The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Sagna was one of the first Senegalese to play professional soccer in Europe and wielded his experience in an attempt to change Traoré’s mind. “George said to me, ‘You don’t understand what you are doing,’ ” said Traoré. “ ‘Football in Europe is very difficult.’ ” Traoré said he wasn’t worried because he believed in Ibrahima’s talent, but they told him the striker was too young to sign with a club because he wasn’t 18. Traoré countered by saying Lukaku had played at Anderlecht when he was only 16, Ibrahima’s official age at the time. But they told him that was different because Lukaku was born in Belgium, not Africa. (In fact, according to information from friends and family back in Ziguinchor, Ibrahima was likely in his early 20s when this happened. But that wasn’t a secret he or his coach could reveal without risking their entire mission, and to this day, Ibrahima maintains that he was 16 at the time.)

  Even Traoré’s sister scolded him for trying to whisk Ibrahima off to Europe. “My sister said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” said Traoré. “ ‘You know this boy is your player, he was in your football school, but he’s not your son!’ ” Ibrahima was upstairs watching TV while the group argued in the living room beneath framed photos of family members on the walls. Eventually, Traoré’s sister called him downstairs to ask him directly whether he wanted to go. “She said, ‘If you’re not sure, it’s better you tell us,’ ” said Ibrahima. “I said, ‘Yes, I want to go.’ ” Secretly, however, his brash confidence was fading, and he was starting to doubt leaving was the right decision. But he didn’t say anything at the time. Traoré’s sister finally told the others they weren’t going to change her brother’s mind, so they should just give up. Savané and Sagna reluctantly filed out of the house, and Traoré and Ibrahima headed to the airport.

  While the two of them were waiting at the gate for their flight, Ibrahima had a true change of heart but didn’t feel brave enough to tell Traoré since he had gotten them into this situation in the first place. Instead, he snuck into the terminal’s cramped and smelly bathroom and sent texts to Savané and several others at the academy saying he was having second thoughts but felt pressured to go by his coach. It’s unclear if this was the reality or Ibrahima’s attempt to shift blame. Traoré insisted afterward that he would have turned right around if Ibrahima had told him he didn’t want to go. “I think when he got to the airport, he had a crisis of conscience,” said Wendy Kinyeki, the Football Dreams staff member who was close with Ibrahima. “These guys have been so good to me all this time, how do I just bail?”

  Ibrahima started to have doubts when Colomer called him at Traoré’s sister’s house and pleaded with him to stay. Part of him resented the call because Colomer had waited until he was leaving to praise him, and he knew the Spanish scout must have contacted Diawandou to get his number. But he also realized that perhaps Colomer and others at the academy appreciated him more than he had known. Diawandou, who was in Doha at the time, also called Ibrahima at the airport and tried to convince him to stay, but the striker said it was too late. “I told Diawandou I didn’t want to go, but it was no longer my decision. It was my coach’s,” said Ibrahima.

  As this drama played out at the airport, Aspire made one last attempt to keep the striker from leaving. Savané contacted Ibrahima’s mother to persuade her to join their side and even got Ziguinchor’s chief of police to call her to see if she consented to her son’s departure. But she told both of them she didn’t know anything about soccer and put her full trust in Traoré. Still, it was an incredibly difficult time for her because she was worried whether her son was making the right decision. Aspire had done so much for Ibrahima and even paid for her to visit Doha. The money the academy sent her was even more important, and she used it for everything from buying food to paying her kids’ school fees. She had no idea what would happen now that Ibrahima had abandoned the academy and was winging his way toward Belgium with Traoré. “I couldn’t sleep the night he left,” she said.

  Colomer was outraged at Rijsenburg and the half dozen players he helped lure away from the Milk Cup. The tournament victory should have been one of Football Dreams’ greatest triumphs, but it had morphed into a nightmare. The other players who left included a pair of Cameroonians who had excelled in the Milk Cup final: Cedric Tchoutou, the pacey winger who provided Ibrahima’s first two assists; and Oumarou Kaina, the little midfielder who scored the final goal. “The story shows the danger of agents hovering around,” said Savané, the Senegal country director. “That’s the dark reality of the football business. At the end of the day, it’s a crazy race looking for Eto’o, Drogba, so they can ride off into the sunset with big amounts of money.”

  Ibrahima’s mother outside the one-room home in Ziguinchor where she raised her four children.

  The captain of the second Football Dreams class, Yobou Thome, also failed to return after the summer, but he wasn’t at the Milk Cup. A German agent lured the defender away while he was captaining Ivory Coast’s national team at the Under-17 World Cup in Mexico. Yobou decided to leave even though Aspire paid for him to have surgery to correct a potentially life-threatening heart defect discovered when he was in Doha for his final Football Dreams tryout. Yobou’s age was likely a factor in his decision since he was actually 24 years old at the time and may have felt like he was wasting precious time at the academy. Ibrahima and the others who left may have had similar concerns because they too were likely older than they claimed.

  Colomer assembled the entire academy inside one of the classrooms at Diambars to vent his frustration over the players who snuck away. He demanded to know why those at the Milk Cup didn’t tell him about the secret exodus that was under way. “He was very angry!” said Babacar Ndoye, the Senegalese winger who also scored in the Milk Cup final. Like Fallou, Babacar wanted to leave after the tournament but was stopped by his father. Colomer warned the players against making the same mistake as those who left and assured them they were better off at the academy. “Colomer told the boys, ‘We will not force you to stay,’ ” said Forewah Emmanuel, a Football Dreams staff member at the meeting. “He said, ‘I am honest with you. I took you from your villages when you never knew I would come. We train you for five years, and you have confidence in me because what we promise you, we give you. If you meet someone you don’t know, and the person says he will take you to Real Madrid and you believe that person, you are making a mistake. Are you going to believe in someone you know or someone you don’t know?’ ”

  Colomer said he would warn European clubs not to sign any of the boys who left because they were Aspire players and weren’t yet 18 years old, according to several kids at the meeting. Ibrahima discovered this threat was real after landing in Brussels, where he was met by Rijsenburg and Petrovic at the airport. Ibrahima and Traoré said they soon found themselves in the office of Anderlecht’s general manager, Herman Van Holsbeeck, and the big striker eagerly expected to sign a contract with the club. But Aspire had gotten to Van Holsbeeck first, they said, and warned him not to sign Ibrahima. The general manager peppered Traoré with questions as soon as he arrived. “He asked, ‘Was Ibrahima at Aspire Academy before?’ ” said Traoré. “Did he have a contract?” Van Holsbeeck told Petrovic to clear up the situation before Anderlecht made any moves.

  In the meantime, Ibrahima took to the training field at Anderlecht and did what he does best, scoring five goals in the first three matches he played. That seemed to produce a change of heart by the general manager. Traoré said Van Holsbeeck contacted him to propose they sign a contract directly, cutting out Petrovic because he was demanding too much money. Traoré was inclined to accept the offer, but Ibrahima didn’t feel comfortable going around Petrovic’s back since he was the one who facilitated his trip, so he torpedoed the deal. A few months later, Van Holsbeeck told the press that Anderlecht never had any intention of snatching Ibrahima away from Aspire because he wasn’t old enough. “Only when a player is 18 can there be a transfer,” he said. “But we will negotiate directly with Aspire without intermedi
aries.”

  Petrovic and his associates eventually gave up on Anderlecht and told Ibrahima they wanted to take him for a trial at AS Monaco. “They came one evening and said get your bags,” said Ibrahima. Thus began a painful months-long odyssey as he traipsed across Europe looking for a team that would take him. After Monaco, he went to several clubs in Italy, including Novara and Udinese, before finally ending up in Bulgaria at CSKA Sofia. At times, he intersected with the other players Petrovic had lured away from the academy, but a deal proved elusive. There were issues with his age, his lack of a European passport, the threat of retribution from Aspire, and the amount of cash Petrovic wanted for the big striker. “I was so tired of it!” said Ibrahima. “Everywhere I went I did my best, but they said no because the agent asked for a lot of money.”

  Ibrahima’s mother was having a rough time back in Ziguinchor as well. Petrovic sent a little money while her son was searching for a club, but it was less than she had been getting from Aspire. She struggled to make ends meet and would soon find it even more difficult as the money from Petrovic dried up as well. After months of traveling, Ibrahima finally reached his breaking point in Bulgaria. “They wanted to sign us, but I took my bags and returned to Senegal,” said Ibrahima. “I didn’t want to sign for a club in Bulgaria. That’s no football country. I decided to go back.”

  It was a steep fall for the big man. In 2012, months after dazzling the soccer world at the Milk Cup, Ibrahima was back to square one in Ziguinchor, with no club, no academy, and no clear way forward. The best that can be said is that at least he had a ticket to fly home at all and didn’t end up stuck in Europe like thousands of other African players. But like Bernard, he now faced the daunting prospect of forging his own path out of Africa without the money and connections he once had at Aspire. In fact, he thought many people at the academy would be happy to see him fail.

  Colomer was determined to prevent any more players from leaving but also wasn’t quite sure what to do with the ones who remained. Even before the Milk Cup debacle, he and others at Aspire had been debating the best way to funnel the boys to clubs in Europe when they reached the end of their time at the academy. In the fall of 2010, Colomer chose a group of players from the first two classes to train with Barcelona’s reserve squad, known as the B team, while they were on one of their regular trips to Spain.

  One of the Spanish scout’s closest friends, Sandro Rosell, had recently been elected the club’s president, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to showcase the Football Dreams players for Barcelona’s coaches. Rosell, a smooth-talking Catalan businessman, was the one who brought Colomer on as Barcelona’s youth director years earlier. He was also closely tied to Football Dreams since a company he owned, Bonus Sports Marketing, provided the operational backbone for the talent search. Given these connections, perhaps Barcelona would pick up some of the boys, which would help validate the talent Colomer had discovered and provide Football Dreams the perfect outlet for the best players after they graduated from the academy.

  The group Colomer selected included the captains of both classes, Diawandou and Yobou, the slick Ghanaian playmaker Samuel Asamoah, and half a dozen others. A photo shows them with their arms around each other in the Barcelona locker room, wearing pink training jerseys bearing the club’s iconic crest. One notable absence from the group was Ibrahima, and his exclusion added to the list of the striker’s grievances against the Spanish scout. The boys trained for several days with a Barcelona squad that included future first team players like Thiago Alcántara and Cristian Tello, whom Colomer first signed for the club years earlier. The B team’s coach was Luis Enrique, who would later win a historic treble with a senior side that included the deadly attacking trident of Messi, Neymar, and Suárez.

  Barcelona was reportedly interested in several of the players, but none ended up transferring to the club. It’s unclear why exactly. They weren’t officially 18 years old yet, but Barcelona had taken players younger than that from outside Europe, including from Africa, since the club had a deal with Samuel Eto’o’s foundation that funneled Cameroonian kids into its academy. Barcelona’s recruitment of minors would get it into trouble with FIFA several years later when the club was hit with a yearlong transfer ban, but it wasn’t yet an issue at the time.

  It’s possible club politics got in the way. A few days before his election as president in June 2010, Rosell caused an uproar by telling a Spanish newspaper there were too many Africans in Barcelona’s academy already because they were taking spots from the locals. He said everyone knew most of them were older than they claimed. That meant they had trouble competing when the other kids caught up physically and often faced the grim reality of having to return home. He spoke the truth, but it was quite a statement for someone who owned a company recruiting African players for Aspire on an unprecedented scale. Rosell always praised Football Dreams, but the program faced exactly these same difficulties. About six months later, after Rosell brokered a controversial 150 million euro deal for Qatar to sponsor Barcelona, he made it clear in a TV interview that the club wouldn’t take Football Dreams players into its academy at all. He clearly thought he had enough African kids on his hands already.

  The avenue to Barcelona was clearly more complicated than Aspire had anticipated. Instead, Colomer sent the boys from the first class to Doha in the fall of 2011 as they officially neared the age of 18. He paired them with Bartolome “Tintin” Marquez, a veteran Spanish coach with a no-nonsense demeanor who was tasked with preparing the players for their eventual transition to Europe, no matter which club ended up taking them. He had played midfield for one of Spain’s biggest clubs, Espanyol, for years before eventually becoming the team’s head coach. Tintin picked up his nickname as a young player because one of his teammates thought he had the same spiky hair as the famous Belgian cartoon character. The name stuck even as he approached his 50s and was now almost completely bald.

  Tintin said the initial plan was for the first class to form a team to play in Qatar’s second division so they could get professional experience before moving to clubs in Europe. The boys trained with their coach for about a month to get ready for the competition, but they said Aspire called off the entire plan only a week before the start of the season with little explanation. Academy officials later explained that they abandoned the idea because Qatar’s second division wasn’t competitive enough for the kids and they faced problems with local federation regulations. They also wanted to avoid fueling suspicion that the goal was to naturalize the boys and have them play for Qatar’s national team, since that had been such a flashpoint for criticism. According to FIFA, the players would have to live in Qatar for five years after they turned 18 for that to happen, a real possibility if they were playing in the country’s league. Qatar has continued to naturalize plenty of foreign players over the years, just not from the Football Dreams program.

  After Aspire jettisoned the plan to play in Qatar’s second division, Colomer and the others debated a new way forward. Should they turn the players loose to agents, try to find them teams themselves, or buy a club of their own? They eventually rejected the first two options out of concern the boys might be taken advantage of or end up on teams where they spent most of their time on the bench. “The gap between 18 and 21 is the most decisive in a professional career,” said Andreas Bleicher. “I’m sure there are so many talents who should play in top clubs who don’t make it because in these years they don’t get the chance to play.” Aspire didn’t want to see that happen with the Football Dreams kids, so they decided the best solution was to buy a club to ensure the players got the professional experience they needed to move on to the biggest teams in the world. That required even more money for a program that had already cost tens of millions of dollars, but Qatar certainly wasn’t short on cash.

  Colomer relied on Diawandou to keep his class in line until Aspire could purchase a club. He was worried some of them might follow the lead of Ibrahima and others who left the academy
early, so he called Diawandou and instructed him to make sure it didn’t happen. The Senegalese captain gathered his teammates for a meeting inside his room at Aspire. “I told them we are near to being professionals,” said Diawandou. “We need to be patient. Everything will go its own way and come at the right time. If you rush, your life will go the wrong way.” Diawandou was lucky because he came from a fairly comfortable background, so he was less tempted by the riches agents often dangled in front of the Football Dreams players to get them to leave. He even shut down his Facebook account because too many agents were contacting him when he was at the academy in Senegal.

  But others had more trouble shutting out the agents whispering in their ears. They may have been back in the lap of luxury in Doha with Aspire’s world-class facilities and colossal air-conditioned dome, but as the months dragged on, some grew restless. After years of hard work, they were desperate to make it to Europe and worried any holdup might put the dream at risk. They questioned whether sticking around Qatar was really their best bet or if they should follow those who left with Rijsenburg and were already in Europe. “They were phoning and Skyping with their families,” said Stefan Wetzel, a social worker who assisted the boys. “The families were saying, ‘You have been playing four years with Aspire. They promised you would play professionally. Where’s the money? We’re suffering here.’ ”

  These calls weighed on the boys’ minds as they trekked back and forth to training every day. “Some players were worried,” said the Nigerian goalkeeper John Felagha. “But Colomer said he was fighting to get a club, and I believed him.” Many others did as well since Colomer’s bond with the first class was so strong. They also had faith in Diawandou, who kept them united with the kind of leadership that was absent in the classes that had splintered. He urged the players to maintain their trust in Aspire because of everything the academy had done for them so far. “If they say be patient, we need to be patient because they gave us money, they changed our lives, they changed the lives of our families,” said Diawandou.