money to leave’. Chelsea’s case was not a breach of Article 19, but it showed football’s regard for the welfare of minors.
When a club – nay, an institution – the size of Barcelona deems itself to be above the law, or perhaps unaware of it, it highlights the challenge Fifa, and football, has in trying to effectively impose sanctions to protect children. So far, two attitudes have been all pervasive: first, that a club will sign players under 18 if they are good enough, at any cost; and, secondly, ‘If we’re big enough, we can do what we want.’
‘That exists everywhere,’ Mark Goddard said. ‘Some people believe they’re not subject to the rules, there are exceptions that should be granted, and they can do what they want.’ He made clear at this point that he was not referring to Barcelona, but continued: ‘We don’t care who you are, you will use the system as it is intended, which is consistent with creating integrity and stability. You can have arrogance, humbleness, do the rules apply, do they not? It’s everywhere. We’re not that interested in what their personal opinions are. We’re into communicating what the rules are, what they need to do and not do.’
It was tough talk from Goddard and taken in isolation one could be convinced by such combative soundbites. Fifa didn’t care how big a club was or how powerful. If they broke the rules they would, as he said, ‘face the consequences’. It all sounded very honourable. But there was a problem. What about the Qataris? What about the Aspire Academies in Doha and Senegal, which have been taking kids as young as 13 from their families since 2007? What about the ‘screening’ process they boasted about on their website and at that UN conference in Geneva?
‘Aspire Academy,’ Goddard said. ‘What about them?’ The Fifa press officer who sat in on our call then interrupted. He sounded panicked: ‘Just one thing . . . we scheduled for this to last an hour so we can limit this to another ten minutes. And not to just go into specific examples because it’s not in the scope of the conversation.’
‘Aspire move kids at 13,’ I said. ‘Why are they allowed to do that?’
‘Um . . . I . . . can’t say . . . I’m gonna take your point and say that, that’s what happened,’ Goddard said, for the first time sounding unsure. ‘If you’re telling me that is what’s happening then you could provide some information and we’re more than happy to—’
‘It’s not a secret,’ I interjected. ‘It’s on their website. It’s well documented that that’s what they do.’
‘Right.’
‘Are you uncomfortable about 13-year-olds going to Qatar?’
‘Our compliance unit does visits with various member associations and in those visits we go through how to handle the minors’ situation. But short of starting a formal investigation this is all speculative statements which, to be frank, I’m not sure the information you’ve provided is accurate or not.’