The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Senegal would go on to win the game thanks to a goal by another Football Dreams player, kicking off wild celebrations that wouldn’t have been out of place at the World Cup. Senegal’s players sprinted across the field and jumped on top of their coach, as Ghana’s team collapsed on the ground at the halfway line. At Serigne Mbaye’s home on the outskirts of Dakar, his mother danced with joy in front of the TV, and then her phone started ringing off the hook as friends and family called to congratulate her. Back in the stadium, Serigne Mbaye capped off the celebration by running down the field carrying a large red, yellow, and green Senegalese flag he had gotten from a spectator, a moment of patriotism and personal triumph that meant everything to him.

  The staff at the academy were overjoyed at the role Serigne Mbaye had played in the win over Ghana and could see how the experience had changed him when he returned to Saly after the match. “When they came back from the national team, now you saw a man,” said Ndongo Diaw, a Football Dreams staff member. “He knew he was an important person, all of Senegal knew him. At the academy, everyone was greeting and congratulating him. In training, you could see he wanted to show that he was a big player.”

  But the joy was all too fleeting. It wasn’t long before he glanced at the newspaper and discovered he wasn’t one of the players selected to travel to the tournament. The coach said he appreciated everything Serigne Mbaye had done for the team in Dakar but wanted to stick with the group that had gotten them most of the way through the qualifiers. The player was devastated, and it would take him days to recover. “I don’t think I ever saw Serigne Mbaye as sad as that,” said Wendy Kinyeki. “You could see him trying to figure out, ‘Did I do something wrong? Why wasn’t I called back? I did such a great job. Why am I not being given another chance?’ That really crushed him and made me sad.” But Serigne Mbaye didn’t let his disappointment get in the way of supporting the players who did travel to the tournament. He was always the first one to turn on the TV and gather the other Football Dreams kids whenever one of Senegal’s games was broadcast. He wasn’t on the team, but they were still his teammates.

  Losing Serigne Mbaye was an emotional blow for many of the players headed to Rwanda, but the team suffered a much bigger setback just days before they were scheduled to leave for the tournament. They found out that their most important player wouldn’t be making the trip. Rather than leading the team from his position in the back line, Diawandou would end up watching the tournament on TV, sitting next to Serigne Mbaye at the academy. He wasn’t left out because the coach thought the team didn’t need him. He wasn’t hobbled by injury either. The reason Diawandou wasn’t at the tournament was much more troubling, not just for him, but for the entire Football Dreams program.

  It all started with a trip to a clinic in Dakar. It should have been little more than a formality. All the tournament organizers needed to do was check the boys’ ages to confirm they weren’t too old to play. Only players born on or after January 1, 1994, were allowed to participate, meaning they were no older than 17. That shouldn’t have been a problem for any of the Football Dreams players since Colomer started the program in 2007 looking for 13-year-old kids born in 1994. The next year he was searching for kids from 1995, and so on. To check a boy’s age, the tournament organizers used an MRI to examine the growth plate in his wrist. If an MRI shows a player’s growth plate is fully fused, there’s a 99 percent chance he’s older than 17, according to FIFA. The world soccer body started using the test at the Under-17 World Cup in Nigeria in 2009, and the African federation introduced it for the first time at the tournament Diawandou and his teammates were headed to in Rwanda.

  The test was badly needed because one of the biggest problems in youth soccer in Africa, and in many other parts of the developing world, has been age cheating, kids saying they’re much younger than they are so they will have an advantage over other players. Imagine throwing a college-age player in with a bunch of middle schoolers, and you get the idea. Age cheating is so common in Africa that it’s not unusual to hear coaches say things like, “The boy is 17, but his football age is 13,” although not when they’re worried about being overheard. Using birth certificates or passports to verify a player’s age is often futile because they are so easily faked, or real ones are generated using false information.

  Many soccer officials believe age cheating has been one of the biggest impediments to an African country winning the World Cup, as Pelé predicted would happen decades ago. Although several African nations, especially Nigeria and Ghana, have had great success at the Under-17 and Under-20 versions of the tournament, many of the players who participated were never heard from again because they were much older than advertised. They couldn’t hack it when they tried to compete against world-class players their own age.

  The problem continues to plague African soccer because players are so desperate to make it to Europe they will do anything it takes, including lie about their age to appear better than they are. Others who stand to benefit are usually onboard as well, like their coaches, families, and even federation officials who might make a bit of money from a transfer. Piercing this veil of lies can be difficult, especially when it comes to determining a player’s exact age. But it’s usually possible to deduce whether a player is significantly older than he says by asking him and those around him enough indirect questions that help peel back the lies. Still, it’s a huge problem. “Age fraud is more serious than doping,” one of the founders of Diambars academy, Saer Seck, told the media on the eve of the tournament to which Diawandou and his teammates were headed in Rwanda in January 2011.

  A little over a week before the tournament was scheduled to start, the players traveled to a clinic in Dakar to get their ages checked. They left from Thiès, where the squad was preparing for the tournament at Diawandou’s old academy. When the players arrived at the clinic, they waited their turn to file into the room where the MRI scanner was located and then all headed back to Thiès, making it in time for training in the afternoon. But Cissé had bad news for his captain. He had failed the test. This time it was the coach who had trouble looking Diawandou in the eyes. “I was very surprised,” said Cissé. Diawandou was outraged and protested that the test was wrong. His coach backed him up but said there was nothing he could do. “He was really upset, but I comforted him,” said Cissé. “I told him I didn’t think the test was reliable and will always believe he is a good player.”

  Diawandou also sought guidance from his uncle, Cheikh Gueye, who had raised him since he was a young boy. Gueye told him he should trust in God and believe that even though the path to the tournament had been cut off, a better one might appear. Diawandou reluctantly agreed, even though he was still heartbroken. “I said, ‘No problem, I will leave everything to God,’ ” said Diawandou. “Maybe I would have gone there and gotten injured anyway.” He met his best friend Baye Laye at a restaurant in Thiès to talk over the ordeal, and Senegal’s coach and the other players called him while they were there to cheer him up. But it didn’t do much good.

  The coach and the other players needed some cheering up themselves. They were seriously worried about heading to the tournament without Diawandou. “It really destabilized the team because he was their captain,” said the coach. “We didn’t have a player who was as good to replace him.” Diawandou’s absence was clearly felt when the team got to Rwanda, even though he called the players while they were there to rally them. Senegal lost 2-1 to Egypt in the opening game and then went down 3-2 to Burkina Faso. They managed to beat Rwanda 1-0 in their third match, but it wasn’t enough to send them through to the next round. The players were disappointed and left wondering what would have happened if Diawandou had been there. “It handicapped our team,” said Ibrahima. “If he had gone, we could have done very good things.”

  The entire episode was embarrassing for Football Dreams, especially since it had been such a triumph for Senegal to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time with so many players from the pro
gram. When asked later about the incident, Aspire officials said they doubted the validity of the test conducted in Dakar and were comfortable with their own records that indicated Diawandou was younger than 17 at the time. Diawandou also insists the test was wrong, although it likely wasn’t. Information from Diawandou’s friends and former schoolteachers in Thiès indicates he was around 16 years old, not 13, when he first tried out for Football Dreams in 2007. That would have made him roughly 19 when he put his wrist in the MRI scanner in Dakar in December 2010. The scholarship agreement Diawandou signed with Aspire stated that he could be kicked out if he lied about his age. But the academy staff stuck by the Senegalese defender, and the bond between Diawandou and Colomer remained strong.

  Publicly, Colomer and others involved in Football Dreams stayed quiet when Diawandou was kicked off the team, perhaps hoping the controversy would simply blow over with time. There were a few articles in local newspapers, but that was largely it. The practice of age cheating was so common in African soccer that few people were shocked, but some had expected Aspire would do a better job policing players’ ages given the resources at its disposal.

  That was the more troubling implication of Diawandou being kicked off the team. It raised the question of how many other Football Dreams players were older than they said. In all likelihood, many of them were. Colomer was surprisingly blasé about the issue when asked several years later how difficult it was to determine if Football Dreams players were actually 13 when they first tried out. “Zero difficult,” he said in imperfect English. He pointed out that Aspire required players to provide an original birth certificate or ID card when they first tried out, but these are easily faked for just a few dollars in many African countries. Even if a player did lie about his age, Colomer didn’t think it was a huge problem. “They can change it, but in the end, is it important if Eto’o is now 30 or 33?” said Colomer, referring to the famous striker from Cameroon. “You look for excellent players. If he is 13 or if he is 15, we don’t care because we aren’t taking them to play in an Under-13 league.”

  That was a recipe for potential failure. Many others involved in African youth soccer say getting a player’s age right is the most important, and most difficult, thing a scout needs to do to determine whether a boy has what it takes to make it at the top level. Even when a player’s age is clear, the process is challenging because a scout must assess future potential based on current performance, an imperfect indicator. Recall that scouts often make the mistake of choosing performance over potential by simply picking more physically mature players. That risk is even higher if a player is much older than the scout believes, and it makes the link between current performance and future potential even more tenuous. “Your assessment of performance has to be age-specific,” said Joe Mulberry, the director of recruitment at Right to Dream, one of the best academies in West Africa. “If the assessment is made on a player who is not very close to the age you think he is, then your assessment of potential could be wrong.”

  Of course, African players have lied about their ages and made it at the highest levels in Europe. But many more have failed, and a scout’s failure rate is going to be even higher if he gets a boy’s initial age wrong, especially if he’s way off. Diawandou was likely three years older than Colomer thought when he first spotted him in Thiès. That’s a pretty big difference already, the equivalent of putting an 11th-grader up against 8th-graders. But other players found by the Spanish scout were even older. Yobou Thome, a defender from the Ivory Coast who became captain of both the second Football Dreams class and his country’s Under-17 national team, was 21 years old when he first tried out, not 13, according to the date of birth recorded by his primary school when he first started class.

  Yobou looks a little over five and a half feet tall in a photo taken of him at the final tryout in Abidjan in 2008. He doesn’t necessarily look 21, but he doesn’t look 13 either. One of the challenges for Colomer and many of the other European Football Dreams scouts was that they hadn’t spent much time, if any, scouting in Africa before. In many instances, locals working with the program knew how old the kids actually were but had little incentive to tell the truth because they wanted to see their players make it into the academy and score a free trip to Doha in the process. It wasn’t difficult for them to feed the foreign scouts myths, like saying African boys are bigger and stronger than Europeans of the same age. In fact, the opposite is often true because of poverty and malnutrition. Conversely, the scouts could also be tricked into thinking an African player was young because he was small, when in reality he might have just been small.

  Eugene Komey, the head coordinator at the field where Colomer found Bernard Appiah, realized the player wasn’t 13 years old when Football Dreams asked him to shoot video of the midfielder at his school after he was selected to go to Doha. The coaches of competing kids had complained to Komey at Bernard’s first tryout in Teshie and at the final in Accra that the player was too old for the program. At the time, Komey brushed them off, saying he didn’t have proof because Bernard’s birth certificate said he was 13. But he discovered the coaches were right when they started shooting video of Bernard in what was supposed to be his class at school. “I realized the kids didn’t know him,” said Komey. “They didn’t really interact with him because he wasn’t in their class. Bernard had already completed school. They falsified all the documents.”

  Bernard was likely at least 17 years old when he tried out for Football Dreams in 2007, which helps explain why the player was so eager to leave the academy in Doha three years later. Aspire kept telling him he couldn’t move to Europe until he was 18, but the reality was that he was already past that age but couldn’t tell anyone. Bernard likely felt like he was wasting time at the academy, and the dispute over his license may have helped push him over the edge. By the time he left in 2010, he would have been around 20 years old, two years older than most players are when they graduate. Komey never told Colomer or other Football Dreams officials about Bernard’s true age because he didn’t want to prevent the player from making it to the academy. “Whatever it takes for him to go,” said Komey, who subsequently quit working for the program.

  What makes this all so surprising is that Aspire officials say they checked the ages of all the Football Dreams players who made it to the final tryout in Doha each year by conducting their own wrist examinations, using an X-ray machine for the first class and an MRI scanner for later classes. The reality that several of the players were apparently well above 13 years old when they tried out raises the question of how well these tests actually work in weeding out older players, especially from Africa. Aspire points out that the science behind the tests has not been specifically proven for African kids, whose bones might grow at different rates than children in the developed world.

  Another question is how well the results from these tests are actually enforced, not just at Aspire but elsewhere. Yobou Thome captained Ivory Coast’s team at the Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations in 2011 even though he was nearly 24 years old at the time. He was also captain later that year at the Under-17 World Cup in Mexico. Before both tournaments, FIFA used MRIs to check players’ ages, but Yobou was allowed to play. This fact raises the possibility that other Football Dreams players on Senegal’s team with Diawandou were also overage. The African confederation said they weren’t. Others weren’t so sure.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Milk Cup

  The crowd in Northern Ireland was eager for the match to start. The small stadium only held a few thousand people, but the stands on both sides of the pitch were packed. The ground was normally home to Ballymena United FC, but the spectators who showed up that cloudy July evening in 2011 hoped to catch a glimpse of much bigger stars before they became household names. They were there to watch the Under-17 final of the Milk Cup, one of the biggest youth tournaments in the world. The competition, which began in 1983, was officially called the Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament but came to be known as the Milk
Cup because of sponsorship by the country’s dairy council. Large billboards that said “Milk” ringed the field, along with advertisements for BBC Sport, which broadcast the 70-minute final live on TV. It was one of the biggest events of the year in Ballymena, a quaint town of only about 30,000 people perhaps best known as the birthplace of actor Liam Neeson.

  Out on the emerald green field inside the stadium, Ibrahima faced down the devil, eleven of them actually, and still fancied his chances. The imposing frontman was back in Aspire’s blue and white stripes and impatient for the referee to start the game. Six months had passed since Senegal was knocked out of the Africa Cup of Nations. The disappointment lingered, but Ibrahima knew a win by his academy team that evening would be a huge achievement that would attract even greater attention. It was the perfect opportunity for him to make his mark in front of scouts from some of Europe’s top clubs. But it meant taking on those devils, Red Devils to be exact. That was no mean feat since Manchester United was one of the most successful clubs in history.

  The English side had long dominated the Milk Cup, having won the tournament more times than any other team. Club legends like David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, and Paul Scholes had featured in the past, along with stars from other teams like Barcelona’s Sergio Busquets; Radamel Falcao, when he was at River Plate; and Wayne Rooney during his first spell at Everton. The Manchester United squad up against Aspire contained several English internationals who would eventually make it to the club’s first team, including defender Tyler Blackett and striker James Wilson.