The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Many people were also worried that the real goal of Football Dreams was to improve Qatar’s national team by finding talented Africans who could be given Qatari nationality, just as the country had done in the past. This suspicion intensified when Qatar won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup. The country had never qualified for the tournament before, but as the host, it was guaranteed a spot. That meant there was a risk Qatar would be humiliated by soccer’s giants on its home soil. To many observers, filling out the country’s team with players found through Football Dreams seemed to be a logical way to try to prevent that from happening.

  Bleicher, who oversaw talent identification at Aspire, said in January 2008 that the academy didn’t require the Football Dreams kids to play for Qatar, but indicated they might end up getting passports. “We leave it up to them,” said Bleicher. “A player might be here for five years, and if he wants to play for Qatar, we would not say it is impossible.” Many people disapproved of the idea of Qatar skimming off the best African talent for its national team and worried the country could simply dangle enough money in front of the kids to make it happen. “In the beginning, most people thought they were choosing the players to play for Qatar,” said Diawandou’s old coach, Bousso Ndiaye.

  Mbvoumin arranged a meeting with Blatter at FIFA headquarters in Zurich in June 2008 to express his concerns about Football Dreams and the trade in underage African players more broadly. But by that time, the FIFA president had changed his tune under pressure from Qatar. The flip-flop came after Blatter visited the country in February 2008 at the invitation of the emir, Sheikh Hamad, and Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari who served on FIFA’s powerful executive committee. Blatter visited Aspire during his trip and surprised reporters by praising Football Dreams only months after he had criticized it. “This visit has provided me with the opportunity to learn about the Aspire Africa program firsthand, and I have to say that I am very relaxed and supportive about the project now that I understand how it works,” said Blatter. Mbvoumin’s concerns were sincere, but he was no match for Qatar’s growing influence in the soccer world. Football Dreams was here to stay.

  The Football Dreams kids were still in limbo when Blatter visited Aspire, since Colomer and Bleicher were still exploring the idea of setting up a satellite academy in Africa. They also needed to convince Sheikh Jassim that the kids were good enough to make it worthwhile. But the players took care of that themselves about a month later. At least that’s how some people in the program tell it. All the sheikh needed to do was see them play one match, but not just any match. This one was against arguably the world’s greatest soccer power: Brazil.

  The kids were understandably a little daunted. Brazil had visited Aspire several times before, and not surprisingly, no academy team had ever defeated them. “Everybody said Brazil was going to beat us,” said Adama, the Ghanaian defender. But Aspire had never had a team like this before, and the coach, Michael Browne, thought the African kids could give Brazil’s Under-16 side a run for their money. “Michael told us, ‘They are very strong, very big, but you have to work hard and score against them because every time Brazil comes to Aspire, they beat us,’ ” said Bernard. “ ‘We have to break that record.’ ”

  Bernard took the field with Browne’s words ringing in his ears, dressed like his teammates in a blue and white striped jersey emblazoned with Aspire’s logo, a capital A with silver wings on a royal blue background. He certainly had his work cut out for him in center midfield. Lining up opposite Bernard, dressed in Brazil’s iconic yellow and green, was Philippe Coutinho, who would later earn the nickname the Little Magician when he became a star for Liverpool and Brazil’s senior national team. Fellow Ghanaian John Benson stopped by to watch the match at one of Aspire’s outdoor fields and was impressed by how Bernard was holding his own against one of Brazil’s biggest youth stars. “Bernard was competing very well,” said John. “You could see that they have one player, and we have one player: Bernard and Coutinho, great competition.”

  Bernard and his teammates poured on the pressure and conjured up a moment of magic in the first half. Arabo Bakary, a midfielder from Cameroon’s far north who had to travel 17 hours to make it to the tryout in the capital, threaded a pass through Brazil’s defense. Running onto it was Jasper Uwa, a searingly fast striker who convinced Colomer of his skill back in southern Nigeria despite playing on completely waterlogged fields. He latched onto the ball and managed to slot it past Brazil’s keeper, prompting wild celebrations among the Football Dreams kids. As the first half drew to a close, the score remained 1-0.

  When the Football Dreams kids resumed their battle in the second half, Brazil’s coach threw a new striker on the pitch. The thin, baby-faced player meant nothing to the Football Dreams kids at the time. In fact, it was his first call-up to the national team. But it wouldn’t be long before the world knew his name: Neymar. His silky footwork and nose for goal were already attracting attention back at his Brazilian club, Santos. He would eventually move to Barcelona and help form one of the most fearsome attacking tridents in history, alongside Messi and Luis Suárez, before moving on to Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain for the highest transfer fee in history.

  Neymar and Coutinho had never played together before traveling to Doha but now linked up effortlessly and ran at the Football Dreams kids. Bernard and his fellow countryman Hamza sprinted like madmen to smother their creativity in midfield, while Diawandou, Adama, and the other defenders tried to maintain a solid back line. Again and again, the Brazilians came at them, but the defense held firm. So did the goalkeeper, John Felagha.

  Colomer first selected John after testing his skills personally on a rain-soaked field in the Niger Delta. The Spanish scout kept him at the pitch after the tryout ended and fired shots at him that skipped off the water at unpredictable angles, forcing quick reactions as John slid around in the mud. Colomer lost track of the number of times he fired the ball at the goal, probing for a weakness. But he remembers how many times he scored: none.

  Neymar and Coutinho had just as little luck getting the ball past the Nigerian keeper. “That was the best game I ever played,” said John. The Brazilians never found a way through, and the Football Dreams kids held on to win 1-0, a huge victory. They now enjoyed the reputation as the first Aspire team to ever beat the Brazilians.

  It’s easy to imagine Sheikh Jassim watching the Africans beat soccer’s golden boys and realize Aspire was really onto something with Football Dreams. That’s how Forewah Emmanuel, a Football Dreams staff member from Cameroon, tells the story. However it played out, Colomer got his wish: an academy in Africa for the kids who wouldn’t be staying in Doha. It was the chance for him to build the soccer school of his dreams with a pool of players he believed was more talented than any he had ever encountered, Colomer’s own African La Masia. All that was left now was to announce who was going where.

  The kids all stayed in Doha until the end of May, and Aspire waited until they were packing up their rooms to head home for the summer before notifying them of their fate. Michael Browne got first dibs on deciding which kids would be based in Doha since the primary purpose of Football Dreams was to improve the Qatari players. That meant Bernard was staying put, along with fellow Ghanaians Hamza and Adama. Colomer would have to watch his African Messi bloom from afar. Aspire had originally planned to keep only three kids from the first class in Doha, but Browne added the Nigerian keeper John as well after his performance against the Brazilians. They would get the chance to train in an environment they couldn’t have imagined a few months earlier.

  Diawandou would be leading the group of players headed to Senegal with Colomer. He had impressed Browne during his time in Doha but was left off the list to stay. Perhaps it was his ankle injury at the beginning of the tryout. Whatever the reason, Diawandou was disappointed. Staying in Qatar was certainly seen as the bigger prize among the boys. They didn’t know exactly what the academy would be like in Senegal but were sure it wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular as
Aspire. At least Diawandou would be on his home turf and could help many of the other boys adjust to life in a new country. They were saying goodbye to Aspire’s air-conditioned dome and manicured fields, but at least they were keeping their captain.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sent Off

  Bernard looked up toward the sky and panicked. He was back in Doha following summer vacation and was supposed to be at the academy by 6 p.m. curfew, but the darkened sky and lit street lamps indicated he was running late. He set off at a sprint, dodging Qatari men wearing white robes and headdresses and women in black abayas and veils, taking care not to bump into the Filipino nannies pushing baby carriages behind them. He passed rows of luxury stores and a canal filled with swimming pool blue water, where shoppers took rides in wooden gondolas painted black and gold. Anxious to make it back to the academy in time, he burst through a doorway and was momentarily confused by the bright sunlight that struck his face. Then he started laughing. It turned out he wasn’t late after all. The sun was still high in the sky. Life in Doha could certainly be disorienting.

  The Villaggio mall was a case in point. They definitely didn’t have places like this in Bernard’s neighborhood in Ghana. Located next door to Aspire, it was built to resemble some sort of idealized version of Venice, with a canal snaking past shops set inside pastel-colored facades meant to resemble Italian villas, complete with faux balconies topped with potted flowers. The mall had high ceilings painted to look like a blue sky filled with puffy white clouds, dimmed just enough to make Bernard think he had missed his curfew at the academy. The glowing street lamps that line the mall’s walkways added to his panic, until he emerged into the sunlight outside and realized his mistake. Good thing his friends from Aspire weren’t around to make fun of him.

  In the months since joining the academy, Bernard and the other Africans there had fast become a tight-knit group. They included the other Football Dreams kids, Hamza, Adama, and John Felagha, as well as three others: John Benson, the first African player recruited by Aspire; Serigne Abdou Thiam, the Senegalese boy Colomer discovered in Dakar while he was at Barcelona; and Antoine Messi, a Cameroonian goalkeeper the Spanish scout found for Aspire before launching Football Dreams.

  Bernard had been thrilled when Aspire told him he would be one of the boys staying in Qatar, but he wasn’t surprised. Five feet of pure self-confidence, that was Bernard. He was sure by the end of the tryout his performance had been good enough to make the cut. “I will not lie to you,” said Bernard. “I was amazing.” By his telling, Sheikh Jassim even requested personally that he remain in Doha. “Colomer called me and said the king likes only me,” said Bernard. Truth or fiction, the story is revealing. Bernard felt entirely in command on the field at Aspire, unbowed by any competition thrown his way.

  The other Africans respected Bernard’s immense talent on the field, but that didn’t stop them from teasing him off it. His fellow Ghanaian John Benson especially liked to needle him about his poor English, particularly when he had to read out loud in class. Even though English is Ghana’s official language, Bernard grew up speaking Twi at home, and the English he studied at school did little to help him master the language. Studying was never his forte. “Whenever it came time to read, I would shout, ‘Hey, Bernard, it’s your turn!’ and he would say, ‘No, no, no!’ ” said John Benson.

  John was a couple years older than the other kids but was often stuck in the same class because many of Aspire’s teachers spoke Arabic, not English. Bernard would often tap John’s shoulder in class, point to English words, and ask, “What’s this? And this? How about this?” He even showed up at John’s door one day asking how to spell the Microsoft web portal, MSN. “I said, ‘M - S - N,’ ” said John. “He started laughing and went back to his room. We did have fun.”

  Bernard may have had trouble with English, but that didn’t stop him from jabbering away with his buddies. He talks the way he plays, in rapid-fire bursts, the words flying out of his mouth like they’re skipping past a defender. He may be all business on the field but otherwise loves cracking jokes, trying to get a laugh out of his teammates. “Off the pitch, he is very funny, so everybody loves being around him,” said Hamza, his closest friend at the academy.

  Bernard could get by in English, despite the taunts from his friends. But he felt much more comfortable in his mother tongue, one of the reasons he and Hamza became so close. They both grew up speaking Twi less than 20 miles from each other in Ghana, although the drive between Teshie and Tema could take hours thanks to Accra’s notoriously bad traffic. Other than Hamza being Muslim and Bernard Christian, the two came from similar backgrounds.

  The youngest of six kids, Hamza grew up in a simple three-room, concrete house wedged into a crowded neighborhood near Tema’s busy port. Lines filled with drying laundry run from house to house like some giant urban spider web. Women squat on the ground pounding cassava with long wooden poles and grilling corn and fish over coal fires. Sewage runs through open gutters that line the alleyways between the buildings, and the occasional goat wanders by munching on a cast-off scrap of paper.

  Hamza’s father grew up in northern Ghana, where his education was largely limited to studying the Quran. He moved to Tema before Hamza was born to look for work and managed to get a job driving a truck at the local port. Life wasn’t easy, but the job put food on the table and paid for his children’s school fees. “Sometimes we struggled a bit, but it was ok,” said Hamza. Years later, his father decided he had had enough of the city and moved back north to become a farmer. Hamza’s mother ran a small open-air restaurant near their home in Tema that consisted of a few wooden benches nestled in the dirt by the roadside, protected from the elements by a patched canvas roof. Bernard would have approved of the menu since she served his favorite, banku and okra stew. Hamza sometimes helped out washing dishes when his mother asked but spent most of his time outside school playing soccer.

  Hamza got his start playing barefoot with a small rubber ball in a patch of dirt in front of his home and soon joined a neighborhood team. Like Bernard, he became part of Africa’s booming trade in extremely young players when he was sold to another coach around the age of 10 and joined the man’s team, Great Palmas, where he played central defense. His coach signed up to work as a coordinator when Aspire launched Football Dreams and convinced Hamza to give it a shot even though neither of them had ever heard of Qatar.

  The tryout took place on a dirt field outside a nearby primary school, just around the corner from the God’s Grace barbershop. Hamza only managed to touch the ball twice during his match. “But these two balls were incredible,” said Colomer, who was convinced he wanted to see more. The Spanish scout took Hamza along with him to the next field, and even though he only touched the ball three times there, Colomer was convinced. He called one of his assistants over, pointed to Hamza, and said he was one of the best players in Ghana. The final tryout in Accra was no different, and Hamza could tell he was headed to Doha as soon as the last match ended. “Everybody was talking about me, mentioning the number on my jersey,” said Hamza.

  As with Diawandou, Colomer and Michael Browne decided they could get more out of Hamza by changing his position. Whereas Diawandou moved from midfield into defense, Hamza migrated in the other direction. He was a solid defender, but his ability to hold the ball and distribute passes made him even more valuable as a defensive midfielder, as evidenced by his performance in the win against Neymar and the rest of the Brazilian squad. Hamza’s commanding presence on the field also led Browne to appoint him captain of the team the kids trained with in Doha. Bernard may have been the flashier player, but Hamza was more of a conductor on the field, barking out commands and directing other players where to go.

  Hamza didn’t hold back from speaking his mind off the field, either, a tendency that led to occasional clashes with the Aspire staff and earned him a reputation as a player who could be difficult to coach. Hamza didn’t see any problem with his behavior, but one of the staff
compared him to Mario Balotelli, the talented Italian striker whose career has been hamstrung by his mercurial personality. “Like Balotelli, he is great on the field and difficult off it,” said Forewah Emmanuel, the Aspire staff member from Cameroon.“You have to choose your words carefully with him.”

  That may have been true of the staff, but Hamza and Bernard got along like peas in a pod. Sometimes they even slept in the same room, although Bernard had the habit of getting up in the middle of the night and praying out loud, disturbing everyone else. “He didn’t care that everyone had to get up and go to their own room,” said John Benson, who sometimes joined in the slumber party. They were all religious to some extent, but Bernard was by far the most devout and expressive of his faith.

  One of the downsides of Aspire was that Bernard couldn’t attend church, a tough blow since it had been such an important part of his life back in Ghana. There are several churches in Doha, but none of them were easily accessible for him and the other Christian boys, John Benson and John Felagha, so they had to pray in their rooms. Even if the churches had been nearby, John Benson was too scared to go. He had heard too many stories about Christians being persecuted and even killed in the Middle East. That wasn’t common in Qatar, but John wasn’t taking any chances.