The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  They were late, so the kids whom Colomer had come to see had been waiting for hours at the community field in the center of town for their tryout. They weren’t the only ones who had showed up. When Colomer arrived, he saw spectators of all ages crowded around the pitch, a sea of green surrounded by metal shacks strung with drying laundry. The organizers had even set up a tent so old men could sit in the shade and watch.

  Normally, the tryouts observed by Colomer across Africa that year included 176 players each, enough for sixteen 11-a-side teams that would play a total of eight 25-minute games. Colomer and the other scouts would pick the best 50 players from each country out of this pool and invite them to the capital for a four-day trial. The three best field players from each country, and several goalkeepers from across Africa, would then be invited to a final tryout outside the continent that lasted several weeks. The top players at this final test would then be invited to join the academy and train to become professionals.

  Setting up these tryouts required nearly 6,000 local volunteers in Africa, about the same number of people needed to operate an aircraft carrier. Many of the volunteers were local coaches who ran the thousands of small, informal soccer schools that dot neighborhoods across Africa. To enlist their support, Colomer and his team distributed thousands of dollars of free Nike gear at each of the fields where they held tryouts. Volunteers were also given a free trip overseas if one of their boys was selected for the final tryout, a big perk since many had never traveled outside their countries before.

  Football Dreams was like nothing the soccer world had ever seen, and not simply because of its size. Soccer has long been called the global game, but the program took globalization to an almost absurd new extreme, for Football Dreams is not simply a story of European scouts chasing future African stars. It’s also a tale of rich Arab sheikhs who play soccer on their palace grounds, South American wonder kids who grow up to become legends, and small-town European fans worried about the takeover of their little local club. The combination of these disparate worlds made Football Dreams one of the most radical experiments in sports history. It was up to Colomer to find a small number of African boys who were good enough to make the experiment work. He would make soccer history if he succeeded. So would the boys he found.

  In Ogulagha, Bekewei couldn’t quite assemble 176 players for the tryout, even though he had paid for several dozen kids from neighboring communities to take boats to the town. The players who had showed up were a hodgepodge. Some wore proper soccer gear, complete with cleats. Others were barefoot or planned to play in their socks. The field turned out to be a great equalizer. From a distance, the grass looked a little overgrown but fairly inviting. Closer inspection revealed a swampy bog. It was the rainy season in Nigeria, and water had flooded the pitch. The goalmouths sported small ponds that ducks used to bathe when the field wasn’t in action.

  The players who took the field wore reversible Nike training bibs that were several sizes too large for many of the kids. They battled against each other and the conditions on the field in an attempt to impress Colomer. It wasn’t easy. An encouraging dribble could be stopped dead by a pool of water, knocking the player off balance and into the mud at the same time. A key skill was being able to flick the ball out of this standing water to get the game restarted—not something you see youth players at Barcelona practicing. The conditions showed just how difficult it could be for Colomer and his team of scouts to evaluate a player’s true level of skill at some of the fields across Africa. But Colomer was intent on casting his net as wide as possible. There was no way to know where the next Messi might be hiding.

  PART ONE

  BOYS

  CHAPTER 1

  The Tornado

  Bernard Appiah had no idea he was about to trade one miracle for another. The pint-sized midfielder was sweeping the floor of his modest wooden church, Miracle Temple, in Ghana’s crowded capital of Accra when his coach came to tell him a foreign scout was expected in the neighborhood that morning to hold a tryout. It was a fitting coincidence. The only thing that could match Bernard’s passion for soccer was his faith in God. In fact, the church, a squat building with a gently sloping gable roof and fading light blue paint job, was more than just a church. It was basically Bernard’s home. And his coach, Justice Oteng, a regular Bible teacher at the church, was like a second father. So when Oteng told him he should attend the tryout being held at a dusty public field in his neighborhood of Teshie, Bernard obediently grabbed his black and white Nike cleats and headed out the door.

  Bernard first began turning coaches’ heads as a young child in the dirt courtyard of his school in Teshie. The large open space is an oasis for kids seeking an escape from the chaotic web of humanity and commerce outside. The area where Bernard grew up is dominated by a sea of small ramshackle homes and shops made of wood, concrete, and metal. They’re set along a maze of red dirt roads shared by a tangle of cars, bikes, wooden carts, pedestrians, traders, chickens, and goats. Noxious green sewage seeps down some of the town’s dirt alleyways. The assault on the senses is softened only slightly by the presence of an occasional palm tree. The ocean and its cooling breeze aren’t far away, but it’s easy to forget amid the bustle.

  From a young age, Bernard spent every minute he could at his schoolyard playing soccer, usually with his younger brother, Eric. They tried to play in the patch of dirt in front of their cramped two-room home, but the landlord always yelled at them. They would sprint off in the direction of the school, carrying the small plastic ball their parents bought for them. Bernard constantly seemed to lose his, earning a scolding from his parents. They didn’t have much money for such things.

  Like millions of Africans in recent decades, Bernard’s parents, Noah Appiah and Elizabeth Ansare, moved to the city from the country looking for a better life. They came from Ghana’s Central Region, where their parents had been uneducated cocoa farmers. But life in Teshie proved harder than they anticipated. Bernard’s father, who suffers from a persistent stutter, soon found work opportunities hard to come by in his newfound home. He and his wife had more education than their parents, but neither had finished high school. Noah worked at a clothing factory when Bernard was young, loading boxes onto trucks for the equivalent of about $40 a month at today’s rates. The pay wasn’t great, but he was occasionally able to bring home clothes for Bernard, Eric, and their younger sister, Josephine.

  The company eventually laid off Bernard’s father, and he spent months unemployed before finding a lower-paying job as a security guard at a local guest house. It was a tough time for the family. A good chunk of his pay was spent on rent for their home, where they all slept together in a single bedroom. The house also had a small living room with a picture of Jesus on the wall and a narrow porch where Bernard’s mother cooked meals on a coal stove. Bernard’s favorite was banku, a mixture of fermented corn and cassava dough, paired with okra stew. He would help out by fetching water in large plastic jugs since their home didn’t have a tap. When his mother wasn’t cooking or cleaning, she sold secondhand clothes in the market to help pay for the kids’ school fees and the occasional plastic soccer ball.

  Bernard had a lot more interest in the school’s soccer field than its classrooms. “When I was in school, I was not clever,” said Bernard. But he was intelligent on the pitch. He would bolt from his wooden desk when class was over and head out to play. There was a small field for younger kids like Bernard, with weathered wooden goalposts that leaned at an angle. The older kids had a full-size pitch with rusty metal goals that had lost most of their white paint. These fields teemed with kids in the afternoons and on weekends. Women set up wooden tables selling drinks and grilled corn. Those kids who weren’t playing stood around in their brown and yellow school uniforms and watched.

  They weren’t the only ones watching. Local coaches prowled the fields looking for the best young talent in the area. Seth Ali first spotted Bernard playing soccer at the school in a pair of old tennis shoes when he
was about 8 years old. Even then, he stood out for his speed, control in tight spaces, and ability to take on players with his dominant left foot. Ali convinced Bernard and his parents that he should join his team, the Top Stars, and the midfielder quickly impressed his new teammates. Tornado, they called him, because of his work rate in practice. It was a nickname he shared with one of Ghana’s most famous players, Stephen Appiah, a midfielder who played for Juventus and captained Ghana’s national team, the Black Stars, in the 2006 World Cup. Bernard also dreamed of playing for the national team one day. A red, yellow, and green Ghanaian flag with its distinctive black star waved in the courtyard of Bernard’s school, where the Top Stars practiced.

  Ali had more enthusiasm than resources, a constant problem for soccer coaches in Africa. He only had two balls for the 50 kids he was training, so they spent a lot of their time simply running around in the dust. But he clearly knew who his best player was. “People were always talking about Bernard,” said Ali. “He was the best player in every game, always the best player.” It was clear to his teammates as well. “He was raised from nowhere to become a star,” said his good friend and teammate Joshua Lartey. “His free kicks, penalties, passes, are all incredible.” But Ali had a problem. He needed money to buy jerseys and equipment. That’s how Justice Oteng, the coach who told Bernard about the Football Dreams tryout, came into the picture.

  Oteng was putting together a new team, Unique FC, to play in Ghana’s youth Colts League, and he needed players. He spotted Bernard playing in the schoolyard and approached Ali to buy him and over half a dozen other players from the Top Stars for his team. It was an example of the booming economy for even the youngest soccer players in Africa. Local coaches, many of whom have no formal training, hope to get rich by finding a kid who is good enough to play at a top club in Europe. Some people see these coaches as villains out to exploit young players. Others believe they’re vital because they help fund grassroots soccer throughout Africa. There’s truth on both sides, but the potential for abuse is very real.

  Oteng not only had Bernard join his team but also had the player come live with him. It’s a common practice by youth coaches in Ghana when it comes to dealing with their best players. It helps to strengthen the bond in two ways. It proves the coach’s loyalty to the player and his family by taking on some of the financial burden of raising him. It also makes it more difficult for a competing coach to steal away the player, and Oteng definitely didn’t want to lose Bernard. “He was very small, but he had the talent,” said Oteng. “He was the best striker and offensive midfielder we had.” Bernard knew it as well. He was an affable character off the field, quick to crack a joke. On the pitch, he was pure confidence and determination. “By God’s grace, I have that kind of talent,” said Bernard. “I know how to dribble. I know how to give a pass. I have a lot.”

  Bernard (second from right) lined up with members of his Colts League team, Unique FC.

  Bernard’s family was happy to do anything they could to support his soccer career, even if it meant him living outside the house. His father, also a passionate soccer fan, was sure his son was going places. “Whenever I saw him playing soccer, I had this feeling that my boy was going to become somebody someday,” his father said. “I believed in him because of the way he played and the passion he had.” Bernard didn’t forget about his family either. Whenever he won a packet of FanIce (ice cream) or some boflot (Ghanaian donuts) in pickup games, he always shared the spoils with his parents and siblings.

  Bernard and two other players slept on the floor of Oteng’s one-room home. Oteng took care of them like they were his own kids. He bought them cleats and jerseys, cooked for them, and even paid some of their school fees. When they weren’t in class or playing soccer, they helped out at Oteng’s welding business. It was run out of a tattered wooden shack with Oteng’s cell phone number scrawled across it in white paint. He used the proceeds from the business to fund his Colts teams. In addition to jerseys and equipment, he had to pay for transportation to games and hospital bills if a player got injured.

  Oteng also got support from his local church, the same one Bernard was cleaning the day Colomer came to town. His teams often slept on foam mattresses under a large mosquito net at the church the night before games so they could pray for victory. One of the church’s ministers, Rev. James Mensah, used to play fullback in the Colts League himself. “But I was born again at 17 and eventually stopped,” he said. Bernard moved in with Rev. Mensah and his wife in 2007 because Oteng got a welding contract in the central city of Kumasi and could no longer take care of him. That’s why Oteng went to look for him at the church the day of the Football Dreams tryout to tell him to grab his cleats and head for Star Park. Neither of them had ever heard of the group holding the tryout, but that didn’t matter. It was an opportunity.

  Scouting for soccer players is often a shoestring operation, even toward the upper echelons of the sport. Scouts in England, for example, endure long hours behind the wheel driving to places like Yeovil and Hartlepool to watch a steady parade of games. They subsist on ham and mustard sandwiches, or perhaps rice, curry, and chips, frequently eaten on the run. They constantly worry about job security, especially amid the oft-promised data revolution looming over the soccer world. For their troubles, they are often paid a measly 40 pence a mile or so, as chronicled by Michael Calvin in The Nowhere Men, a touching portrait of this largely invisible clan. “Scouts may be marginalized, professionally, but they possess the power of dreams,” wrote Calvin.

  The pay can be significantly better at the world’s top clubs but not necessarily for scouts chasing youth players. And those youth scouting operations definitely don’t include paramilitary police protection or covert intelligence agents. They don’t feature talk of procuring satellite phones for secure communication while out for a boat ride with a Nigerian militant. That’s because Colomer wasn’t traveling across Africa to scout for Barcelona, Chelsea, or any of the other big teams that might come to mind. Colomer’s backer made them look like paupers. He wasn’t in Africa for one of the richest clubs in the world, but one of the richest countries: the tiny desert kingdom of Qatar. A country most people in Africa had likely never even heard of. Many people in the rest of the world, too.

  That changed in dramatic fashion a few years later when Qatar shocked the world by winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup. The country’s qualifications looked paper thin. Qatar is smaller than Connecticut and has so few citizens that the exact number is considered a national secret. Its team was ranked 113th in the world at the time and had never qualified for a World Cup. Temperatures regularly soar above 110 degrees in the summer, when the tournament is normally held. But Qatar did have one powerful weapon: money. Oil and gas reserves worth trillions of dollars sit beneath the country’s desert sands and offshore in the Persian Gulf. Combine that wealth with a population of only 2 million people, a mere 300,000 of whom are citizens, and you get a lot of excess cash.

  Qatar’s ruling sheikhs were determined to use this wealth to seize a place on the world stage and knew few things could have as much impact as success in international soccer, especially the World Cup. But the tournament turned out to be a public relations nightmare for Qatar. The country was soon battling allegations that it had bribed officials to win the bid. It faced serious concerns about the health risks of playing soccer in the Gulf’s searing summer heat, prompting FIFA to make the controversial decision to move the tournament to winter. The country also grappled with withering criticism about its treatment of migrant laborers, who make up much of Qatar’s population and are tasked with building the tournament’s many stadiums. The uproar was so intense that many called on FIFA to revote on which country would host the 2022 World Cup.

  Despite this newfound attention, Qatar’s mammoth search for the next generation of soccer stars has remained shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the size of Football Dreams is how few people know about it. Most seem to have no idea
that years before Qatar won the right to host the World Cup, it decided to dispatch Colomer to Africa with a mandate to bring back the best young players he could find. The program was launched by Aspire Academy, a colossal, state-run institution built by Qatar at a reported cost of over a billion dollars.

  Even those familiar with Football Dreams have struggled to understand Qatar’s goals and why it has spent so much money on the program, well over $100 million according to one source. Is the nation trying to build a crack team of Africans to compete in a future World Cup? Does the country see a path to even greater riches by harvesting the continent’s best players and selling them to the highest bidder? Aspire has presented Football Dreams as a humanitarian project to help young Africans achieve their goal of joining the world’s top clubs, but that hasn’t quelled suspicions in the media and elsewhere that Football Dreams is yet another chapter in the long history of rich nations stripping Africa of its most valuable resources. “Is this the academy of dreams or exploitation?” said one newspaper headline.

  This is an important question, but it only scratches the surface of a much broader story, one that centers on the boys Colomer plucked off dirt fields across Africa and took to Qatar. Their journeys not only peel back the mystery surrounding Football Dreams but also provide a revealing glimpse into the increasingly global search for young soccer talent. It’s a side of the game that largely sits in the shadows. Millions of kids around the world see making a life in soccer as the ultimate dream, but the small number of players who succeed dominate the headlines, not the millions who fail. Fans rarely see just how daunting the odds are for children to make it, even when they’re marked for greatness at a young age, like Bernard, or how challenging it is for scouts to pick the right kids, even when they know what to look for, like Colomer. Science and technology can help, but only so much. Nigerian militants normally don’t.