‘Are you one of these people who thinks it’s a story about poor African kids? They run. They get to Europe and they run.’
It was an unequivocal answer to a question which, with unerring frequency, had demanded to be answered from the start of this journey. It had been the juggernaut on the horizon of a one-track road; a speck at first, clouded in the dust of the road, but over time growing menacingly bigger, the distant hum of the engine getting louder. My time in Accra had made it more prescient; the slums, the poverty, the desperation in the boys’ eyes, the rutted pitches, the willingness to break the rules. Seeing the West African football industry at its limp, faltering grassroots had brought a clarity. Then, of course, there had been Hamid’s boys, a platoon of them turning up in a small town in Larnaca for a trial game. Hamid had said all of them had overstayed their visas. The shenanigans with Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, his dubious relationship with Shinji, the lunch with the Lost Boys in Paris –fiddling with their expensive smartphones – and none of them prepared to play football at a level they considered beneath them . . . all had made an impression. After months on the road, cynicism and mistrust had taken hold. The juggernaut was unmissable. It was blasting its horn, bearing down.
At the outset, the intention had been for the story to be all about those ‘poor African boys’. They were victims who had compelling tales to tell. So the perpetrators had to be found, dissected and exposed to give those stories the context which they deserved. It was why Scout Network had been set up: to try to uncover the football people who had left this collection of disaffected young boys to rot. I got caught up in the emotion of it all at the beginning. I was on a quest to find the truth. I had tunnel vision. I was single-minded in the pursuit of vanquishing the traffickers.
It was inevitable, however, that the focus would have to turn on to some of the victims themselves. That juggernaut had just kept on coming. From Geneva to Larnaca, Paris to Accra, a faith had been slowly eroded. Cruelly, empathy, too, had taken a hit. Cold-hearted reason had taken its place. ‘Hang on a second,’ I thought, ‘a major part of this whole story is not right.’ The juggernaut was doubt. The question was: were these boys telling the truth?
Chief among my concerns was the actual explanation behind the football trafficking. There were two types, remember. The first saw an agent jettison the player after a failed trial. Understood. But the second made no sense. An agent asked families for thousands of pounds so he could buy the player an airfare, visa and passport and take him for trials to Europe. As soon as the boy left the departure gate, the agent was not seen again
Eby Emenike, the London-based football agent, admitted she was ‘puzzled’ by the scam. Jake Marsh, head of youth protection at the ICSS, could not fathom it, either. There was no logic. Why would an agent con a boy and his family for several thousand pounds, selling a false dream of footballing stardom, take him to Europe and then abandon him in a hotel room or at the airport? And never actually take him to trial at a club?
Think about it. Think about it in the context of Ben from Cameroon. He paid £3,000 to go to trials. From that £3,000 the ‘agent’ would have had to pay for his own airfare, Ben’s airfare, visa and get him a passport. He would have made, what, £500? Why not just take all the money and run?
After all, that is what happens with the ‘online scam’. Boys are made promises via email and harassed until they pay up. They don’t receive a visa or a passport. They don’t receive an air ticket. They don’t get on a plane. They don’t go anywhere. That, as a con, makes perfect sense. As does the first type of trafficking: a player has paid money for a trial but is cut loose when he fails. The second version was a contradiction. It also happens to be the most prevalent, the one a media hungry for injustice has devoured. And why not? It’s a classic yarn. Good versus evil. Weak versus strong. Poor versus rich. But could it be that the truth was stranger than the fiction?
Let’s change the context for a moment. Most of us have received emails, at one time or another, from someone claiming we have won the lottery in a foreign country. Nigeria, for example. Now, the anatomy of that scam might have been: to collect your prize, you need to send, say, £1,000 to release the funds. Misguided folks wire the money and never hear anything again. The equivalent in the example of the second ‘type’ of football trafficking is Mrs Smith sending the £1,000 and then the conman buying her an air ticket and visa and flying her to Nigeria. Then she hears nothing. What could the con artist possibly gain from spending all that money taking her to Nigeria? Nothing.
Yet it is that type of fraud we hear so much about – it’s the story repeatedly told by newspapers, magazines and television channels. And it was the main one Jean-Claude Mbvoumin had highlighted, earning exposure for his charity. The one boys all over Europe had told various social services.
‘They run. They get to Europe and they run.’ Those were the words of Darragh McGee. ‘That line about being “one of those people” and “poor African kids”? Someone said that to me when I started out looking into it. Your perceptions change. They run. It happens.’ He had lived in Accra and had worked as a football coach at academies in the city, including Feyenoord Fetteh, which would later become the West African Football Academy. He was an academic, a faculty member of the School for Health at the University of Bath, and had authored a paper on child trafficking in sport.
‘Of course it doesn’t make any sense,’ McGee said. ‘What sort of criminal operates that scheme? Not a very bright one. Not a very rich one, either. The fantasy of exile underpins the game of football in West Africa. You’ll hear of agents complaining they’ve had boys over with them and they’ve run. There were two boys last year. A French agent working in Cameroon went public, lamenting that they ran and they destroyed his reputation and he can’t do anything about it.
‘Stories abound about youth tournaments across Europe, even in England. Just recently, six members of a youth team from Cameroon bolted out of a hotel window the night before a tournament in Belgium, jumping into cars with Belgian plates on them. Did they turn up somewhere saying they’d been trafficked? Almost certainly.’
What McGee was saying was that, at the very least, some of the boys who had told Foot Solidaire or social services that they had been victims of the second type of trafficking – abandoned at a hotel or airport – may have been complicit. He was also suggesting that it was the supposed villains of the piece – the agents – who were victims. They were having their supposedly good names sullied.
McGee was not the only academic to have raised suspicions that not all was as it seemed. James Esson, a lecturer in human geography at Loughborough University, had explored the subject in a paper (‘Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe’) following nearly a year of research. He spoke to 20 boys in Paris who had been trafficked. Most of them he found through Foot Solidaire. One of them was Richard from Guinea who had given an agent €4,500 for ‘plane tickets and everything’. When he got to Paris the agent disappeared. Just like Ben had said, the agent had taken away his passport and visa. That is exactly what trafficking gangs do who want you to earn back money in the black market.
Esson made the point that it was wrong to assume that people who had been ‘football trafficked’ were ‘passive victims’ whose decision-making skills had been rendered ‘null and void’. He argued that because they had undertaken immigration independently of their parents they didn’t match the stereotype of a trafficked victim at all (Esson found that it was accepted for children to be moved from country to country within Africa on the say-so of their parents for schooling, to stay with relatives, to work). In addition, football trafficking victims had overstayed their visas and had no way of verifying their status as a child. ‘In the eyes of French immigration, they were simply male adults staying illegally in Paris,’ Esson wrote.
Another characteristic of an illegal immigrant at odds with a trafficked victim is one that did not want to go home. The boys Esson met, just like Ben, Sulley and Didier, did not want to return to Africa. If what had happened to them had been so terrible and life had become so intolerable, why not go back? In France, and the UK, government assistance was available for displaced people to be returned. In the case of football’s trafficked boys, the phrase ‘there was no place like home’ is taken literally. Esson found that they spoke of Europe as a ‘paradise’ in comparison to where they grew up. Indeed, Old Fadama, Accra’s slum city, is a hell on earth compared to the streets of Paris. Choose: broke and hungry in Old Fadama or Paris? There was always a possibility of ‘upward social mobility’, Esson stated, in Europe whereas the prospects at home were bleak and getting bleaker. ‘Life as an undocumented migrant in Europe is more preferable than returning to their country of origin.’
Still, few of the boys would readily admit that was the reason they were still in Europe. They instead preferred to talk about the ‘shame’ of going home, the ‘embarrassment’ at being seen as a failure or as someone who had been fooled. ‘Dominant accounts of football trafficking frequently attribute irregular football migrants’ disinclination to return to their origin countries to the shame their situation will bring in their country of origin, particularly as family members and the wider community often financed their trip,’ Esson wrote. ‘There is some truth to this claim, as all of the irregular migrants I spoke to in Paris had at one point or another felt ashamed and embarrassed by their situation. Many also suffered from bouts of guilt tied to a belief they had destroyed the lives of family members in their country of origin who had sacrificed to fund their passage abroad.’ Ben, Sulley and Didier, of course, insisted they did not subscribe to that view.
So, add the boys Esson interviewed to Ben, Sulley and Didier and you have a contradiction. Here’s another: the victim and the victim’s family believed that leaving home for Europe to pursue a career in football was a ‘viable livelihood strategy’. They were also well aware that there were risks involved. Both of these recurring themes were, surely, inconsistent with the self-reproach that the boys claimed they felt.
One 17-year-old Esson interviewed said: ‘Everything turns around football and there isn’t a single family in Guinea that doesn’t have a son that wasn’t pushed to play football, everyone thinks that if a boy is talented he can make it to a league in Europe and money will follow.’ It was as Samuel, the agent and my guide in Accra, had said. Even middle-class families were taking their sons to football training.
So when an ‘agent’ came calling, promising a trial at Paris Saint-Germain or Marseille, it was hardly surprising that families acceded to his demands. ‘During my time in Accra, I witnessed first-hand how young Ghanaian males’ desire to use football as a means to earn an income and help their family financially, alongside their family’s eagerness for them to do so, placed considerable pressure on players to do whatever was necessary to secure a trial abroad,’ Esson wrote. That desire and pressure led to people taking a gamble. Esson consistently found that although boys had travelled in expectation of them attending a trial, rather than a hope, there was still an awareness that all might not go to plan. Jordan Anagblah, the former vice-president of the Ghana Football Association, vividly summed up the risks that families took when he described how the father of a boy he had coached in his academy revealed an approach had been made to take his son to Europe: ‘There was a small boy in my team and the father came and told me, “Somebody is taking him to Belgium.” Whether he is going to kill him he doesn’t know, but because he has heard “football” and “Europe” he thinks his son will make money and be OK. “You don’t know these people, you only met them now in Ghana when they came to watch him play and you say you are giving your boy out for adoption? Nonsense!” But it is his child, he says. The man wants to adopt his son. What can I do?’
It was clear from that example that often within families who are impoverished or desperate to improve their stock in life, risk did not quite have the same negative connotations to you or me. ‘This is how the West African youth I encountered in Paris and Accra understood football migration,’ Esson wrote. ‘If migrating through football was indeed a risk, it was a risk worth taking.’
In summary, it was possible boys had travelled to Europe as ‘run of the mill’ immigrants aware that a trial at Paris Saint-Germain or Marseille might not be waiting at the other end. The cynic in me could not fail to notice the grumble of another juggernaut. Could it be then, that those ‘agents’ who had so generously organised for them to go to Europe for such a small profit, or in some cases surely none at all, had them ‘trafficked’ for reasons other than football?
Stewart Hall has been a coach for 30 years, five of them in Africa. He has, he said, ‘seen it all’, including the ‘online scam’ where money was demanded for the chance of a lucrative career abroad. There was a difference, though. It wasn’t boys who were the targets, it was the coaches. ‘Someone, somewhere,’ said Hall, ‘had worked out that there were many, many coaches out of work. They needed jobs, they needed money.’ Desperation. The ‘online scam’, whether targeting players or coaches, Hall said, had its roots in the oil industry.
‘The oil industry has always had a history of bogus jobs,’ he said, revealing that he had been educated about the trick by some of the oil-rich sponsors of a former club. ‘People recruiting to Nigeria, or places like that, for jobs which didn’t exist. They’d take you down the road of a job application, you’d send a copy of your passport, all sorts of information, and they’d get you on the hook by offering a very good contract. And all of a sudden right at the death when you’re waiting for an air ticket they’d send a request for something to do with a visa or something. It would only be $400–500 and you’d think, “Surely it’s not a scam, they can’t be making much, lots of emails coming back and forth, they’re going to a lot of trouble.” But they had 100 people on the same hook from all over the world and that $500 is suddenly substantial. And then that’s been replicated in the football scams.’
Hall had been an apprentice at Wolverhampton Wanderers but didn’t make the grade. He took his coaching badges at the age of 25, managed Halesowen Town, spent eight years at Birmingham City’s academy and then ‘saw the world’ with the FA’s coaching education system. He began to coach for foreign clubs and national sides. He was youth and first-team coach for Tanzania and national coach for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. He also worked in South Africa, South Korea, Canada, India and Zanzibar.
It was not until he worked abroad that he was targeted. Three times. Hall was offered a ‘bogus’ job in Benin with a top division club, coaching the under-12s and under-20s with Nigeria, and the Togo national team role. For each of them he received an email out of the blue and was asked to begin an application process. He never had a face-to-face interview for any of them.
‘The Benin one sticks out,’ he said. ‘They offered a fabulous job on an eight-month contract, which was the duration of the season, but the salary and win bonuses were fantastic. It was coaching AS Dragons – the top team in Benin. They took me all the way through the process, offered me the job and then said every foreigner coming in had to pay $500 for a safety certificate – that ensured you were registered with the police and that you’re on their radar in terms of protection if there’s any problems. I said, “You pay it and take it out of the first month’s salary.” They said that was impossible, “You have to pay yourself, to prove payment yourself.” I refused. I was in work at the time so I wasn’t desperate. I pulled out. At exactly the same time a friend had been offered a job in China. Same thing, same process. I told him, “If they ask you for money, pull out.” They wanted $500 for the coach’s association so he could be registered.’
Hall knew there was never any question he would have paid the money and then actually receive an air ticket, board a plane and fly to Benin, Nigeria or Togo only to be left stranded. ‘It was all about getting the money out of me,’ he said. ‘What you’re describing with the boys who actually go to these places doesn’t make sense. There’s more to it, of that I’m sure.’
Hall’s explanation was stunning. ‘The scouts or talent spotters go into the villages, small academies and they identify real talent when about 14 or 15. Before they have a club. So they give them football boots and a bit of kit. Then they introduce a person who is called “the groomer”, and then he gets in with the family. He gives them some money, takes that player to an agent and that agent fixes that guy up with a club in Africa.
‘He plays proper football, he’s highly talented, does well, and the agent sees his passage through to somewhere outside of Africa. Now, it might be the Belgian league, or England. But it’s harder to get into England. It might be Asia. But they get them out to the highest standard as possible. When they graduate to a senior team in that country, they then call in the favour. It’s match-fixing. Spot-fixing, like they do in cricket. A red card in the 22nd minute. All these betting syndicates make money. “You give away a penalty in the 15th minute.” It’s quite specific. The money involved is phenomenal.
‘Having worked in Africa for some time, to be honest, I don’t know any African players who would say no. I honestly don’t. I had an experience myself. I had a bribery scandal on my hands. My goalie and three of my back four were suspended for taking money to throw a game. I know those boys personally, worked very closely with them. They were and still are in a national squad, and I can’t honestly look anyone in the eye and say, “They didn’t do it.” That’s your problem. It’s so easy. Corruption is endemic. It’s part of the culture. They don’t look at it the same way. To get those kids on a plane to Paris, Madrid or wherever, it’s so, so easy.’
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Richard Hoskins had gone quiet.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m still here . . . I was just waiting for you to finish the story. What happens next?’
‘Nothing. That’s the point. They go to a city in Europe and then they’re just, well, left there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Extraordinary.’
Hoskins was a criminologist. He was best known for his work in trying to track down the killers of ‘Adam’, the six-year-old African boy whose severed torso was found floating in the Thames in 2001. It was known, grimly, as the ‘torso in the Thames’ murder and received widespread media coverage in the UK. The victim of a probable ritual killing, ‘Adam’ had been trafficked from Nigeria to Germany and then on to London. Hoskins was an expert in trafficking and African religion. He had been called as an expert witness in more than 100 criminal cases, most of them ‘voodoo’ or ritual killings.
‘We know “Adam” was trafficked through Germany, we know he was handled there, stayed for a short time and came in through the Holland to Harwich route. He probably wasn’t in London that long, maybe a matter of weeks. Why he was killed is still a mystery. The cases of kids I’ve been involved in who have been trafficked into Europe, often come through mainland Europe. There are always staging posts rather than direct.
‘The people behind the trafficking of Adam would most likely be involved in other cases of trafficking. We are sure of that, actually. There would have been a person whose job it was to procure a boy. A trafficking gang. That gang would take girls to Italy for prostitution as well. That type of thing.’
‘Would these gangs be using football as a lure to move children from one continent to another?’
‘Anything is possible,’ Hoskins said. ‘The example you’ve just given about kids paying money and then being abandoned is interesting. Well, I say “interesting” but “odd” is a better word. Traffickers are not kind or generous people. They’re dangerous, nasty people. They want something out of it and I would be surprised, very surprised, if there was not something more to it. Of course, I don’t have any experience of this football activity, but in the criminal cases I’ve been involved with there is evidence that gangs operate on many fronts.’
One possible reason for the movement of boys could be a child benefit fraud which had swept Europe. It is an issue Hoskins was responsible for highlighting, claiming that the UK was the child abuse capital of the world with gangs trafficking kids from every corner of the globe to be abused. Hoskins explained the anatomy of the crime: ‘A child is brought over and stays with relatives or friends. They will “adopt” or claim the child as their own. The child is registered for a school, triggering the benefit system, working tax credits and other payments. The child, though, might not ever actually attend a school. They’re being worked in the underage sex industry. As soon as registration is complete, the gang moves the kid to another school and repeats the process. There just aren’t the checks in place to stop it happening, and if any authority asks to see a child they have hundreds to choose from. They can lay their hands on fake birth certificates and passports anyway to convince people the child is real.’
This was a multiple-gain fraud. Money would flow straight to the criminal through repeated child benefit claims and from the child being worked in the sex industry. I asked Hoskins what he thought of Jay-Jay and his story, apprehensively nudging him about his passport being taken away in the hope that he would immediately say his story was legitimate.
‘You know the score with passports,’ he said. ‘They are given the passport for the journey but then taken off them again. In the case of prostitution they’re told they have to earn back loads of money to get it back. Jay-Jay’s story seems plausible. Interesting to use football as a lure. Clever. You can say to a boy, “Come to Europe, you have a skill in football.” But you can’t say to a girl who you want to take to Thailand, “Your body is your skill.” In the work I’ve done there is a lot of coercion, threats and rituals. So the child might be told, “If you don’t earn this money we’ll kill your family.” They are terrified. They are put under spells, they are cut, made to drink pigeon blood . . . In football, there are no threats made, no rituals, no coercion?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said. ‘But they could be keeping that to themselves . . .’
‘Interesting,’ said Hoskins. ‘Interesting but horrible, of course. Did the boy seem fearful to you? Did he manage to break out?’
‘Well, they let him go.’
‘They let him go? That’s unusual but, look, I don’t know the specifics of the case and, as I said, anything is possible.’
There are, of course, plenty of other reasons why a child might be trafficked to Europe. Anti-Slavery International (ASI), which has worked at national and international level in an attempt to reduce trafficking, said that it was hard to believe that some of the stories of football trafficking abandonment were true. The ASI’s Jakub Sobik said, ‘It could be benefit fraud, as you say. But there is more than one reason. They might be forced to beg and sell drugs as well as being brought here for child benefit fraud.’ The organisation had also reported there had been cases in France of victims being forced to claim social security benefits and giving the proceeds to the trafficking gangs. It brought us back to Jean-Claude Mbvoumin and Foot Solidaire. It was the charity’s job, according to Jean-Claude, to act as the middleman between the boys and those social services in Paris.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the numbers. From 2005 to June 2014 it was estimated there had been more than 1,000 cases of football-related irregular migration in Paris, and around 7,000 in France. That meant there had been, on average, 777 cases a year in France. Or about 15 a week. It is also worth reminding ourselves where those numbers came from. Foot Solidaire.
Of course, Foot Solidaire have already been discredited in these pages. But their role is worth examining. They wouldn’t be the first charity, or the last, to embellish a problem a little to justify their existence. Particularly a charity which had drifted in and out of existence through lack of funding.
For a moment, though, let’s give Jean-Claude Mbvoumin and his maths credence. That’s because Foot Solidaire had produced another set of startling statistics in 2014. It took some digging around to find them because they did not appear in the stories of the boys Foot Solidaire had offered to the media, but, according to Foot Solidaire, a massive 98 per cent of the football-related irregular migration cases in Paris concerned illegal immigrants.
If that number was to be believed, then it gave further weight to the argument that boys were complicit in their ‘trafficking’. To be an illegal immigrant you have to have done one of three things: travelled on the sort of fishing trawler that was washed up on a beach in Tenerife in 2007; travelled on a fake visa/passport; or overstayed your visa. I wondered how many of the 98 per cent went to Jean-Claude when their visa had run out?
It was also true that many of the boys Jean-Claude had found had told him that they had worked on the black market. It was, he said, their only way of survival. Jean-Claude had never made a secret of the fact that the boys were working in illegal industries, drugs or crime. ‘You know we have African solidarity,’ he told me. ‘They can work in the black market. People on the street talk. “Please help me.” We are talking about a section of people who have illegally entered a country and have worked in crime.’
As Richard Hoskins and Anti-Slavery International said, there were many cases of people being forced to do things they did not want to do. But, if that is true, then it is also possible that there are boys who have travelled illegally to Europe under the guise of football with the intention of working in the black market to improve their lot in life.
At this point it should be made crystal clear that there were legitimate cases of football trafficking. Jay-Jay, for example, was hoodwinked in the most horrible of fashions. And there were boys who genuinely believed that they were going to make it at the trial they were promised. They turned up with their boots, they gave their all and when the club was not interested, the agent had told them to ‘get lost’.
There is no gripe with them. Could it be, however, that those stories had been exploited? Exploited by the trafficking gangs themselves and the ‘solidarity’ in the African community. In each of those examples, everybody is a winner, bar the state, when a boy is told, ‘Go to Foot Solidaire, they can help you.’
The ‘abandoned’ boy has the perfect cover. Remember how scammers stole the names of agents from the Fifa website? Anyone trying to check the validity of a boy’s story would get nowhere. Sure, an investigator could contact the real agent and he or she would deny all knowledge. Puzzled, the investigator would dig further and discover the aforementioned anatomy. ‘Ah, it’s identity theft.’ They may have even checked with the only charity in the world set up to deal with football’s slaves. And Jean-Claude would readily attest authenticity. That gave a possible, and plausible, answer to another question which had grumbled away in the background. Why did Jean-Claude not hand over the names of each and every agent accused by his boys to Fifa, Interpol or the International Centre for Sport and Security or anyone who might help? Was it because it could have revealed the true nature of the ‘problem’? Or was it because he knew it was a total waste of time?
Having digested the numbers, the contradictions and taken on board the views of Darragh McGee, James Esson, Stewart Hall, Dr Richard Hoskins and Anti-Slavery International – all highly qualified to pontificate and raise more questions – it was difficult not to have become sceptical. To query everything.
Indeed, was it possible that when Foot Solidaire first raised awareness of the issue back in 2000, they actually caused an explosion in the number of complainants? And was it possible that those complainants had tried to claim benefits from the state once they had proved their status as ‘victims’ or ‘poor African boys’? It was not as far-fetched as it might seem. There was a precedent. ‘You need to go to Belgium,’ McGee told me. ‘There’s a guy you should meet.’