The Aspire Academy, based in Doha, is a futuristic, state-of-the-art training centre meticulously designed to hone the sporting stars of tomorrow. The ‘Aspire Dome’ is the largest indoor sports venue in the world. There are seven outdoor football pitches. Its sports science department, including altitude and biomechanical laboratories, are the envy of the football world. Its dormitories, for 255 students, offer cable TV, Wifi and en suite facilities. Manchester United and Bayern Munich, among others, have used it for warm-weather training.
Once completed, in 2004, all it needed was some footballers of its own to do it justice. Proper footballers. Qatari professionals and amateurs used it to train, but that wasn’t enough. So one of the most ambitious and controversial talent searches football has ever seen began three years later. The project was called Aspire Africa and targeted boys as young as 13 in Morocco, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Pelé, the Brazil legend, was drafted in to announce the programme. The press release trumpeted: ‘When testing starts at the end of May, six thousand staff will screen more than 500,000 boys born in 1994 in seven different countries across 700 locations. In the first phase the best 50 players from each country, identified in the selection process, will go for a week of trials in the capital city of their respective nations. The top three from each country will then come to Aspire for four weeks of trials and testing. From here, following a period of assessment and discussions with the families, the most talented players will be enrolled into the Aspire Academy.’
The Aspire programme actually screened 430,000. Three players were granted scholarships to Doha. The programme then expanded. The name was changed to Aspire Football Dreams. By 2014 the number of players that Aspire had ‘screened’ had risen to 3.5 million. Twelve countries in Africa have participated, but the continent has proved not to be big enough. So Aspire have branched out to Asia – scouting 13-year-olds in Vietnam and Thailand – and the Americas, in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Paraguay. Initially three scholarships to the academy in Doha per year were offered to the best of the best. But that has also proved not to be enough. A second facility was built in Senegal in 2007 which allowed the number of scholarships to rise to between 16 and 18 per year. When it opened all scholars went there instead of Doha. The scholarships lasted five years. In 2014 up to 70 boys were living and training there. It is understood that the families of the boys were paid up to £3,500 per year.
The aim was twofold: to give underprivileged youngsters an education that they could otherwise only dream of; and to produce professional footballers. Aspire, stated the website, was ‘the perfect bridge to professional football’. To that end in 2012 Aspire had brokered a deal to effectively buy the Belgian second division club, KAS Eupen. From the dusty fields of the ‘screening’ process, to final trials at the out-of-this-world Doha academy, to a full-time scholarship and then to Eupen, there was a clear route to stardom.
There was nothing secretive or mysterious about the Aspire programme. Nor was there anything ‘speculative’, as Mark Goddard, the TMS manager, told me. Most of the detail could be found on the Aspire website. The rest had been reported widely since the programme’s inception, with journalists freely given access to the academy itself and its operation. Indeed, Aspire were proud of their ‘humanitarian project’. Bora Milutinovic, the Aspire ambassador, informed the UN conference in Geneva, with relish, of the number of kids who had been ‘screened’ to ‘give opportunities to young players from developing countries to reach the height of football’. Some might say they were brazen. It was wholly, apparently unashamedly, at odds with Article 19.
In 2007 five European MPs wrote to Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, to express concerns about Aspire’s talent search. They called it ‘trafficking and exploitation of children’. ‘We seriously doubt that children under 13 years can make autonomous choices that have such an impact on their lives,’ they wrote. ‘The protection of children against commercial [interests] and football clubs is absolutely vital. We would ask you to do a thorough investigation of this case, to check the practice is compatible with the existing rules and to apply, if need be, appropriate sanctions.’
Blatter agreed. In reply, he wrote, ‘It [Aspire] is a good example of the exploitation of individual dreams and gives a misleading impression of providing access to education.’
A year later he had changed his mind. He had visited Aspire and was hosted by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir. The Al Thani royal family, which funded Aspire, had put sport or, more specifically, football at the centre of a plan to prepare Qatar for a post-gas economy. The Qatar National Vision 2030 policy document explained how football could help Qatar become an ‘advanced society’. The Aspire Academy and Aspire Dreams programme were early signs of Qatar’s ambition to colonise the game and realise the ‘Vision’. They also funded the International Centre for Sport and Security (ICSS), the self-proclaimed police force of world sport, who Jake Marsh worked for. These were considered ‘soft’ plays. Much harder was the power grab at Paris Saint-Germain: the club was bought by the state-owned Qatar Sports Investments in May 2011. Even Barcelona had received massive cash injections from state-owned companies in the form of corporate sponsorship. Then came the most formidable, and stunning, coup by the Al Thanis: the successful bid to stage the 2022 World Cup. It has, of course, since been sullied by allegations of corruption and bribery. Blatter, when he visited the Aspire Academy, had also been received by Qatari Mohamed bin Hammam, a member of the Fifa executive committee at the time. Hammam was the subject of an exposé by the Sunday Times in June 2014. It showed he had paid members of other football associations prior to the 2022 World Cup bid decision.
‘This was a wonderful opportunity to see Aspire and to discuss the important role of sport in youth development and education,’ Blatter backtracked. ‘The essence of football is education, because it teaches team-work, discipline and respect for your peers and your competitors. The fact that Aspire has been able to combine both education and sport in one institution is remarkable.’
One might argue that all that was truly remarkable was Blatter’s volte-face. The Sunday Times reported that Blatter had made a pact with the Qatari royal family to protect his own presidency from bin Hammam, who lauched a failed bid to usurp him, in return for ensuring they would not be stripped of the World Cup. It was, therefore, worth examining Aspire Dreams’ role in Qatar’s World Cup aspirations. Did it only exist to discover talent young enough to be naturalised to play in Qatar’s World Cup team, and thus improve their chances of not being humiliated? Such on-field humiliation would make a mockery of plans to see the country recognised as a centre of sporting excellence, and not least cause them acute embarrassment with their Arab neighbours. There was nothing new about that criticism. But what if their search for young footballers, which had been described as ‘child trafficking’, had been used to curry favour and win World Cup votes? And why had Aspire Dreams been allowed to essentially transfer minors from continent to continent despite it being against the rules? Both were damning accusations.
The small, sleepy Belgian city of Eupen, 15 kilometres from the German border, was a good place to start. It had a football team with a reputation for mediocrity, a stadium which could hold almost half the population, and a reported €2 million debt which threatened KAS Eupen’s existence. Most investors wouldn’t have touched the club. But for the Al Thani family and Aspire, KAS Eupen was perfect. They wiped out the club’s debt and pumped in a reported €4 million, including €200,000 a year for the youth team alone. In return, all they asked for was to run the professional part of the club, nothing else.
Aspire had a foothold in European football, a club where their most promising youngsters could gain first-team experience, improve and, eventually, perhaps excel enough to be spotted by bigger European clubs. In the 2014–15 season, Eupen had 12 players from the Aspire Dreams programme in their squad alongside six Qataris.
The head of the Aspire Dreams project, Andreas Bleicher, who had formerly worked for the German Olympic team, had originated the idea of controlling a European club in 2010, the same year that Qatar recorded its lowest ever Fifa ranking of 114. Bleicher hired Josep Colomer, the scout who was responsible for taking a 13-year-old Lionel Messi from Argentina to Barcelona. Together they recognised that after players left the academy, they could go anywhere in the world to play football, and they would have no say, or control, in their development. ‘We want our players to become the best in the world,’ Bleicher told the New York Times. ‘To do that, we needed a club of our own.’
The Aspire vision, from its 2007 origins, suddenly looked different. It had taken kids away from their families, something Article 19 had been written to prevent, but now it was actively looking to benefit from producing star players. It sounded very much like the ‘neo-colonial’ approach which had so enraged Blatter in 2003. Let’s remind ourselves of that quote: ‘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.’
Bleicher wanted a tight grip on the players. Each Aspire player had to sign a contract which included strict image-rights provision. ‘If a player gets really good, we can freely use his picture,’ Bleicher said. All players also had to use the same agent. His name was Lamine Savane. Savane had been the Africa director for Aspire since 2007 and had been responsible for setting up the academy in Senegal. It is worth repeating. A player was not free to choose the agent he wanted to represent him. He had to sign with an Aspire employee. Players were paid the minimum wage (just under €70,000) for a foreign footballer in Belgium. A proportion of this was paid to the academy to cover their accommodation.
Critics of Aspire argued that the control they exerted over the players, and the Eupen project, was evidence of a grand plan to naturalise players in time for the World Cup. A 13-year-old from Paraguay offered a scholarship in 2010 would be 25 and approaching the peak of his footballing lifespan in 2022. In reality, though, for a player to obtain citizenship he would have to live in Qatar for five years after the age of 18.
Dr Paul Darby, a senior lecturer in sport and exercise at the University of Ulster, who had researched African football labour migration exhaustively, publicly denounced Aspire Dreams. In 2008 he said he felt ‘very uncomfortable by the whole exercise’ and argued there was a moral problem with seeking to build a sports culture in one country by under-developing the sports culture of another. ‘I have a bit of an issue that the project is framed as humanitarian, rooted in a sense of altruism, helping kids in developing nations, and I think they use the term “empowering youth” on their website,’ he told me. ‘That’s, to be frank, bullshit and bluster. Ultimately they’re looking for athletes who can be naturalised and play for their national teams. And, if they get success in the game, that has all sorts of benefits in terms of Qatar’s place in the Middle East. That’s really what they’re at.’
Aspire had always strenuously denied that a stronger national team was the point. Bleicher, however, appeared to be more malleable in his New York Times interview. ‘Could it happen?’ Bleicher said. ‘I suppose maybe some of the players feel like they would want to represent Qatar, because Qatar helped them when their home countries did not.’
A former Aspire employee, who was part of the management team when Aspire Africa was launched, revealed to me (on condition of anonymity) that the project was not wholly philanthropic. We’ll call him ‘Mehdi’. He said, ‘The message was “we’re doing our bit”. The reality was that, when I was having off-the-record conversations with the other senior management team, it was all about a fear that the Arab children are much smaller, they don’t have the physical attributes that African players have. What they wanted to do was bring up the Qatari players by making them play against, and with, bigger, stronger, faster and better players because that would improve them.’
‘Was it spoken about that the Africans could play in the national team?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it was. But that was not unusual. We had Kenyan runners who had been naturalised. So it was there in Olympic sports, and Aspire was also an Olympic academy. It wasn’t just football.’
Qatar had form for the naturalisation of other countries’ sports stars. One of the first imports was a Bulgarian weightlifter, Angel Popov, who won a bronze medal in the 2000 Olympics under his Arab name, Said Saif Asaad. In a scheme that had been lampooned as ‘cash-for-gold’, eight track athletes had switched to Qatar between 2003 and 2015. Foreign-born players who held Qatari citizenship made up more than two-thirds of the country’s 16-man handball squad that won its first ever medal in the 2015 world championships, losing the final to France. What was interesting was that the tournament was staged in Qatar. Was that a precursor for the World Cup?
‘What you see happening in handball, you just feel it will happen in football as well,’ Mehdi said. ‘The ultimate goal is the 2022 World Cup.’ It has, to an extent, already started. Qatar won the 2014 West Asian Cup with a team that included Karim Boudiaf, of Algerian–Moroccan descent, and Boualem Khoukhi, of Algerian descent. Both had taken Qatari citizenship. In a friendly match against Algeria in March 2015, six of the starting XI were not born in Qatar. Mehdi said that naturalising players in time for the World Cup was not Aspire’s only ulterior motive. They wanted to produce a Messi, a superstar who could be sold for millions. A ‘best player in the world’, as Bleicher had admitted. It left Mehdi feeling ‘uncomfortable’. ‘There’s a lot more to it,’ he said. ‘Absolutely they wanted a Messi. That’s exactly it. The whole idea was there would be a return investment in the future, but that might take ten or 15 years [from now].’ It is understood that the Africa arm of the project had a budget of $4 million a year.
‘I thought it was unethical,’ Mehdi added. ‘Totally wrong. There was the educational aspect. The boys were being taught English and Arabic. But I think they struggled. They had not been to school much. And what happened to them when they were deemed not good enough? They were sent back. There was no support network. They were on their own again.’
Another fierce critic of Aspire was Phaedra Al-Majid. Al-Majid was the ‘Fifa whistleblower’ who revealed that Qatar had paid Fifa members to vote for them to host the 2022 World Cup. Al-Majid worked as an international media officer for the Qatar 2022 bid team before losing her job in 2010. She had retracted the allegations in a signed affidavit in 2011 but she insisted she was ‘coerced’ into changing her statement. The FBI had offered her protection after she said ‘threats’ were made against her and her family. ‘I’m convinced my phone’s bugged,’ she said, as an excuse for talking on Skype. Like Mehdi, Al-Majid said that Aspire Dreams was ‘disgusting and heartbreaking’ and ‘absolutely’ about naturalising talent. But her claim that the programme was used to gain votes for the bid cast it in a different light. ‘One of the things we promised Thailand was was a Dreams programme,’ she said. ‘That was a huge thing.’
Worawi Makudi, president of the Thai FA, was an influential member of Fifa’s executive committee – the same committee that decided where a World Cup would be staged. It has been widely reported that Makudi was under investigation by Fifa’s ethics committee for his conduct during the Qatar bid. In May 2011, Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the FA, gave evidence in Parliament that Makudi had demanded the television rights to a friendly between England and the Thai national team in return for voting for England to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Makudi tried to sue Triesman but failed because of immunity given to speakers. In July 2015 Makudi was given a suspended jail term by a Bangkok court for forgery in his 2013 election to lead his country’s FA.
‘There had also been criticism in Africa with what Qatar is doing with Dreams,’ Al-Majid continued. ‘They take the best, and the rest they leave. One of the things that was promised to African Fifa executive committee members by Aspire was that not only will we take the best players, train them for ourselves, but train them to play on their own teams.’
Al-Majid’s assertion that Thailand was offered an Aspire Dreams programme was backed up by a ‘corporate and social responsibility’ World Cup bid document that I obtained a copy of. It clearly stated that Aspire would ‘build a football academy in Thailand emulating the Aspire Football Dreams academy in Senegal’. It also suggested developing ‘a nationwide grassroots programme in Nigeria through Aspire expertise and local Nigerian organisations’. That is significant because Nigeria also had a vote on the Fifa executive committee.
It should be pointed out that of the 24 nations with delegates on the Fifa executive committee, Aspire Football Dreams operated in five of them. This was not lost on the Aspire Academy’s marketing and communications department which, reported the New York Times, produced a document that detailed how it could help Qatar’s World Cup bid. ‘Every country where projects are conducted should vote for Qatar,’ the proposal read. ‘Five votes could be directly rendered favorable via an influence from Football Dreams.’
The role of Aspire in offering incentives to voters was raised as a concern in a 430-page report by Michael Garcia, the former attorney for the southern district of New York, into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. It also found that Harold Mayne-Nicholls, Fifa’s then chief bid inspector, had asked in an email to Andreas Bleicher, head of Aspire, whether the programme could ‘evaluate and train’ his son and nephew. Aspire offered to cover the cost of Mayne-Nicholls’s son and nephew before having a change of heart. Garcia resigned after Fifa said the probe should be closed because of a lack of evidence of wrongdoing, refused to make public his investigation and then released a summary of his findings which he said were inaccurate.
Aspire were prickly, to say the least, when challenged about their project. Ward Abdallah, a media officer, wrote in an email to me: ‘From the questions you have addressed, [it] seems you have your pre-judgement already. To be more precise, we are not that interested . . . as it really appeared you don’t have any knowledge about our project although it is very transparent and published on our websites. I am sure you will not find any headlines here unless you really care about CSR [corporate and social responsibility] and helping young footballers.’
Aspire were invited to comment on the following allegations: the project gives a misleading impression of access to education (as initially alleged by Blatter), it was used to curry favour and win votes from Fifa members (in particular from Thailand), the ambition of naturalising players to represent Qatar was the reason for its philanthropic aims and, finally, there was no support network for boys who are returned to Africa. They did not respond to any of them. Qatari officials and Aspire executives have, however, consistently denied Football Dreams had any influence over votes, emphasising that it was a programme to help poorer nations and it provided limited benefit to Qatar.
Who benefits isn’t actually that important – be it the Qatari national team, KAS Eupen, the boys themselves or their families – what is crucial is that Aspire Dreams has paid no heed to Fifa’s Article 19, which has no exemption for registering foreign minors to an academy or amateur players. Aspire did respond to the allegation that they were involved with the trafficking of minors. They rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing. Abdallah wrote: ‘We have open books, you should have changed your angle but seems you don’t want to. There is simply no transfer of minors.’ He also said that, because they are an educational facility and the boys ‘don’t play organised football’, the rule does not apply. In other words, they are not affiliated with Fifa. From a strict regulation point of view that is correct. It appears a flimsy argument in the context of an ethical and moral debate.
But surely, in the case of strict regulation, the goalposts had been moved as soon as they bought KAS Eupen, who were, obviously, affiliated with Fifa? What Aspire was doing as soon as that arrangement was made was no different to Barcelona. Both were trying to produce players for their respective clubs. Aspire also use the same argument that Barcelona put forward in their case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The Spanish club said they were, first and foremost, educating boys in their La Masia academy: they were providing them with opportunities that they would have otherwise gone without. And if they became professional footballers and played for Barcelona, all well and good. The attitude was mirrored by Aspire with the ‘bullshit and bluster’ approach to humanitarianism. Article 19 has no exemption for education or humanitarianism. Aspire were asked whether their ‘bridge to professional football’ with Eupen was evidence that they held the rule in ‘low regard’. They did not respond.
What also intrigues is the link between the Al Thanis, the Qatari royal family, and therefore Aspire, and Barcelona. Lionel Messi is an Aspire ambassador. An Aspire Dreams XI plays Barcelona’s youth team every year. Senegalese Diawandou Diagne, who joined Aspire at 13 and went on to play two seasons at Eupen, signed for Barcelona’s B team in 2014. And the association runs much deeper. In 2011 the Qatar Foundation, the country’s charitable arm, paid €150 million to become the first sponsor of the hitherto sacred Barcelona shirt for five years. Then Qatar Airways paid just under €100 million for shirt sponsorship, as the Foundation’s agreement was converted to a more general corporate sponsorship. There should be no real reason, therefore, why Aspire and Barcelona appear to have been treated differently with regard to Article 19. Their academies have operated in the same way, extolling the same virtues and professing the same aims. To all intents and purposes, both are bankrolled by the emir. Yet Barcelona, of course, have not won a bid to stage the World Cup at the Camp Nou in 2022.
When trying to fathom why Aspire have not faced scrutiny by Fifa, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the governing body could not possibly tolerate another scandal involving Qatar. It will do nothing but further damage the credibility of the tournament if the host nation’s flagship sporting academy is charged, or investigated, with illegally transferring minors. Perhaps that’s why the Fifa press officer sounded panicked when I asked Goddard about Aspire.
Such an argument was given credence by Fifa’s reaction to another sordid encounter involving the Qataris. A report by Amnesty International found that migrant workers building Qatar’s 2022 stadia were ‘treated like cattle’. It found workers were victims of forced labour and lived in overcrowded conditions exposed to raw sewage and no running water. There was, as one would expect, worldwide condemnation. Except at Fifa. Sepp Blatter said, ‘It’s not Fifa’s responsibility.’
Article 19 was Fifa’s responsibility, however, specifically the Transfer Matching System. It is understood that despite Goddard’s protestations, the TMS team are well aware of the numbers of children Aspire has moved across continents to Qatar and Senegal since the launch of Aspire Africa. Fifa reject any suggestion that a blind eye has been turned to Aspire’s trade. A spokesman, when asked for a defence to the allegation, repeated that they did not have jurisdiction over Aspire which ‘is not affiliated to any of Fifa’s member associations … Fifa can only regulate activities within the scope of organised football.’ How long does it take to confirm Eupen operate within that scope? Slightly less time than to discover the link between the Belgian club’s owners and Aspire?
Still, it would be a surprise if the TMS were to file a case against them like they did Barcelona. ‘We don’t care who you are,’ said Goddard. On the contrary, Fifa appear to care very much.