When Ibrahima wasn’t in school or skipping class to work, he was playing soccer. He started playing barefoot in the courtyard of his family’s home, running around with his brothers and whatever they could come up with for a ball, usually rags or plastic bags tied together with string. His mother would sit in the shade and watch the kids dribble around plastic laundry tubs under lines filled with drying clothes. As Ibrahima got older, his obsession with soccer only increased. His mother could barely get him to sit down for a meal without hearing protests that he didn’t have time because he needed to be out on the field improving his game. She couldn’t even get him to stop playing when he was sick and should be recovering in bed rather than running around in Ziguinchor’s heat and suffocating humidity. “I would tell him to stop playing football, and he would say, ‘No, it’s my life,’ ” said his mother.
Luckily for Ibrahima, he had an uncle, Amadou Traoré, who lived around the corner and decided to start one of Africa’s many informal neighborhood soccer schools. The kids trained on an uneven dirt field in front of a local primary school, where they lashed the ball past rickety wooden goalposts while trying to avoid a large pair of trees that dominated one side of the pitch and a concrete building that jutted into the other. Boys who weren’t playing sat in a row on a concrete walkway outside the school or perched themselves on a wall on the opposite side of the pitch, their skinny legs dangling over the edge. Girls wearing brightly colored dresses and long, flowing headscarves sometimes got pinned against the wall by the run of play as they tried to cut through the field.
Ibrahima showed up at Traoré’s soccer school one afternoon when he was 8 years old and demanded to play, but his uncle told him he wasn’t big enough yet and would have to sit and watch. Ibrahima unhappily took a seat and kept his eye on the game. After a few minutes, he marched back over and defiantly told Traoré he was better than the kids on the field. Once again, his uncle told him to sit down. “He said, ‘You are so small. You cannot play football here. They are going to hurt you,’ ” said Ibrahima. This time Ibrahima simply ignored him and took the field. Even though he was playing in cheap plastic sandals, not proper soccer cleats like many of the boys, he quickly proved his uncle wrong. “Once he saw how I was playing, he said, ‘OK, you can come train,’ ” said Ibrahima. Even at that age, he was a natural goal scorer and would go on to become the best player the school ever produced.
Ibrahima (right) posing with a teammate from his soccer school in Ziguinchor.
Years later, when Aspire contacted Traoré to work as a Football Dreams coordinator and told him the academy was looking for the best 13-year-old boys Senegal had to offer, he knew exactly which kid had the best chance of making the cut. This was 2008, the second year of Qatar’s massive talent search. Ibrahima had grown like a weed and was no longer the little kid who first showed up at Traoré’s school. He now stood nearly six feet tall and was lanky and strong. Traoré asked Ibrahima to give the tryout a shot, and he agreed, even though he had never heard of Qatar.
But when the day of the tryout arrived, Traoré looked around the sandy public field in Ziguinchor where it was being held and saw no sign of the young boy. “Where on earth could he be?” thought Traoré. “This was the chance of a lifetime.” It turned out a friend had borrowed Ibrahima’s cleats, and he was frantically trying to track him down so he could use them at the tryout. He finally succeeded and took off at a sprint to make it to the field before the tryout ended.
Traoré was relieved to see him run through the gap in the concrete wall that surrounded the field and pressed Ibrahima to throw on his cleats and jersey as quickly as possible. The striker did as he was told and didn’t disappoint when he took the pitch. He quickly scored two goals and caught the attention of the Spanish scout who had traveled to Ziguinchor to watch the tryout while Colomer was holding trials elsewhere in Senegal. “The scout told me he hadn’t seen talent like this anywhere in the country,” said Traoré. There was little doubt Ibrahima would be headed to Dakar in a few days’ time to compete against the top players found across Senegal for a chance to attend the final tryout in Qatar.
Colomer may not have been at Ibrahima’s initial tryout in Ziguinchor, but he had been to the town before. In fact, it was where he first dreamed up the idea for a massive talent search in Africa while working as Barcelona’s youth director. Colomer traveled to Senegal in 2005 on a pair of fateful scouting trips at the invitation of Lamine Savané, the gregarious son of a government minister who was working as a sports agent in Dakar. The two of them traveled to several of Senegal’s major cities, where Savané arranged a series of games so Colomer could look for talented young players. It was an eye-opening experience.
During one of the sessions in Dakar, Colomer spotted a kid named Serigne Abdou Thiam who hadn’t even reached his teens but wowed the Spanish scout against a group of much older, bigger players. Colomer invited him to Barcelona to play a tournament with one of the club’s youth teams. The team won, and Serigne Abdou was a big reason why, said Savané. That got Colomer thinking about what kind of talent he could find for Barcelona in Senegal if he could cast his net even wider. “Savané put around 50 players in front of me, and I found one who was very good,” said Colomer. “I started to think to myself that if among 50 players, there is one very good player, what can happen with 1 million players?”
But it was the second trip to Senegal that really got the creative juices flowing. Colomer and Savané made the long journey south from Dakar to Ziguinchor. They stopped at several cities along the way, and Colomer grew more and more impressed by the level of talent. Senegalese kids from the ages of 13 to 20 zipped around in front of him trying to catch his eye. “When Colomer came, he was like, ‘Wow!’ He was even more impressed than expected,” said Savané, who would later become the Senegal country director for Football Dreams.
Of course, Colomer knew there was talent in Africa before he got on the plane. He only needed to look as far as the Camp Nou, where the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o helped Barcelona win the league in 2005 with 25 goals. It wasn’t the fact there was talent in Senegal that impressed Colomer, it was the sheer quantity of it. “I saw the potential of the players there,” said Colomer. “It was amazing.”
Colomer witnessed this firsthand because he was doing something that most European scouts weren’t: traveling outside Dakar looking for skilled young players. Most stuck to Africa’s capitals, if they came at all, and were often shown older players at the major clubs. Or they relied on tournaments where Africa’s youth national teams played. There were a couple reasons for this. Traveling across Africa as Colomer was doing was difficult and took both time and money. Also, transferring players under the age of 18 to Europe from Africa and other countries wasn’t easy. FIFA had placed extensive restrictions on the practice, although they weren’t ironclad. Many European clubs pushed the boundaries on the rules or simply broke them. That would get some into trouble later, including Barcelona.
One of FIFA’s goals was to crack down on the illicit trade in young players by unscrupulous agents in Africa. They regularly dupe underage kids by claiming they can get tryouts with top European clubs in exchange for money and then disappear with the cash. Those who do make it to Europe often find themselves abandoned when the tryouts fail to materialize or they don’t make the team. Some end up living on the streets, either because they don’t have the money to go home or can’t face the prospect of returning a failure. It’s a tragedy for them and their families, who often pay thousands of dollars in the hope that their son will be the next Drogba. FIFA has tightened its restrictions over time, but it hasn’t stopped this abuse.
Some in the soccer world have criticized FIFA’s rules as being too heavy-handed, saying they are preventing young African players from getting a chance to train with reputable European clubs. It’s often extremely difficult for an 18-year-old African kid to slot into a major European team because he hasn’t received the same level of training as players from that club’s
academy, who have spent years practicing there.
There aren’t that many high-quality academies in Africa offering the kind of training a player might find in Europe. The most famous is run by Ivory Coast’s top club, ASEC Mimosas, which produced stars like Yaya and Kolo Touré. Others include Diambars and Generation Foot in Senegal and Right to Dream in Ghana. The shortage of top-notch academies is mainly driven by a lack of resources, a problem exacerbated by corruption at all levels of African soccer.
Several European clubs have set up their own academies in Africa over the years, but many have failed. Critics say the missing ingredient was often adequate knowledge of the local soccer scene and how much it differed from Europe. The absence of a large academy infrastructure helps explain why only four of the Guardian’s top 60 young players worldwide in 2017 were from Africa. It has also contributed to the failure of African teams to live up to expectations on the international stage.
Pelé famously predicted in 1977 that an African nation would win the World Cup by the year 2000. It probably seemed like a safe bet given the continent’s passion for soccer, the number of kids playing in the street, and their motivation to use the sport to improve their lives. But it hasn’t happened. The farthest African teams have gotten in the tournament is to the quarter-finals: Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002, and Ghana in 2010. What’s driving this underperformance? Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski looked at this question in their book Soccernomics. “To win at sports, you need to find, develop and nurture talent,” they wrote. “Doing that requires money, know-how, and some kind of administrative infrastructure. Few African countries have any.”
Most African kids train at the thousands of informal soccer schools that dot neighborhoods across Africa, under the guidance of coaches who often have no formal training and very few resources. The situation at major African clubs can be somewhat better, but they haven’t historically targeted kids much younger than 16 years old. Also, these clubs can miss talented young players who live outside the major cities where the clubs are located because youth soccer in Africa is much less organized than in Europe.
Savané and his partner George Sagna, who was one of the first Senegalese to play professional soccer in Europe, realized all this. They knew that if European teams wanted to see the real talent Senegal had to offer, they must look at younger players outside the major clubs. They believed that if they traveled across Senegal to look for talented young kids, especially at the small soccer schools that dot almost every neighborhood, they would find undiscovered gems who could be trained to play at the highest levels in Europe. “The best players are playing on their local teams or their school teams, not necessarily in the clubs,” said Savané.
These were the kids they were showcasing for Colomer in Ziguinchor and other cities across the country. But they were operating with very limited resources. In essence, the process consisted of Sagna tapping his contacts around the country for talented players and then traveling personally to see them. Colomer wondered what would happen if they went much bigger, canvassing the country in an organized fashion to uncover the best young kids Senegal had to offer. If he had been impressed by the players assembled by Savané in a piecemeal fashion, imagine what they would find if they left no stone unturned. “If you have the chance to find the best young kid in Senegal, he must be unbelievably good! Imagine if you got to see all of them!” said Savané.
Colomer’s mind was spinning with the possibilities of what he had seen as he jumped into the car in Ziguinchor for the 12-hour return trip to Dakar. He chatted excitedly with Savané and Sagna as they made their way along bumpy, rutted roads. They passed through the lush green landscape of the southern Casamance region, cut through the Gambia, which juts into Senegal like a crooked smile, and made their way past the many baobab trees that dot the road to Dakar. They likely passed barefoot kids playing soccer in the dirt beneath their nubby branches. Along the way, they mapped out a blueprint of what it would take to conduct a blanket talent search in the country.
Upon arrival in Dakar, Colomer took a short rest at his hotel before reuniting with Savané for a grilled fish dinner at the city’s most famous live music venue, Just 4 U. “Even in the car from the hotel to dinner, Colomer was saying, ‘We have to find a way to do this! It would be unbelievable!’ ” Savané said. They arrived to find the joint jumping. Dakar is a musical hothouse and has produced one of Africa’s biggest stars, Youssou N’Dour. The distinctive mbalax music he popularized in the 1970s, combining percussive Senegalese drumming with jazz, soul, and rock, has spread far beyond this concrete metropolis nestled next to the Atlantic.
But Colomer and Savané weren’t focused on the music. They were captivated by their scouting idea. “We were crazy excited!” said Savané. They stayed out until 2 a.m. talking, raising their voices to be heard over the music. At one point, Savané got worried they were simply indulging in fantasy. “I said to Colomer, ‘Take it easy. Maybe we are just dreaming and don’t know what we’re saying. We have to find someone to talk to, explain, and get feedback,’ ” said Savané. They ran the idea past Savané’s father, Senegal’s industrial minister, the next day at lunch to make sure they weren’t crazy. “My father said, ‘No, it’s not crazy. There is existing demand, but some talent is being missed,’ ” Savané said.
What Senegal and many other African countries lacked was the organization and resources to fully tap into this talent pool. Colomer and Savané had addressed the first issue by coming up with a blueprint for the process. But it was unclear where they could get the resources. At this point, they were just focused on Senegal. Extending the talent search across Africa seemed too outlandish to even contemplate. The only groups that seemed to have the cash that would be needed were major European clubs like Barcelona. But it was unclear if the plan was too ambitious even for them. Plus, they might be excluded from doing it altogether because of FIFA’s restrictions.
As Colomer boarded his flight back to Barcelona, the dream seemed like it might be out of reach. “We assumed we couldn’t get the money,” said Savané. “You were conditioned to thinking this is so expensive that it wouldn’t make sense.”
A fabulously wealthy Qatari sheikh would soon take care of that problem. He had seemingly endless riches but not the talented young soccer players necessary to assemble the kind of world-class national team he had always envisioned. Soon their paths would cross, and Colomer would discover that there was indeed someone rich and ambitious enough to carry out a program as massive as Football Dreams.
In the spring of 2008, a few years after Colomer made his Qatari connection, the big striker Ibrahima jumped into a car with a local coach for the 12-hour drive from Ziguinchor to Diawandou’s old academy in Thiès. That’s where Colomer was holding the tryout for the top 50 players found in Senegal during the second year of Football Dreams. Ibrahima began raining in goals as soon as he arrived and was certain before the final Senegal trial was even over that he was headed to the last tryout, in Doha. “The final was so easy for me because everybody knew they were going to pick me,” said Ibrahima. That included the kids he was competing against who approached him in the cafeteria between sessions. “They would say, ‘Don’t worry, they already picked you,’ ” said Ibrahima. “They told me that I was the best.”
Making it into Aspire would be life changing for Ibrahima. The families of the boys who entered the academy received a stipend of several thousand dollars a year. That money would take the burden off Ibrahima’s mother and older brother and could, of course, be a tiny prelude to the riches he would earn if he made it to a top European club.
Not long before Ibrahima left for Doha, he heard that his brother Sekou was thinking about taking a risky journey to Spain to find a better job to support the family. At the time, thousands of West Africans were using small wooden boats with single outboard motors to cross the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco. Hundreds had already died when their boats capsized, and Ibrahima told his br
other it wasn’t worth the risk now that he had the chance to join Aspire. “Ibrahima told me, ‘Don’t go,’ ” his brother said. “ ‘I’m going to the tryout now. I think when I’m at the academy everything will change for the family.’ ”
That was the dream of all the boys Colomer plucked off dirt fields across Africa and took to Doha. They were different sizes and played different positions, had different skills and personalities, came from different countries and backgrounds. But all hoped Football Dreams would be a life-changing opportunity. Diawandou and Bernard would get the first shot, along with the other boys found during the first year of Football Dreams. Ibrahima would soon follow.
PART TWO
TRAINEES
CHAPTER 4
The Academy
With its smoothly curved walls and high-tech metallic sheen, Aspire Academy looks like a giant futuristic space station that somehow ended up on Earth. It radiates a brilliant royal blue and cool gray, the academy’s official colors, which seem especially intense in Doha’s bright desert sunlight. Even major clubs like Bayern Munich and Manchester United that come to train at Aspire are often dazzled by its facilities, especially the academy’s signature feature: a massive air-conditioned sports dome marketed as the largest of its kind in the world. The dome is about the width of the Eiffel Tower lying on its side and required more steel to build than the iconic French landmark, about 7,000 tons. Its 290,000 square meters of floor space house an Olympic-size swimming pool, a regulation soccer field, an athletics track, eleven tennis courts, and many other sports facilities.
The Away Game Page 7
