The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Chibsah’s friend Myrer worked for a Norwegian mining company in Liberia, and he ended up buying a club there, Monrovia FC, with the hope of grooming players and sending them to Scandinavian teams. Myrer invited Bernard and two other players from Unique to Monrovia, where they spent a few weeks playing with his club. Oteng tagged along to make sure they would be okay. Myrer certainly liked what he saw in Bernard. “He was very, very skillful,” he said. “If you go to Africa, you can see a lot of players who are very physical but not very well trained. But he was trained. All the coaches and the guys in Liberia loved Bernard and the way he played. We could see that he had good talent.” Myrer even arranged for them to play a friendly match against Liberia’s Under-20 national team, and Bernard once again dazzled in his playmaker role. “When you do that, you play against adults that are twice your size, and he was really tough and did very well.”

  Myrer arranged for Bernard and one of the other Unique players to travel to one of Norway’s top clubs, Lillestrom SK, in the summer of 2011. They trained with the club’s Under-16 side for a few weeks and then traveled to Sweden to compete in one of Europe’s biggest youth tournaments, the Gothia Cup. The team didn’t do so well, losing two games and drawing one, but Bernard and his Ghanaian teammate were the standouts at the tournament. “I talked to the guy who was the youth coach who took them there, and he said they were the best two on the team,” said Myrer. But Lillestrom said they couldn’t sign Bernard until he turned 18. Bernard was almost certainly older than that, but like Ibrahima, revealing his true age would have raised a whole host of issues. Chibsah suspected Bernard’s height may have also been an issue for Lillestrom given the physicality of Norwegian soccer. He was still only a little over five feet tall at the time and wasn’t going to get any taller.

  Bernard switched gears and returned to Sweden because a fourth division club there, Säffle FF, expressed an interest in signing him after seeing him play in the Gothia Cup. It was a far cry from the clubs like Lazio and Valencia that had targeted Bernard when he was at Aspire. But he was growing desperate and figured any foothold in Europe was better than returning to Ghana empty-handed. He had to head home before anything was finalized because he had overstayed his visa and couldn’t get an extension. Still, he hoped they could come to an agreement and he would soon find himself winging his way back to Sweden.

  While Bernard waited for word from Säffle, he got a call from a Football Dreams staff member in the fall of 2011 saying Colomer was in Accra and wanted to meet him. It would be the first time Bernard had seen the Spanish scout since he had left Aspire. He caught a ride to El Wak, the stadium where Ghana and Senegal faced off about a year earlier in the Africa Cup of Nations playoff. Colomer was holding the final Football Dreams tryout in Ghana there that year and wanted to reconnect with the player from the first class who had left such an impression on him. Bernard brought along a photo of him playing with Säffle in Sweden, an attempt to show Colomer his career was still on track even though he left the academy.

  “When he saw me, he was very sad because Colomer always liked me so much,” said Bernard. The Spanish scout gave him a hug and asked the midfielder to sit next to him until he finished scouting for the day so they could talk. As the two sat silently side by side, Bernard had time to stare out at the latest batch of Ghanaian Football Dreams prospects and wonder how their fortunes would compare with his. Finally, Colomer turned to Bernard to find out what had become of the player who once held so much promise for him. “He said, ‘Oh, my son, what is going on now?’ ” said Bernard. “I told him I went to Sweden and showed him the crowd I went to train with, and he said it was very good. He wanted me again and said he would call me.”

  That may have been wishful thinking on Bernard’s part. He never heard from Colomer again. The Spanish scout was in his fifth year of recruiting for Football Dreams at that point and had an entire stable of potential stars back at his academy in Senegal. That wasn’t all Colomer had in Saly, either. He also opened a five-star hotel in town called the Rhino Resort that attracted soccer celebrities like Messi. Colomer may have compared Bernard to the Argentine at the beginning of the program and predicted he would become a star. But that was years earlier, and the Ghanaian had apparently proven more trouble than he was worth. A few years later, Colomer even said Bernard wasn’t a true Football Dreams player because he trained in Doha rather than at the Spanish scout’s academy in Saly. Whatever bond had existed between the two was well and truly broken.

  Bernard also got bad news from Säffle. Like Lillestrom, the club said they couldn’t sign him since he wasn’t yet 18. It was a painful blow, and not just for Bernard. The number of people counting on him making it to Europe had expanded in recent months. Bernard got a text message from his girlfriend while he was in Liberia saying she had given birth to a baby girl, quite a shock since he didn’t even know she was pregnant. He not only needed to find a way to support them but also had to look for a new place to live. Not surprisingly, Bernard’s pastors disapproved of him fathering a child out of wedlock, and he no longer felt welcome living in their home.

  Moving in with his parents wasn’t really an option. His father had lost his job as a security guard around the same time, and without the money that had been coming from Aspire, he could no longer afford the rent for their house in Teshie. He and his wife were forced to move outside Accra to an unfinished home they had started building when Bernard was at the academy but couldn’t complete when the money from Qatar dried up. As Bernard looked around for help, he discovered how few people he could actually count on. “When I had money, I had a lot of friends,” said Bernard. “When I was in Ghana, people would say, ‘Appiah, Appiah’ when I walked down the street. I thought they liked me, but when I came back to Ghana and didn’t have money, I realized they didn’t. Sometimes they will see me in the street and just pass.” Bernard eventually found another set of pastors to take him and his younger brother into their cramped two-room home. But it was unclear if they acted out of charity or because they saw the player as a potential path to riches if he could ever make his way to Europe.

  In any case, Europe was out of the question for now. Bernard needed to make money and explored playing in Ghana for the first time since he returned. It wasn’t a very appealing option since he would earn peanuts compared to what players make in Europe. It was also a blow to his pride since everyone in Teshie figured he was on his way to becoming a big European star once he got into Aspire. But Bernard didn’t have much choice. His coach Oteng reached out to two of the biggest clubs in Ghana, Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko, but they wanted to take Bernard for their junior teams since they often relied on older, more experienced players for their senior sides. Oteng thought he was too good for this and refused to release him.

  Instead, Bernard ended up making his way to a club in Ghana’s second highest league, King Solomon, after playing a friendly match against them toward the end of 2012. Bernard’s team, Unique, lost 2-1, but he scored his side’s only goal and wowed King Solomon’s coach. “He plays like Lionel Messi,” said the coach, Thomas Duah. “He’s very fast with the ball, and I liked his technique, his control.” Bernard only earned about $50 a month, but the club promised him much more in winning bonuses, especially if he could help the team qualify for Ghana’s top division. Bernard scored a bucketload of goals and carried King Solomon to a final playoff match to get promoted, but the team ended up losing 1-0. The loss wasn’t the most painful part of the season for Bernard, though. He repeatedly clashed with the club’s management because they only paid him a fraction of the winning bonuses they promised. He was so angry that he quit the team and vowed never to play in Ghana again.

  In fact, he was thinking about giving up soccer altogether when he met Arenton Ofoe Chiri, a buttoned-down IT specialist in his early 30s who worked for a major bank in Accra and owned a team in Ghana’s third highest league on the side. He played a bit of soccer himself in primary school but admitted he wasn’t very good and ab
andoned the game as he continued his education. Years later, when he was back home visiting his parents, he ran into an old schoolmate who had been a wizard on the field but hadn’t been able to make it because he got injured and had no money to pay for his recovery. Chiri decided to use his savings to help his old friend and ended up doing the same for other promising players who had fallen on hard times. “I started looking for talents who are going to waste, to help them achieve their dreams,” said Chiri. This eventually led him to starting his own team, Miracle Land, which he funded himself for about $5,000 a season. Without the support of someone like Chiri, many talented players in Africa would end up abandoning soccer because they need to earn a living and take care of their families.

  That was where Bernard was headed when he crossed paths with Chiri in 2013. “When I met him, psychologically he was down,” said Chiri. “Around that time, he didn’t even want to play football anymore. He had a lot of frustration because he knew that when he was at Aspire he was a star. But now nothing was happening because he lacked someone taking responsibility for his life and pushing him to the next level.” Bernard’s name filtered down to Chiri after he was named one of the best players at a tournament organized at a sports complex in Accra owned by Marcel Desailly, a defender born in Ghana who became a star in Europe and won the World Cup with France in 1998. Chiri took Bernard under his wing and even invited him over to his house to have his wife cook for him. He persuaded Bernard not to give up on his talent and promised to help him achieve his dream of making it to Europe. “I talked to him to make him feel like he’s going to be somebody,” he said. “I told him I want to see him play in the Champions League because he’s got the potential.”

  Of course, Chiri could earn a bit of money himself if he was successful in reviving Bernard’s career, since he negotiated a deal to split any proceeds with Oteng, but he insisted that wasn’t his motivation. Bernard agreed to play for Chiri’s team, Miracle Land, while they looked for a way to get him to Europe, even though he would once again only earn about $50 a month. Chiri also found him a new place to live, although like his salary, the dingy concrete room was no great shakes. Bernard was originally supposed to share it with just one other player, but four of them ended up cramming into the 12-by-12-foot room. One of the players was six feet, six inches tall, so space was definitely tight. But at least Bernard wasn’t sleeping on the couch at his pastors’ house, and Chiri occasionally ponied up money to buy him a new pair of cleats. “He started to gain that confidence again,” said Chiri. “It was timely that I met him.”

  Bernard dribbling through a pack of his Miracle Land teammates during training in Accra.

  But getting Bernard to Europe proved more difficult than Chiri had anticipated. He connected with an agent in Sweden interested in bringing Bernard over for trials, but Chiri couldn’t get him a visa since the player had overstayed his visa the last time he was in the country. Chiri also failed to get Bernard a visa for Belgium when an agent invited him for a trial with one of the country’s top clubs, KRC Genk. Looking for any route out of Ghana, Chiri even flew Bernard to Singapore for trials there since Ghanaians don’t need a visa. But airport officials wouldn’t let him enter the country because he wasn’t carrying enough cash, and he had to return home without ever stepping on the field. As the years passed without progress, even Chiri began to worry Bernard might never achieve his dream of making it to Europe. “Appiah does not have time on his side, so I need to accelerate things because at the end of the day if I’m not able to do that, I have really disappointed him and I have disappointed myself too because he has the talent.”

  Bernard tried to remain optimistic, but it became increasingly difficult as the failed attempts to leave Ghana piled up. It was impossible to ignore just how far he had fallen. Every morning, Bernard willed himself to rise from his bare mattress and jogged along the highway for a half hour to an anonymous red dirt pitch tucked away in one of Accra’s crowded neighborhoods. He and his Miracle Land teammates placed yellow and blue cones in the dust and trained for a couple hours to the shrieking sound of saw against metal coming from an auto repair yard next door. The years had taken their toll, and Bernard had lost much of the weight he gained when he was at Aspire, making him seem even smaller on the field. His game had grown rusty as well, although there were still flashes of brilliance, a sudden change of direction leaving a defender stranded as Bernard sailed by with the ball glued to his left foot, the kind of move that had caught Colomer’s attention all those years ago. But now nobody was watching. Bernard had become just another African player hoping against the odds to be discovered. He was back in a crowd of millions, and talent wasn’t always enough to escape. What Bernard needed was another miracle, but they were in short supply.

  So was food. Bernard decided whether to run home from training each day depending on whether he had enough money to buy lunch. When he didn’t, he walked to conserve his energy. The money from Chiri began to dry up as Bernard’s chances of making it to Europe dimmed. At times, even a bowl of rice and beans from a roadside stand was out of reach, and he was forced to scrounge food from his neighbors or look to his pastors for help. He also needed a new pair of cleats. One of his white and blue Adidas Predators had a gash in the side, and he didn’t have the money to replace it. Turning to his parents had become even less of an option because his mother suffered a stroke in 2015, and his father needed all the money he could get to care for her. Still, Bernard didn’t give up on his dream. He not only made it to training every morning, but also ran up and down a highway overpass in the evenings to keep up his fitness. “When God brings you down, you can’t give up,” said Bernard. “You have to keep working hard. I’m praying to God that God should help me and let me stand on my feet again.”

  To cope with his fading fortune, Bernard leaned heavily on the memories of his time at Aspire, when he was seen as one of the chosen few marked for greatness. Even on warm days, Bernard often ran to training in a full blue and gray Aspire track suit that he brought back from the academy and tried to keep meticulously clean. The large wings printed on the back looked conspicuously out of place in an environment better suited to grounding Bernard’s dreams than helping them take flight. But the track suit helped him stand out in a way that nothing else in his life could at that point. Strangers sometimes stopped him in the street to ask if he was part of Aspire, and he proudly said yes.

  He could even show them the photos he kept on his phone. There was one that showed Bernard dribbling away from Coutinho when his academy team beat Neymar and the rest of the Brazilian squad in 2008. Another showed Bernard lined up with Diawandou and other members of his class after they played Valencia under Aspire’s massive dome. Bernard had even more photos he kept in a plastic bag at home along with other mementos from his time at Aspire, including banners from many of the European teams he played, the contract he signed with the academy, and even the itinerary of his last flight out of Doha.

  Bernard leaving Miracle Land training wearing the track suit he brought back with him from Aspire.

  Looking back, Bernard wished he had pressed his coach Oteng to give his license to Aspire, regardless of the price, so he could have stayed at the academy. “I would be a big boy now,” said Bernard. “I would be playing my football in Europe.” But Oteng stuck to his guns. He said he regretted Bernard hadn’t been able to find another way out of Ghana but still didn’t think he should have handed over the player’s license without getting a percentage of the future profit. “Our football men in this town, they are wicked people,” said Oteng. “They are greedy also.” But some thought Oteng was also being greedy and should have given up the license for Bernard’s sake. “He saw Bernard as an opportunity to make money,” said Eugene Komey, the coordinator at the field where Colomer first spotted the little Ghanaian. “It’s easier for me to let my players go. I can give you the card if you can assure me that the kid is going to play. But they wanted to hold on to the boy to make money at all cost.”r />
  Bernard wished he could reach out to Colomer one last time to beg for help but had no idea how to get in touch with him. “If you talk to him, tell him I need him,” said Bernard. “It’s very difficult for me now. I can’t stay here.” Time was certainly running out for the midfielder. He was already in his mid-20s, the prime playing age for professionals. If he had to wait much longer, he would miss his window entirely, if he hadn’t already.

  It seemed a lifetime ago that Colomer stood at Star Park and selected Bernard for a journey that took him tantalizingly close to the world of his dreams before he was cast back into the soccer wilderness. But his dreams weren’t completely dashed. He still had hope of staging a miraculous comeback, one that would allow him to stop looking at the past as the brightest period in his young life. “I know I’m not done yet,” said Bernard. “I have very far to go. One day I will look back and tell my story, and it will be a happy story because I pray to God and work very hard.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Only the Beginning

  The jerseys, framed in glass, leaned against the wall of Diawandou’s living room, ready to be hung. They told the story of his remarkable journey over the years in a parade of colors. To commemorate his time at Eupen, Diawandou chose a blue and white jersey, eschewing the club’s traditional colors for those of Aspire. There was also a green jersey with yellow Puma logos on the sleeves. That was the one Diawandou wore during his first match for Senegal’s senior national team. He played the full 90 minutes in a 2-2 draw with Colombia in May 2014, becoming the first Football Dreams player to debut for his nation’s top side. It was the first time he had made it back to the Lions of Teranga since being kicked off the Under-17 squad ahead of the Africa Cup of Nations several years earlier.