I knew one boy who wanted to go home. ‘My life can’t continue like this,’ Amane said. ‘I have nothing here. In Africa things were easier for me.’
The Amane I had met in Geneva was no more. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his face looked grey. That day his Atlético Madrid shirt had glistened under the lights from the television camera crews, now it was dull and faded. And there was no joking (‘Willy Swing!’). No smiling.
‘At home I didn’t have anything to worry about, I had no problems,’ he said. ‘Here, there is always something. Nothing is happening with my football. I don’t have the contacts to get a club, so it is useless. So I want to go home. Yeah, soon I will be going home.’
Home was the Ivory Coast, where he lived with his uncle. He had been born in Bamako, Mali, in 1994, but his parents had sent him away because they believed he would have better prospects further south. For four hours a day he cleaned shoes. He earned the equivalent of five pence per shoe. ‘There were some customers who gave more. I washed the shoes, waxed them. I enjoyed it. I would put my money aside.’
It was his uncle who decided Amane should try his luck as a footballer in Europe. ‘I liked football,’ Amane said. ‘I was an attacker. He thought I could make it as a footballer.’ But it was not his dream. Amane would watch the European leagues on television for enjoyment, not for inspiration. ‘Ronaldinho [the Brazilian] was my favourite player. I thought it would be good to play like him. But my uncle managed everything. It was his idea that I came [to Europe].’
Amane’s uncle paid a human trafficker to take him to Spain when he was 16. He cannot remember how much money changed hands but it was likely to be around £1,500. ‘I was smuggled in,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘It was complicated. I had no visa, no passport.’ It had begun with a drive in the back of a van from the Ivory Coast to Morocco. He couldn’t remember how long that part of the trip had taken, and he seemed irritated when I asked why. ‘I was asleep,’ he said. ‘If I knew that when I came to Europe people would ask for all these things I would have written it down.’ In Morocco he was put on a boat. Amane was one of the thousands of illegal immigrants who had risked their lives on the migrant boats which had set a perilous course for Europe.
‘There were about 30 others on the boat. We waited in the ocean for one day until it was night so we wouldn’t be spotted. Sometimes it can be longer than that, it depends on the type of boat you go on. Ours was quite small and we had a leak and we had to get the water out. We took turns getting the water out. It’s traumatic when the water is coming in. Some people were going crazy. They couldn’t cope. Maybe they thought we would sink. The wind was strong. I wanted to keep my head.’
I asked Amane whether he was scared. He laughed. ‘The thing is I didn’t realise that I was going by boat. No one told me. I was just following the instructions, what they told me to do. I didn’t have time to be scared.’ Those instructions included putting his birth certificate in his sock. ‘So if you drown they can identify you.’
Amane did not know where his boat had docked but, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it was most likely to have been the Canary Islands. In 2010, the year he had been smuggled, there had been 2,246 ‘detected’ illegal migrants entering the islands by sea. Amane was going to Bilbao to train at a soccer school. It had been arranged by an agent his uncle had contacted. He spent two months there before going to Paris.
He trained with four clubs, including Paris Saint-Germain, who told him that they couldn’t sign him because he was a minor, but that he would be able to train with them if a parent or guardian could vouch for him. ‘I said to them, “I have my agent,” he said. ‘So he came and voilà, I trained there for three weeks, maybe a month.’ This was a different version to the story he had told the media at the conference in Geneva. I only discovered this after I had met him for a second time, when I contacted a journalist who had interviewed him. Back then he said the agent had driven him to the Paris Saint-Germain training ground, told him he would pick him up later, only to abandon him. It was another inconsistency, another contradiction. ‘I haven’t heard from my agent since after I left PSG,’ he’d said.
He lived on the streets for a week in La Défense, the Paris business district, and was told about Foot Solidaire and Jean-Claude by another African he met. He was now attending school, had a flat and received €180 a month in benefits payable to minors who could prove they had been victims of trafficking. But not for much longer. ‘I turn 21 in a few months and I will not get that money because I’m no longer a minor. That’s why I’m going home.’ His plan was to take a ferry from Spain to Morocco, a 35-minute journey, which costs around €50.
‘If I knew it was going to be like this I would never have come,’ Amane moaned.
‘Like this?’ I said. ‘What’s so bad?’ Amane received money from the state, an apartment and he was sent to college.
‘The way football is here.’ That was his gripe. That he couldn’t find a club, forge a career. He thought it made him a victim.