But there was an even newer jersey resting against the wall, a blue and red one with D. Diagne printed on the back in gold. Turn the jersey around, and you could be standing in Messi’s living room. Diawandou had stared in awe at Barcelona’s superstar years earlier when he came to visit the first Football Dreams class in Doha. Now the two players shared the same uniform, the same iconic crest. Diawandou had achieved his unlikely dream, one shared by millions of kids living all over the world, except perhaps Madrid. He had joined the Blaugrana, the blue and red; he had joined Barcelona.
Diawandou was driving to a friend’s house during his summer holiday in Thiès when Colomer called to say Barcelona had made another offer for him to join its B team. The first time the club came for Diawandou, the Spanish scout had told him the timing wasn’t right. But after two seasons at Eupen, his message had changed. “Colomer thought I was ready to go,” said Diawandou. “He said, ‘If you go now, you are definitely going to play. You don’t need to do anything more at Eupen.’ ” Colomer thought the Senegalese defender was exactly the kind of player Barcelona needed. “He is a leader. Such teams need strong personalities,” the Spanish scout told Aspire’s magazine. “Physically, he may not be one of the biggest defenders, but he makes up for it in speed and demonstrates outstanding technique, important qualities when you’re playing for FC Barcelona.”
Colomer’s call put Diawandou over the moon, but he kept the information from everyone except his close family because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself while he was still in Senegal. On the day of his departure, he had a celebratory meal with his mother at home and quietly slipped away to Dakar airport’s small international terminal. Over a half dozen years had passed since he first walked through the terminal doors, scared and excited about taking his first flight to a far-off Arab city he knew nothing about. There were butterflies this time as well but certainly not from fear of boarding the plane. That was old hat to Diawandou. He had flown all over the world with Football Dreams. One of his academy classmates even kept all his boarding passes and could shuffle them like playing cards. But Diawandou was the only one from his class making a one-way trip to Barcelona.
He was in good hands when he landed at Barcelona’s airport, where he was met by his new agent, Ramón Sostres, who also represented one of the club’s biggest stars, Andrés Iniesta. It was a whirlwind first day for Diawandou. He went directly to the club’s glamorous training facility for a tour and to complete his medical. He was then met by Barcelona’s sporting director, Andoni Zubizarreta, and the board member responsible for the club’s B team to sign his three-year contract, which had a release clause of 12 million euros. A photo taken after the signing shows Diawandou standing between the two of them as they hold up his first Barcelona jersey, a traditional blue and red one with D. Diagne printed on the back. It was an incredible moment. When Diawandou was at the academy, he always used to ask Colomer to bring Barcelona uniforms back from Spain. Now he had one of his own. “It felt good to hold a jersey with my name on it,” said Diawandou. “My dream was always to play for Barça.”
Diawandou holding his Barcelona jersey on his first day with the club.
Back in Thiès, friends and family flocked to Diawandou’s house to congratulate his mother after local newspapers reported he had signed with Barcelona. “There was a big crowd,” she said. “People were calling to congratulate me as well.” She had returned from the Ivory Coast a few years earlier and lived in a new three-story, six-bedroom house that Diawandou had built with the money he had made at Eupen. Painted red and white and accented with light blue doors, the house lent an air of refinement to an otherwise unremarkable area of the city dominated by dirt roads and half-finished concrete compounds. It rivaled the size of the family home where Diawandou grew up but wasn’t crowded with dozens of other relatives. Parts of the house were still under construction, and much of it was sparsely furnished. But Diawandou took special care over the next few months to set up the main living room on the ground floor. That was where he planned to hang his jerseys from Eupen, Senegal’s national team, and Barcelona.
There was one other uniform resting against the living room wall ready to be hung, a red and white one. But it didn’t have Diawandou’s name on the back. Below the number fifteen, the letters spelled out Dramé. Despite the big striker’s defiant departure from the academy after the Milk Cup in 2011, the two players had remained close, and Ibrahima called Diawandou a few months after he joined Barcelona to ask if he could have one of his jerseys. Diawandou agreed on the condition that Ibrahima send him one as well. He thought his fellow countryman had made a terrible mistake leaving Aspire early but understood why given his family’s tough background in Ziguinchor. “He was rushing to sign a contract to help his family, to help his mother,” said Diawandou. “At the time, he was a great player, he was doing well in the tournaments and everyone wanted him, but he made the wrong decision.”
Ibrahima had similar thoughts back in 2012 when he returned to Senegal after months of fruitlessly searching for a club in Europe. Like Bernard, he found himself back where he started, competing with millions of other young players to attract the attention of scouts who might pluck him out of Africa. He moved back into the crumbling concrete home in Ziguinchor where he grew up with his mother. She still cooked meals on a coal stove outside, looking over the dirt courtyard where Ibrahima first learned to dribble around plastic laundry tubs under lines filled with drying clothes. When Ibrahima needed a bit of space from his family, he stayed at a friend’s house, but that meant sleeping on a thin mattress in a room that flooded in the rainy season.
Ibrahima left Aspire because he didn’t feel like he was appreciated enough, especially by Colomer, and worried what that meant for his future. But members of the academy staff were devastated by his departure. “Of all the kids I lost, Dramé was the saddest because you see all that talent wasted,” said Wendy Kinyeki. “In my opinion, he was going places. Seeing a kid lose an opportunity like this breaks my heart because of what could have been.” The Football Dreams sports director in Senegal, George Sagna, visited Ibrahima’s mother in Ziguinchor, hoping to lure the striker back to the academy. But even after Ibrahima returned from Europe, he resisted the notion of going back. “It was his personality, his pride,” said his old coach, Amadou Traoré. “He told me, ‘I will try to succeed, but I will not return. If I return to the academy, everyone will say you left but you came back.’ ”
Ibrahima also resisted Traoré’s suggestion that he play for Ziguinchor’s local club, Casa Sport, which competed in Senegal’s top league, because he thought it would look like failure. “The people from Aspire would think I went to Europe, didn’t have anything, and now I’m back in Africa,” said Ibrahima. But with help from the player’s former national team coach, Boucounta Cissé, Traoré eventually convinced Ibrahima to reconsider and join the club. They told him it was the only way to keep up his form so he could eventually make it in Europe. Casa Sport was certainly glad to have him since the striker scored a bunch of goals for the club, including one that helped the team win the Senegal Cup at Demba Diop stadium in Dakar in August 2013. It was the same stadium where Ibrahima and his teammates beat Ghana in dramatic fashion a few years earlier to qualify for the Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations for the first time.
Playing for the national team had been one of the high points for Ibrahima at the academy, but his biggest triumph was the 5-1 victory over Manchester United in the Milk Cup final in 2011. The win was clouded by the turmoil that followed when he left Aspire, but it ended up being his saving grace after he returned to Senegal. Late one winter night in 2012, Rolf Magne Walstad, the sports administrator for a club in Norway’s top division, SK Brann, sat at his desk in Bergen, a beautiful city on the country’s western coast built on a fjord and surrounded by mountains. Walstad decided to take a break from his work and Google his favorite English team, Manchester United, according to an article in a local Bergen newspaper. Up popped a story that
said a squad from Aspire had thrashed the Red Devils the previous summer in Northern Ireland, thanks to a big Senegalese striker who scored a hat trick in the final and won the tournament’s golden boot award.
Walstad was intrigued, made contact with Ibrahima through a Senegalese agent, and invited him for trials at Brann. Given the striker’s previous experience in Europe, it could have seemed like a bad case of déjà vu. But Ibrahima impressed Brann’s coaches, and the club quickly said they wanted to sign a four-year contract with the big man when he turned 18 and would send him a bit of money in the interim to help his family. Ibrahima agreed, wrapped up his stint with Casa Sport, and moved to Bergen at the beginning of 2014 to join his new club. The transfer felt like much-needed redemption years after leaving Aspire, and Ibrahima proudly sent Diawandou one of his red and white Brann uniforms to hang in his living room. It wasn’t Barcelona, but it was a big step in getting his career back on track.
Most important, the contract with Brann enabled Ibrahima to build a new house for his mother, something that had long been his dream. Ever since their mud home collapsed in a rainstorm when Ibrahima was a child, his mother and siblings had all lived in a single room of his grandmother’s ramshackle house. That was about to change. Soon after Ibrahima arrived in Norway, he wired money back to his family to begin building a new home on the same spot where the old one had collapsed, and less than a year later it was finished. The one-story, three-bedroom house, located off a dirt road next to a ditch filled with trash, was much less grand than the one Diawandou built in Thiès, but it transformed the life of Ibrahima’s family in a much more profound way.
Rather than seeking shelter from the sun under a few rusty sheets of metal propped up by a wooden pole, Ibrahima’s mother could sit on one of the new floral-patterned couches in her living room under the cool breeze of the ceiling fan, sipping a cold drink from the refrigerator and watching the flat-screen TV on the wall. There was even Wi-Fi that Ibrahima used to browse Facebook on his iPhone. When asked about the new house, his mother simply said, “Thank you God, thank you Ibrahima.” The question brought tears to her eyes, partly from joy and partly from the painful memory of trying to raise four kids with no money and no house of her own after she had split up with her husband years earlier. “When she thinks about how difficult it was, she always starts crying,” said Ibrahima’s older brother, Sekou. “I always say, ‘Momma, stop, that’s over. You must be happy now and forget everything else.’ ”
Making the jump to Norway transformed Ibrahima into something of a local celebrity in Ziguinchor. His mother always knew when he returned home for holiday because she could hear the young boys outside shouting, “Ibrahima is coming!” When he walked Ziguinchor’s red dirt streets, locals flocked to him to say hi, and he often offered a fist bump or a high-five in return. After a challenging few years, Ibrahima seemed back to his old self, gregarious and brimming with confidence. But life in Norway was more difficult than he let on, and not only because he faced the prospect of pickled herring at mealtime. Ibrahima wasn’t getting the playing time at Brann he had expected. He played plenty for the club’s reserve side and was among the squad’s top scorers. But he only logged a few minutes with the senior team during his entire first season and failed to score a single goal.
The coach told him he needed to be patient since he was still young, but Ibrahima disagreed and the two often clashed. “I don’t want to sit on the bench,” said Ibrahima. “I know I’m better than the players who are playing ahead of me.” He eventually grew so disillusioned he left Brann after a single season and followed the sports administrator who brought him there, Walstad, to a team in Norway’s second highest league, Honefoss BK. It was a step in the wrong direction, but Ibrahima was desperate to register the playing time and goals that would allow him to move to a much bigger club, one that met not only his expectations but also those of everyone who watched him tear apart Manchester United on that cool summer evening in Ballymena a few years earlier.
Looking back, Ibrahima wished he had never left Aspire after the Milk Cup. He still bristled at what he perceived as a lack of attention from Colomer but thought he would be in a much better position today if he had remained, and his coach Traoré agreed. “I’m sure if Ibrahima had stayed at the academy it would have been better for him,” he said. “He was the best player and would have found a great club because he has the talent.” Like Diawandou, perhaps Ibrahima would have received a call from Colomer one day saying a top club had come for him. He would never know, and the pain of what might have been lingered. But despite everything that happened, Ibrahima was still glad Colomer selected him out of millions to join Aspire and knew any success he had in the future would largely be due to the training and attention he received at the academy. “I still have good feelings toward Aspire,” said Ibrahima. “Anything I am now and anything I will be tomorrow is because of Aspire.”
Ibrahima outside his coach’s home in Ziguinchor with the medals and trophies he won while at Aspire.
Ironically, some of the players who stayed at the academy after the Milk Cup wished years later they had left like Ibrahima. They didn’t see the pain the big striker went through after his departure, only that he ended up playing at a good level in Norway. Many in Ibrahima’s class appreciated the training, exposure, and financial support they received from the academy but failed to find much success after they finished and felt like they didn’t get enough help from Aspire. They even began calling the second Football Dreams class “Generation Sacrifice.” Like Ibrahima, they accused Colomer of favoring the first class and felt the problem got even worse after the Milk Cup, since the Spanish scout was so outraged at the players who left and demanded to know why none of those who stayed told him the secret exodus was under way.
Only four players from the second class were selected to join Eupen, and those left out were upset that so many more from the first year got to go. Aspire said there simply wasn’t room for everyone, but that didn’t make the situation any easier. The number of spots would dwindle even further in future years as Aspire sought to add more Qatari players to the Belgian team in preparation for the 2022 World Cup. Academy officials said they were doing everything they could to help the players, but finding them all European teams was a huge challenge. “We are running around like crazy to find some clubs, Norway second division, Iceland, Denmark, wherever, to try to find further opportunities for these players,” said Andreas Bleicher. The one place they weren’t looking was Qatar, even though some of the boys said they would be happy there, because they were concerned people would accuse them of trying to naturalize the players.
Aspire considered offering academy graduates the chance to use the Football Dreams country director in Senegal, Lamine Savané, as an agent, but some complained there was no way he could manage so many players at once. Bleicher said they also looked into the possibility of setting up a separate agency to better assist the boys but didn’t follow through because they were worried people would accuse them of trying to profit from Football Dreams. The decision may have helped them defend against such accusations, but they ended up with a cadre of unhappy players who viewed returning home to play in Africa as unacceptable failure. After all, weren’t they supposed to be the best young talent the continent had to offer?
A Ghanaian goalkeeper from the second class even threatened to sue Aspire because the academy didn’t find him a European team after he graduated. One of his fellow countrymen was so depressed when he returned home that he spent most of his time alone in his room despite attempts by his family to lure him out. Even John Benson, the first African player Aspire recruited before Football Dreams started, thought the academy should do more to help the program’s graduates. “Most of the players are home now, and they are struggling,” said John, who has enjoyed a successful career in Qatar’s top league. “You showed them how to play football. You showed them how to live a luxury life. All of a sudden you said, ‘OK, now we stop,’ and then they had to come
back home. This is not right.”
At the same time, the players may have had unrealistic expectations of what Aspire should have done for them after they graduated. Creating a culture of dependency has long been a risk for foreign aid organizations operating in Africa. But how well did Aspire prepare the players for the reality that not all of them were going to make it? Academy officials said they tried to make clear that not all the players would succeed but couldn’t control whether they absorbed the message or not. Part of the problem may have been that Colomer expressed such confidence in his ability to pick kids who could make it. Only a tiny percentage of players at European academies become professionals, and a much smaller sliver go on to top clubs. Colomer believed he could do much better because of his experience and the vast talent pool he had to choose from. He even predicted more than half the first class would become professionals, many at top clubs. But that wasn’t how it played out. Despite over a dozen players from the first two classes turning out for their youth national teams, Diawandou was the only graduate from that period to make it to a major European club. Many of the others ended up playing at low levels in Europe, returning to Africa, or washing out of the game altogether.
The Away Game Page 24
