Finally, in the spring of 2012, just before the players were scheduled to return home for the summer, Colomer and Bleicher called the entire class together for a meeting at Aspire. They had good news and bad news. The good news was Aspire had finally bought a club and almost all the players would be headed to Europe to fulfill their dream of becoming professionals. The bad news was they didn’t have room for everyone, so several boys didn’t make the cut, including Serigne Mbaye, the deaf player who had achieved glory helping Senegal qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time. Nobody had doubts about Serigne Mbaye’s talent, but his disability once again held him back. “He’s a very good player,” said Tintin, who would continue managing the kids in Europe. “But it’s difficult to coach him. If he doesn’t see it on a blackboard, he doesn’t understand.”
In fact, Serigne Mbaye didn’t fully understand what Colomer and Bleicher were saying in the meeting, and it was only when they pulled him aside afterward he realized he wouldn’t be part of the team. It was a crushing blow, just like when he was left off the squad that traveled to the Africa Cup of Nations. Aspire promised they would find a way to help him once he returned to Senegal, but that didn’t do much to ease the pain for him or his teammates, who had grown to become his family. “It was very difficult,” said Diawandou, who had done more than anyone to help Serigne Mbaye. “You spend five years training at the academy, and then they tell you that you are not going to be a part of the project. It’s not easy, but football is like this.”
Serigne Mbaye had to head home, but Aspire allowed him to take up residence once again at the academy as they tried to figure out what to do with him. The staff dreamed of helping him to achieve his goal of playing in Europe and sent him for trials at a first division club in Norway. Once again, he impressed the coaches, but the club didn’t feel like it could take on the burden of a deaf player in its ranks. A couple more years passed as Serigne Mbaye drifted back and forth from the academy to his family’s home on the outskirts of Dakar. He put on a brave face, but it wasn’t easy living in limbo. Finally, he caught a break toward the end of 2014. It wasn’t Europe, but it was still an impressive achievement for someone facing Serigne Mbaye’s odds.
Aspire connected him with a team in Senegal’s top division, Mbour Petit Côte, run by a relative of one of the academy coaches. The club also had the advantage of being based down the road from the academy, so Serigne Mbaye could continue living with the Aspire staff if he could convince the team’s coach he was good enough to make the squad. That didn’t end up being a problem. “After seeing him, I realized he’s a genius,” said the coach, Abdulkarim Mane. “He plays very well and is very intelligent on the pitch.” Serigne Mbaye made good on the coach’s belief in him, scoring a few goals and providing several assists in his first season. He impressed his teammates as well, not just with his play on the field but also with his carefree attitude off the field. “He’s always joking,” said one of his closest friends on the team, midfielder Siddy Saar. “He would be in Europe if he didn’t have the problem with his hearing. He’s got the talent, and we all pray for him.” Serigne Mbaye may not have made it to Europe, but he was likely one of the few deaf players ever to compete in the first division of any league.
Back in Doha, Diawandou and the others who were headed to Europe were ecstatic. All their hard work had paid off. After all those anxious calls from family members back home, the boys could finally hold their heads high and say proudly that they would soon be professionals. They had been dreaming about this moment their whole lives, and success meant they had beaten almost impossible odds. There are roughly 175 million African men between the ages of 18 and 34, prime soccer-playing years, and many of them grew up fantasizing about playing as a professional in Europe. But the number of those who succeed is minuscule. Only a few thousand Africans play for European teams in any given year. No wonder the Football Dreams kids were thrilled. “It was like a party,” said Forewah Emmanuel, a staff member from Cameroon who was in Doha watching over the boys.
It didn’t even matter that they had never actually heard of the club where they were headed or the little Belgian town it was named after. Forget Barcelona and Manchester United, at least for now. They were about to become proud members of the Eupen Pandas. It wasn’t exactly what they had dreamed of growing up in Africa, but it was a start.
PART THREE
PROS
CHAPTER 10
Battle of Belgium
Eupen is a quaint town of 20,000 people nestled next to the German border in southeastern Belgium. It’s so small that the entire downtown area, with its stately old buildings, imposing stone churches, and charming bakeries, can be explored on foot in about 15 minutes. Apart from a few passing cars and residents chatting over glasses of Eupener beer at tables set up in the town’s main plaza, there’s usually so little noise that robins can be heard chirping in the trees. It gets even more serene just outside town, where country roads wind pass rolling green pastures dotted with sheep, ancient stone houses, and the occasional abbey brewing the strong beer for which Belgium is so well known.
Eupen wasn’t always so peaceful. The town, which dates back to the early thirteenth century, has a turbulent history in which it was repeatedly passed back and forth between kingdoms, empires, and countries, before finally being returned to Belgian control after World War II. Soldiers in that conflict fought some of their fiercest battles near Eupen, including the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive of the war. It started with a surprise attack through the densely forested Ardennes region that inflicted heavy casualties on American troops. But they fought back, and the battle played a key role in depleting Germany’s forces and eventually winning the war for the Allies. Eupen’s oldest residents still remember the day American tanks arrived to liberate them from the Nazis. U.S. troops also introduced them to chewing gum for the first time. Eupen itself was largely spared destruction during the war and has been pretty quiet ever since, but reminders of the war’s brutality lurk nearby. A cemetery filled with the graves of thousands of fallen U.S. soldiers is only a ten-minute drive away.
Even in Belgium Eupen is viewed as existing on the fringes, both for reasons of geography and because it’s a German-speaking region in a country dominated by French and Flemish. Eupen is the seat of government for Belgium’s German-speaking community, which numbers only about 75,000 people. The biggest excitement in Eupen every year usually revolves around the town’s annual Carnival parade, especially the choice of the festival’s prince and his two female pages, all of whom dress up in black, white, and gold medieval costumes complete with tights, puffed sleeves, and ceremonial caps. The sleepy town certainly wasn’t prepared for Aspire’s surprise announcement at a press conference in June 2012 that it had purchased the local soccer club, KAS Eupen, on behalf of Qatar.
Arab sheikhs and Russian oligarchs have been scooping up some of the biggest clubs in the world for hundreds of millions of dollars, including Chelsea, Manchester City, and Paris Saint-Germain. But Aspire’s purchase of KAS Eupen was a far cry from those high-profile deals. Instead of a brand-name team in a top league in a major European city, Qatar was now the proud owner of a relatively unknown second division club in a small town that struggled to attract more than a couple thousand spectators to its home games. Hardly a gem by conventional standards. But Colomer and other Aspire officials considered Eupen to be perfect precisely because their needs were so unconventional.
They had been looking for a club they could control and fill with a steady flow of young African players. These criteria ruled out many of Europe’s top soccer nations because they either had restrictive rules about how many non-Europeans could play on a team or prohibited outside investors from owning the majority of a club. Aspire was basically left with teams in Portugal and Belgium but crossed the former off the list because none of the players spoke Portuguese. Even though Eupen is officially a German-speaking town, most of the residents also speak French, as do
many of the Football Dreams players. Aspire was also worried about the boys getting into trouble once they were on their own outside the academy, so they specifically looked for clubs in small towns outside of Belgium’s capital, Brussels. They figured smaller towns would offer fewer distractions that could tempt the players away from the focus and hard work needed to become a top professional.
Another reason Aspire was interested in KAS Eupen was that it was effectively bankrupt but had the potential to grow. The team, which was formed in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II, spent most of its history as an amateur side dwelling in Belgium’s lower divisions. The players mostly came from Eupen or surrounding towns. They earned a living by working at bars, sandwich shops, and other local businesses during the day, trained a few nights a week, and played games on the weekends, for which they might be paid a couple hundred euros a month. After the matches, they stayed up all night drinking with fans at local bars around town. All that changed in 2009 when an Italian investor arrived on the scene, bringing both money and professional players from Italy and Switzerland. The team managed to make it to Belgium’s top division for the first time in its history, forcing the local government and the club to kick in millions of euros to upgrade the stadium to hold 8,000 people per the federation’s regulations.
The team only lasted a year in the first division, and the money from the Italian eventually dried up. As unpaid bills multiplied, a German investor arrived in 2011 as a replacement, but he was arrested back home after a few months for allegedly running an investment pyramid scheme similar to Bernie Madoff’s. The situation was so dire before Qatar arrived that the players had the electricity and water cut off in their apartments and their cars repossessed because the club couldn’t pay the bills. “It was the same for me,” said Michael Radermacher, Eupen’s team manager. “I had a car from the club. One day at noon, I had to take my children to school. I went to the parking lot, and the car was gone.”
The team had to rely on private individuals to pay for the players’ salaries, and some staff members at the club weren’t being paid at all. In early 2012, the Belgian federation refused to issue Eupen a license for the next season because the club was basically insolvent. Given this situation, it’s perhaps no surprise that the local Grenz Echo newspaper greeted Qatar’s purchase of the team by comparing it to a fairy tale in which a knight shows up on a white horse, frees the princess, and rides off with her to live happily ever after.
Some in town agreed, especially former players who said the team would have been forced to start over in Belgium’s lowest division if Qatar hadn’t arrived on the scene with its checkbook. During the negotiations, one of Aspire’s representatives reportedly laughed when the club said the academy would have to assume a few million euros in debt as part of the purchase. That was chump change for Qatar. It all was. Aspire reportedly paid about 4 million euros for the club, brought in an entirely new coaching staff, and injected much-needed cash into the team. Almost overnight, the club went from scrounging around for 100 euros to pay the local baker to being flush with cash.
Word quickly spread through town that the local team, known as the Pandas, was now owned by a mysterious Arab country and would soon be filled with African teenagers, a reality some found unsettling. Questions, rumors, and speculation bounced down Eupen’s normally quiet streets. “You had some supporters hoping the emir of Qatar was like the prince from Aladdin and would come with millions of dollars,” said Thomas Evers, the lead soccer writer for the Grenz Echo. “They were dreaming that in three years we would be playing in the Champions League because you have the emir and he will bring superstars like Paris Saint-Germain. And then they saw fifteen African players who are 18 years old and had never played a professional game. People said, ‘What will happen?’ ”
Radermacher couldn’t wait to meet the players. Eupen’s affable team manager was on his way to the biggest hotel in town, the 28-room Ambassador, to greet the Football Dreams contingent when they first arrived in July 2012. He was excited about the prospect of welcoming what he understood to be an elite group of African players and had visions of Didier Drogba and Yaya Touré dancing in his head. But he was in for a shock when he first spotted them in the lobby. “I came into the hotel, and I saw children!” said Radermacher, laughing at the memory.
Unlike the strapping players people often expect from Africa, few in the first Football Dreams class came anywhere close to six feet tall. That’s in part because Colomer came from Barcelona and had a penchant for the small technical players the club often produced. It was also likely because many of the boys were older than 13 when they first tried out and therefore didn’t grow as expected over the years. At five feet, nine inches, Diawandou was actually one of the tallest players in the class.
Radermacher turned to Eupen’s general manager, Christoph Henkel, to confirm the players he was staring at really were the ones he was supposed to be welcoming, although the likelihood of somehow coming across over a dozen other Africans in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel was pretty much zero. “I said to Christoph, ‘These are the players?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, very young.’ I knew they were 18 years old, but in my head a professional player would be different.” Many in town also questioned their size and harbored doubts about how they would perform in Belgium’s rough-and-tumble second division. But those were far from the only concerns the people of Eupen had after Qatar swooped in from nowhere to buy their little local club.
One of the club’s two supporter groups, the Zebras, made up of younger “ultra” fans, boycotted the team’s games because they didn’t agree with Qatar’s purchase. They saw it as an attempt to hijack the club’s tradition and culture and turn it into a business benefiting the new owner. “Football is for you and me and not for fucking industry,” said one of the group’s members, Peter Schuller. They were angry that Aspire had changed Eupen’s jerseys from red and yellow, the city’s traditional colors, to blue and white to match the academy. Eupen also played in black and white, a practice that generated the team’s long-standing nickname, the Pandas.
Some of the criticism around town had a racist tinge to it. A local slurping down beer at one of Eupen’s small bars blurted out, “The al Qataris are terrorists!” when asked what he thought, “and the Saudi Arabians, too!” At least he knew the identity of the country that bought the team. Another local said it was either “sheikhs from Bhutan or Oman.” He couldn’t remember which. A few of the town’s older residents said they didn’t agree with having African or Arab players on the team at all. Eupen is almost lily white, and the only other black people wandering around town mostly come from an asylum center for refugees located near the team’s stadium.
But most critics said they simply didn’t like the fact that the team was no longer made up of local players they knew and could go drinking with after games. The Football Dreams players rarely went out at all and were completely focused on climbing the professional ladder. But Aspire understood the importance of the connection between the town and the club. The team’s general manager, Christoph Henkel, joked that perhaps he should hire a player whose only job would be to drink with fans after matches. “I thought maybe an Irish guy,” he said. “He never plays, but after each match, he’s the king of the bar here.”
Fans also complained that Eupen’s new coach, Tintin, didn’t interact with them much or speak German, so they couldn’t impart what they insisted would be useful advice to help manage the team. “People here know the players, know who is good,” said Manfred Schumacher, a grizzled bartender serving pints of beer at the cozy Columbus Cafe near the town’s main plaza. “When the coach pulls out a player, the people are not happy.” But Tintin was quite happy to miss out on this advice and said he wasn’t going to explain to the locals why he played certain players and not others. “I come from a very different world, a professional world,” said the coach.
Aspire wasn’t the first to use a Belgian team as a platform for launching African players or to spa
rk opposition doing it. In 2001, French coach Jean-Marc Guillou led a consortium to buy a financially troubled first division club in northern Belgium called KSK Beveren. Guillou became the team’s manager and began importing players from an academy he ran at ASEC Mimosas in the Ivory Coast, taking advantage of the lax rules on how many Africans could turn out for a club in Belgium.
Beveren reached the final of the Belgian Cup in 2004, and the club managed to sell many of the Ivorian players to bigger teams elsewhere in Europe, including Yaya Touré, Gervinho, and Emmanuel Eboué. Many ended up at Arsenal, and it later came to light in the media that the British club provided a loan to help Guillou’s group acquire Beveren. The two were connected because Arsenal’s coach, Arsene Wenger, used to be Guillou’s assistant in France. Although Beveren proved successful in feeding players to big clubs, some in Belgium criticized Guillou’s system because he would often field teams composed entirely of African players, and the coach eventually left the club in 2006.
The purchase of Eupen sparked comparisons with Guillou’s operation, but Aspire officials sought to differentiate what they were doing by saying they were focused on developing players rather than making money. They also pointed out that even though Eupen contained over a dozen Africans, only a few of them usually started. The coach, Tintin, knew the academy wanted him to help the Football Dreams players to progress, but he also needed to win games. That meant he often relied on a core of more experienced players augmented by a few regular Football Dreams starters, including Diawandou, who was made co-captain, the smooth Ghanaian playmaker Samuel Asamoah, and Anthony Bassey, a lightning-fast striker from Nigeria. The coach sprinkled in the other Football Dreams players where needed, and some got very little playing time. Aspire also sent a few Qatari kids to Eupen, part of the country’s effort to improve its national team ahead of the 2022 World Cup, but most trained with the reserve squad since they weren’t good enough for the first team. Many in town suspected they would see the African boys playing for Qatar in the World Cup as well and thought that was the whole point of Football Dreams.
The Away Game Page 20
