The wind had been surprisingly chilly for a spring night in Geneva. I hunched my shoulders, looked at my watch and cursed Jean-Claude Mbvoumin. There had been no sound or sight of him for hours. ‘He should have been here by now,’ I grumbled, eliciting an odd look from an elderly couple on a stroll. Surely he would show up this time?
I had been in the same situation the previous winter. Hunched, clock-watching, cursing. The venue was the Gare du Nord in Paris. Jean-Claude had invited me so he could explain more about the growing problem of football trafficking and what his organisation, Foot Solidaire, was doing to combat it. Since early 2000 Foot Solidaire had supposedly been at the forefront of the fight against football trafficking. They knew everything. They had made contact with thousands of boys who had been victims. Jean-Claude had appeared in numerous articles in magazines and newspapers across Europe. He had spoken about the problem for a BBC documentary. He had engaged with politicians and football administrators. He had travelled the world. A meeting with Jean-Claude was the obvious starting point for me.
When in Paris I had sent copious text messages asking where he was. I called and called. No answer. Eventually a woman answered. She said she thought he might be in Paris but couldn’t be sure. ‘He is supposed to be meeting me!’ I said. ‘I discussed this with him yesterday.’ There was no sympathy. ‘Well, obviously he has left his phone here so I don’t know how you’re going to contact him.’
I was not entirely surprised. A contact who had met him suggested he was unreliable and disorganised. Jean-Claude and I had tried to meet in London previously but he had failed to respond to messages.
I roamed Paris for a few hours, had a steak dinner and called my contact. ‘Who is this guy? What’s his problem?’
‘You know something?’ he said. ‘That’s really weird. When I tried to meet him the first time I had the exact same thing happen. No show at the Gare du Nord, unanswered calls and then a woman picking up and saying he’d left his phone behind.’
If Jean-Claude’s inability to keep an appointment had any bearing on the success of Foot Solidaire, it was not difficult to understand why it had drifted in and out of existence since its inception. There had been a Paris office at the beginning but that had been shut down. Jean-Claude worked from home. Foot Solidaire then moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. Roger Milla, the former Cameroon striker and star of the 1990 World Cup, had been a ‘roving ambassador’. He hadn’t roved for some time. Foot Solidaire had survived on handouts and partnerships. When it had money it was active. When that ran out, it wasn’t. The African Union and France’s national Olympic committee had supported the charity in the past. So too had Fifa. In 2008 the two combined to contribute to the International Conference on Young African Footballers, which focused on the protection of underage footballers. Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, proudly announced that Foot Solidaire would receive ‘full support’ from football’s governing body. The Fifa website still claims that Foot Solidaire is ‘backed’ by the world governing body.
But on the eve of the World Cup in South Africa, Foot Solidaire said Fifa broke its promise. In a letter to Blatter, Jean-Claude wrote: ‘Since August 2009 Fifa has not followed this up, arguing budgetary constraints and delaying its response until December when it finally abandoned the project. If this campaign is not instituted we fear that after the 2010 World Cup the trafficking of young minors will not only be a long-term feature of the African sporting landscape but indeed it will become worse: it will be institutionalised.’
Foot Solidaire, however, did not have an unblemished record in maintaining agreements either. In 2013 it signed a deal with the International Centre for Sport and Security (ICSS). The ICSS was a sort of self-proclaimed police force for world sport, funded by the Qatari royal family. Its aim was to be a one-stop shop for all manner of sporting security and corruption, from stadium safety to match-fixing and, of course, trafficking of minors. Foot Solidaire was to provide vital information to ICSS investigators to enable them to go out in the field and track down the traffickers. Foot Solidaire was able to provide, in some cases, the names, telephone numbers and email addresses of rogue agents and scouts because they had hundreds and hundreds of testimonies from trafficked boys. The ICSS received little.
The partnership had started well. Jean-Claude had written to the ICSS in one of his first communications suggesting they conduct ‘sting’ investigations to root out offenders. He also provided a neat summary of the problems which needed to be solved to rid football of the scourge: ‘Rogue agents produce false clubs’ invitations and request the payment of fees for visas,’ he wrote.
The most affected countries we know are Cameroon, Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana. It is organised into networks. What’s needed is to trap these people, asking, for example, to meet them or pretending to be a young player’s parent.
We may not entirely trust [African] FA officials. Many of them are involved in most of the drifts (issuing false international transfer letters and sometimes false player passports, confiscation of Fifa training compensation due to small academies, falsification of ages and identities of young players). Several officials . . . are owners or shareholders of academies, [a] conflict of interest causing widespread abuses. In addition, FA officials, pretending they are independent from public authorities – which themselves do tend to take control of the football business – are rarely concerned with issues related to the recruitment of young players.
It’s a taboo subject, and anyone who mentions the trafficking of young players is seen as an enemy. That is the reality. In African FAs, corruption is still present at all levels, particularly in countries whose teams regularly participate in the World Cup. Serious levels of mismanagement, conflict of interest, abuse of power, negligence, financial irregularities and possible criminal activity are daily recorded. But always impunity under the umbrella of Fifa, in the name of Fifa. These people [are] never worried, they also have political support at the highest level.
Only an independent entity could alert all stakeholders via information and awareness directly towards young players, academies and families, but also police forces when necessary.
Combating rogue agents and trafficking in Africa means clearly going against some FA’s officials. This is how they’ll see it. But it must be done.
It was good stuff. It was odd, though, given his knowledgeable and impassioned summary that nothing came of the agreement with ICSS. Jake Marsh, their head of youth protection, had been tasked with liaising with Jean-Claude, but rarely did he reply to emails or phone calls. ‘I never heard back from him,’ said Marsh.
Perhaps Jean-Claude wanted to concentrate on bigger suitors. The United Nations had thrown its might behind Foot Solidaire in 2014 and the organisation had been rejuvenated. It was ‘back from the brink’ again. Jean-Claude had organised ‘The Right Paths to Integration and Success for Young African Athletes’, a conference to be held on Young African Footballer Day at the UN. It was backed by names and organisations which were meant to impress: Wilfried Lemke, special adviser to the UN secretary-general on sport; Thorbjørn Jagland, general secretary of the Council of Europe; the Permanent Mission of Italy to the UN; the African Union Permanent Delegation; and the International Organisation for Migration.
There had also been plans to stage a charity match. Jean-Claude had hoped that Samuel Eto’o, George Weah, Yaya Touré and even Roger Milla, reprising that ‘roving’ role, would lace up. But that idea was shelved. Jean-Claude had asked the ICSS for $25,000 to sponsor the game. They said no. Still, Eto’o, Weah, Yaya and Milla were ‘expected to participate’ according to the invitation. I was in Geneva, not hopeful of a glimpse of those footballing stars but of the elusive Jean-Claude Mbvoumin.
At least on this occasion I had managed to speak to him. ‘I will call you back in five minutes,’ he said. He did not. ‘I will be there in two hours.’ He wasn’t. Then he ignored my calls. I called on the hotel phone so he wouldn’t notice the number. He picked up straight away. ‘Yes, yes I am coming. Sorry, sorry.’
Jean-Claude arrived by car, early evening. There was a young African boy with him and a man in his fifties who introduced himself as Mathieu. Jean-Claude shook my hand, and apologised profusely. His eyes darted left and right. He had a lean face and a distinct, chiselled jaw-line, which made his mouth and nose protrude as if he was always craning forward. He had a keen look about him. ‘This is Amane,’ he said, pointing to the African boy as we walked back into the lobby, ‘we must do our interview now, yes? I am sorry. I am very busy but we will sit down and talk, I promise, I promise. But first . . .’
He turned on his heels and beckoned me, Amane and Mathieu back outside. He wanted help carrying boxes of leaflets and books for the conference. As we were unloading the car, a Japanese boy got out of a taxi. ‘Jean-Claude?’ he said. He looked about 18 or 19, greener than the hillsides of Lake Geneva, and pissed off. Jean-Claude was supposed to have collected him from the airport. Jean-Claude and the Japanese boy spoke in French. Amane appeared to know him and gave him a welcoming pat on the shoulder, which seemed to appease the new arrival. Jean-Claude, Amane and the Japanese boy went to check in at the hotel. It was called the Hotel Century, part of the Best Western chain. It was not the Hotel President Wilson. Remember that. It is important. The Japanese boy was called Shinji. That’s important, too. He and Amane went up to their room on the other side of the hotel.
I sat down with Jean-Claude in the lobby to begin the interview. He then said he had to go back to the airport because he had forgotten someone. ‘Was it Shinji?’ A snide dig. He didn’t understand what I said. He said he would be back in half an hour and I should wait.
Mathieu, who was originally from Cape Verde but lived in Paris, sat with me. He told me about Amane. He had come from Ivory Coast when he was 16. He made the trip by road to Morocco and then took a perilous passage on a migrant boat to Spain. ‘These kids, they risk their lives and for what? Why don’t they stay where they are and make the best of it? They work so hard in Europe. I have seen kids work so hard. But they are not prepared to do that in their own country.’
‘So Foot Solidaire is helping Amane?’ I asked.
‘The French,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively, ‘they are taking care of him now. Place to live, you know. I’m just a volunteer . . . we’re all just volunteers.’
An hour later than he said, Jean-Claude returned. He booked more people into the hotel. One was from a film crew. He took them up to their room, telling me he would be back in five minutes. Mathieu went with him. I didn’t see Jean-Claude again until 1 a.m. ‘It is getting late now . . . we can do it at seven tomorrow,’ he said. We did. But we spoke for only eight minutes before he had to go, telling me to travel to the conference with Mathieu, Amane and Shinji.
Amane was a scamp. He had a constant smile on his face and was beside himself at the prospect of visiting the UN. He found it hilarious that I could not speak French. Shinji, whose English was average, tried to act as interpreter and each still-born conversation was greeted with a snigger and wide grin from Amane. When we arrived at the UN, Amane managed to speak the few English words he knew. ‘You get me club? In England?’ He raised his eyebrows as if to suggest that it should be a formality. Shinji gave him a jokey rebuke. ‘He is writer. For magazine. Not football,’ he laughed, revealing a crooked, gummy smile. Amane sniggered again and thrust his hands into his pockets. Amane was to be the star of the show that day. He courted media attention and conducted scores of interviews for press and television. They loved the cheeky chap from Mali. He was wearing a brand new Atlético Madrid shirt. It still had that ‘fresh out the packet’ sheen. His hair had been neatly sculpted into a mohawk. He was bright eyed and bushy-topped. Amane was Foot Solidaire’s poster boy.
Shinji, who was 20, was a mystery. He wasn’t a footballer. At least he said he wasn’t, if he understood my question correctly. Communication was difficult but he seemed to say that he was a football student. I took this to mean he was studying sports science, or somesuch, at a French university. He was a Japanese cliché: meek and mild and unnecessarily polite. He was always bowing and scraping. He never spoke unless someone spoke to him. And that wasn’t very often as everyone else, apart from Amane, in the Foot Solidaire entourage seemed to ignore him.
There were passes for Yaya Touré and Samuel Eto’o at ‘Pregny Gate, Access Door 17’ but not for me, Amane or Shinji. Touré and Eto’o would not be attending after all. We had to go through security, fill out forms and then have each of them stamped by an official who looked like he could make life uncomfortable if he didn’t like what he saw. This was the UN, after all.
Amane needed help filling in his form. He strained his neck to look at mine, as if he were trying to cheat at an exam. Shinji became increasingly anxious. He had left his passport in the car and his bottom lip looked as though it was about to wobble. But he didn’t speak up. I had to ask what was wrong and then take him to Mathieu and explain for him.
I sat between Amane and Shinji in the conference hall. It was a grand affair. The orators were raised on a stage, they puffed out their chests and lifted their noses in importance as the throng below waited for their wisdom. They were flanked by the ubiquitous blue flags of the UN. Amane was like a schoolboy in assembly, unable to sit still or listen. His English was almost non-existent but he was able to lampoon William Swing, the director general of the International Organisation for Migration. ‘Willy swing!’ he laughed, poking me in the ribs. Swing, in the gravelly American tone you might hear in a movie trailer, had been reminding everyone how a migrant boat had recently sunk off the coast of Italy leading to a great loss of life. The timing of Amane’s joke was off. It would prove to be a rather crass afternoon. My investigation would begin with confusion and contradiction after contradiction. Little did I know at that point that it would set the tone for the whole story.
Jean-Claude had invited the chief executive officer of ICSS Europe, Emanuel Macedo de Medeiros, to speak. Given that Foot Solidare had failed to provide the information the ICSS required, and they in turn had refused to sponsor Jean-Claude’s match, there appeared to be little credibility to Medeiros’s appearance.
Jérôme Champagne, at one point a candidate for the Fifa presidency race in 2015, corrected Jean-Claude, who had spoken about corruption within African football associations. ‘I rebel against this caricature that the African federations are very badly organised,’ Champagne said, ever the politician. It would not have been a vote winner to have agreed with Jean-Claude but it was surprising to hear him disagree with a man whose specialist subject was football trafficking. Such hubris was a caricature, surely, of the man he once hoped to displace, Sepp Blatter.
Most crashing of all was the presence of officials from Benfica FC and the Aspire Academy in Qatar. Gonzalo Gomes boasted how the Portuguese club had 1,600 participants in four grass-roots programmes in Angola, three in Cape Verde, and 11 in Mozambique. There was also an academy in Guinea-Bissau. ‘Eusébio came to us from Mozambique,’ he triumphed, before reeling off a long list of names they had also ‘inherited’ from Africa. Perhaps I had missed the point of the conference but it seemed to be sending a mixed message. ‘We want to reduce the amount of boys leaving Africa to go to Europe, but if they’re good enough, hey, let the big clubs trade them.’
In Benfica’s case, just like every other club on the planet, their aim was the pursuit of talent for financial gain. They wanted to find stars and then sell them or improve their team’s chances of winning trophies. And therefore make money. Money was the root of the problem in all of this, surely? So they should not have been there.
It may have been only the start of my journey but at least I knew that European clubs coveted the African footballer: he was faster and stronger and cheaper. Everyone knew that. The Bosman ruling in 1995, which had allowed out of contract players to move clubs for no fee, had given clubs free rein to target players from the continent. This was the source of the problem. In 1997, for example, there were only five players in England’s Premier League qualified to play for African countries. By the 2014–15 season there were 39. Since 1997, 177 had appeared. There had been a sharp rise across Europe of the import of Africans after Bosman. There were fewer than 200 playing on the continent before 2011 but in the next two years 625 more were signed on professional contracts.
And what of the Aspire Academy? In 2008 Jean-Claude had compared their operation to ‘modern-day slavery’. Aspire had targeted 13-year-olds in Africa from as early as 2007, hoping to turn them into professionals. It was part of their mission statement on their website. Bora Milutinovic, who worked as an ambassador for Aspire, had subscribed wholeheartedly to the confusion that afternoon. Milutinovic said Aspire’s objective was to ‘give opportunities to young players from developing countries to reach the heights of international football’. It was something of a fall from grace for Milutinovic who, with Carlos Alberto Parreira, was one of only two men to have coached five different teams at the World Cup. He spoke with the bluntness one would expect from such an experienced manager. ‘From 2007 to 2013 3.7 million children have been screened!’ Screened was the term Aspire liked to use to describe the process of talent scouting in Africa, Asia and South America before selecting the best and taking them to Doha or Senegal to groom them for careers in the game.
Then there was Shinji, who sat dutifully, quietly through the whole charade, listening intently to the translations through his headphones. At the end of the conference, when Jean-Claude was having his picture taken by the UN flag and the rest of speakers were congratulating one another, Shinji stood alone. He was anxious again, waiting for something to happen. ‘The game?’ he said to me. At first I was unsure what he meant, then he showed me his boots. He thought he would be playing in the charity match that Jean-Claude had abandoned. With Eto’o and Touré.
‘There’s no game,’ I told him, almost incredulously. ‘No. No. No. Finished. All talk. No football.’ He sighed and sank his chin into his chest.
Jean-Claude, Shinji, Amane, Mathieu and other Foot Solidaire volunteers headed off into the Geneva night to celebrate their success at a restaurant. Jean-Claude had escaped again. I should have been perplexed. But there was clarity. A bunch of suits in a conference room were rarely capable of revealing what lurked under the fingernails of grubby hands. You had to examine them yourself. Jean-Claude wouldn’t talk to me, but he had given me an idea. All I needed to put it into practice was a little knowledge on how and why footballers were being duped by the traffickers.