The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  The Flea, as they would later call Messi, was never going to overpower bigger players his age at Barcelona, like the tall central defender Gerard Piqué. Instead, he left Piqué and others in the dust with his speed and control. Messi’s coach once warned Piqué and his teammates not to injure the fragile new player, and the defender shouted, “How can we be careful? We can’t even get close to him!”

  A study published in 2011 found that award-winning athletes in soccer and a handful of other sports were actually more likely to be born late rather than early in the selection year. The soccer players included in the study were those who finished in the top three spots in the FIFA World Player of the Year and Ballon d’Or awards over a period of 20 years. Messi has won the Ballon d’Or a record five times, and he’s far from the only little guy to make soccer history.

  The relative age effect is further complicated by the fact that a young athlete’s biological age, or physical maturity, can differ significantly from his chronological age. For example, two 13-year-old boys can have biological ages six years apart because they are growing at different rates. That would mean the early maturer has a body of a 16-year-old and the late maturer a body of a 10-year-old. Much like players who are chronologically older than their counterparts, early maturers have a physical advantage and are often favored by scouts. Imagine if Barcelona had passed on Messi because he was too small. He was clearly a late maturer given his growth deficiency but was lucky enough to be at a club willing to take chances on small, technical players. In fact, they would eventually become the club’s calling card, with Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta all topping out at no more than five feet, seven inches tall.

  Technique is likely a better indicator of a young player’s potential, especially the kind of dribbling prowess Messi exhibited as a child. One study published in 2009 that looked at a group of teenage players at a pair of top Dutch academies found that those who ultimately became professionals were consistently 0.3 seconds faster on average when dribbling 30 meters than those who didn’t make the cut. They were also a second faster on average when repeating the drill three times in a row. Other studies have found that players at youth academies who progressed over the years were also better at passing, shooting, and crossing, although the differences were often relatively small.

  Colomer certainly knew the importance of focusing on technique. He spent time in the 1990s studying the training methods at France’s best-known youth academy, Clairefontaine, which made technique its driving focus and helped the country win the World Cup in 1998 and the European Championship in 2000. “I had the opportunity to really learn how they were working for the World Cup and how they were working with children,” said Colomer. “At the time, Clairefontaine was maybe the reference for youth development in the world.”

  The French federation first started its youth academy system in the 1970s after years of underperforming on the world stage. Initially, the focus was on improving players’ physical conditioning. The training was brutal. Coaches made players run in bulletproof vests laced with metal, according to an article in the soccer magazine The Blizzard. That changed when officials realized they were producing players who were incredibly fit but technically inept. If a kid can’t control and pass the ball like it’s second nature, he’ll never become a star. Technique became the mantra, not endurance. They made players practice technical drills over and over again and never sent kids on a run without the ball. The strategy worked. Clairefontaine, which is located on the sprawling grounds of a French chateau outside Paris, ended up producing France’s leading goal scorer, Thierry Henry, as well as many other top players. This success sealed Clairefontaine’s reputation as one of the best youth academies in the world at the time.

  But focusing on a young player’s technique still tells a scout relatively little about whether the kid will reach the top level, even when the observations are paired with physical measures of speed and agility. A study published in 2016 looked at the results from a battery of five tests conducted by the German soccer federation on over 20,000 of the top Under-12 players in the country. The tests measured speed, agility, dribbling, passing, and shooting. The researchers assessed the utility of the tests in determining how high the kids would progress once they reached the Under-16 to Under-19 level. The study found that players who scored in the 99th percentile or higher in the tests still only had a 6 percent chance of making the youth national team. “This makes the task of searching for future national players similar to searching for a needle in a haystack,” the study said. To improve the predictive power of the tests, the researchers recommended the federation include psychological factors like game intelligence and personality, which are likely the biggest drivers of success. But that’s easier said than done since they are much harder to measure than qualities like speed and technique.

  To Colomer, Bernard certainly looked like one of those needles in the haystack. After traveling thousands of miles across Africa, the Spanish scout had finally found a player who reminded him of Messi. And Colomer wasn’t the only one who saw similarities between the left-footer from Teshie and the Flea. One of the scouts working the final Football Dreams tryout in Ghana in 2007 was Pere Gratacós, who coached Messi on Barcelona’s reserve team when Colomer was at the club. Watching Bernard in Accra clearly brought back memories. “Pere called me over in the final 50 and said, ‘Sit beside me,’ ” said Bernard. “He told me that I reminded him of a player at Barcelona. He was talking about Messi, who was not as famous then.” Gratacós may have been thinking about Bernard a few years later as well when he told a Spanish newspaper that Football Dreams made him realize that “in Africa, there are many Messis.”

  Gratacós’s words gave Bernard a needed boost of confidence. He was a little dazzled by the array of talent Colomer had assembled at the University of Ghana, where the tryout was being held. The Spanish scout planned to select the three best field players from Ghana to attend the final tryout in Doha. Bernard also felt a bit lonely because his coach Oteng didn’t come to the tryout. “Bernard called me and said the other managers had come and asked me to come too,” said Oteng. “I said, ‘God is there with you. God is your manager, so you shouldn’t worry.’ ”

  Bernard certainly spent plenty of time praying but didn’t have to rely on God alone. He could also turn to Komey, the coordinator who helped engineer his selection at Star Park. Komey gave Bernard a ride to the tryout and got a room across the hall at the university to keep an eye on him. “I kept his bag and kit in my room so nobody could steal anything,” said Komey. “Sometimes he said breakfast was not enough, so I gave him my breakfast.”

  Whatever he ate, it worked. Bernard mesmerized the crowd with his moves on the university’s clumpy grass field. “Everybody was like, ‘Your boy is so good. Can he play for me?’ ” said Komey. “He was a much more intelligent player than most of the kids on the pitch.” University students crowded around the edges of the field and applauded especially good plays. The matches weren’t the only spectacle, though. The Football Dreams staff had also invited a variety of performers, including men banging on traditional wooden drums; dancing children wearing hats the color of the Ghanaian flag, red, yellow, and green; and a trickster juggling a soccer ball in every way imaginable, even keeping it balanced on his head while he removed his cap.

  Over the first three days of the tryout, the scouts chose the best 22 players and then pitted them against each other in a final 25-minute game on the last day. Colomer made sure to let the players know just how high the stakes were at that point. “Everything you did until now was only a test. What is really important is today,” said Colomer at a more recent final. He told the players that simply having great technique wasn’t enough. They needed to show that they could bring something special to the game. “The best players in the world, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, these players, they show in the important games they have personality,” said Colomer. “They don’t hide themselves. They show that they want the ball.”

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sp; When the final game rolled around, Bernard took his place in midfield alongside the other top players in the tryout. He suffered an unexpected setback during the match when he blew out one of his cleats. But he simply hopped off the field, quickly donned a replacement, and jumped right back into the fray, skipping past players with the ball glued to his left foot. Komey bragged to the other coordinators on the sideline that the scouts were bound to choose Bernard, but they pushed back, just like the coaches had in Teshie. “They were telling me I was lying because Appiah was so small,” said Komey. “I told them Appiah is intelligent. They will pick him on any given day.”

  Colomer speaking with players at a Football Dreams tryout.

  Komey was right. The Ghana country director, Andy Sam, called Oteng a week or two after the tryout ended to tell him that Bernard was one of the three Ghanaians headed to Doha for the final test, which would include the other top players found across Africa. “It was amazing,” said Bernard. “I called my mom and dad, and we prayed together.” Bernard’s parents were ecstatic, especially his father, who always believed his son would become a star. But there was a tinge of sadness as well as they prepared to watch their son leave. He may have lived with Oteng for several years growing up, but this was the first time he was leaving the country, the first time anyone in the family had ever left the country. First passport, first plane trip, first time at a proper academy: Bernard’s life quickly transformed into a procession of firsts.

  On the eve of his trip, Bernard’s family threw him a party at their home in Teshie. His mother cooked his favorite meal, banku and okra stew, and they ate together on the narrow porch outside their house. Bernard also played one final game with his good friend Shadrack and other members of his Colts team on the dirt pitch at Star Park where Colomer first saw him. Several months later, the Spanish scout would stand at a press conference in Doha and tell the story of spotting Bernard. “When I saw him, I remembered Leo Messi in Barca because he was playing like him,” said Colomer. “He is a good player, and I think he will be somebody in football.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Skipper

  Diawandou Diagne took off at a full sprint, his skinny arms and legs pumping furiously. Beads of sweat quickly sprouted on the young player’s forehead and streamed down his face. The heat of the afternoon sun was relentless, but he kept up the pace. Diawandou was determined to make the most of the Football Dreams tryout being held that afternoon in his hometown of Thiès, Senegal’s third largest city. He had dreamed of becoming a professional player like his father since he was a young boy. There was just one problem. He wasn’t at the tryout. He was late.

  Diawandou had an exam the day the tryout was being held and knew his uncle would kill him if he missed it. That wasn’t always enough to prevent him from skipping school to play soccer. Sometimes he hid his cleats under the books in his backpack and took a shower at his best friend’s house so his uncle wouldn’t know he had been playing. But the deception didn’t always work. Diawandou’s uncle, Cheikh Gueye, was a lot more interested in his education than his soccer career and even paid for him to attend a small private school in Thiès called Mababa. It was a pretty humble operation. The school only had a handful of classrooms filled with scratched wooden desks, cracked chalkboards, and bare concrete floors. Paint peeled off the walls. But it was better than the public schools in town, and Gueye would give Diawandou a serious beating whenever he found out he was playing hooky. He even injured his wrist pounding on Diawandou one day when he discovered the young boy had gone out to play soccer instead of doing his homework. The message finally sank in, and Diawandou didn’t dare skip his exam on the day of the Football Dreams tryout, even though he knew it would be tough to make it there after school. His only chance was a full sprint, so he tore out of the gates as soon as the test was finished.

  Gueye took over responsibility for raising Diawandou after his parents divorced and moved away from Thiès when he was young. Diawandou’s mother, Khadidiatou Gueye, left for the Ivory Coast to live with her new husband and run a restaurant selling traditional Senegalese food. His father, who once played professional soccer in Thiès, moved to the coastal city of Mbour to work for the railroad. Diawandou stayed put and grew up in his mother’s large ancestral home with his uncle’s family and dozens of other relatives. The rambling concrete house was originally built by Khadidiatou’s grandfather, the most successful jeweler in Thiès, a city of over 600,000 people.

  Subsequent generations of Diawandou’s family prospered in the city as well. Khadidiatou’s father was a senior director of a large printing business, and her brother Cheikh studied architecture at a university in Saint-Louis. Many of the other family members attended university as well, a notable achievement given that less than half of Senegal’s population can read. Diawandou’s uncle never finished his degree because family problems forced him to return to Thiès, where he ended up running a construction company. But he continued to believe in the importance of education and presided over the family like a stern headmaster.

  The family’s prosperity enabled them to expand their home over the years until it grew to include over a dozen rooms built around a small tiled courtyard shaded by a large ficus tree. There were limits to their wealth, though. The main building’s white paint job faded and grew dark with grime over time, and some of the new additions had an unfinished look. But the house was significantly bigger than others that lined the patchwork of dirt streets that made up their crowded neighborhood of Bayal. Many were one-story structures built with crude red bricks slapped together with cement. A few were simple reed huts topped with rusted sheets of metal held down with stones.

  The neighborhood is located off a busy paved road where cars and motorcycles compete for space with a stream of pedestrians and horses pulling wooden carts. The street hums with the buzz of small-scale commerce common throughout Africa. Merchants hawk their wares out of cracked concrete buildings and makeshift wooden shacks leaning at precarious angles. There’s a convenience store with dried spices hanging from the ceiling in small plastic bags, a shop selling old printers that spill out into the street, and a tailor with a single sewing machine operating out of a room the size of a broom closet. Men in white robes stream out of a small concrete mosque after prayers, a scene played out five times a day across Senegal since most of the population is Muslim. Not far away, a baker sells loaves of French bread wrapped in newspaper, a reminder of the French colonization of Senegal that began in the seventeenth century. The French brought soccer as well, and shops throughout Diawandou’s neighborhood sell cheap rubber balls suspended from the ceiling in red netting and colorful knockoff Adidas cleats hanging by their laces.

  Diawandou first started playing soccer with his cousins in the courtyard of his home and eventually migrated to the dirt streets outside. He played three on three with his best friend, Baye Laye, and other neighborhood kids, sometimes for money. He was stick thin, but his talent quickly stood out. So did his feet. Many of the kids played barefoot or in plastic sandals, but Diawandou’s family could afford to buy him cleats at a young age. To this day, he believes his legs would be stronger if he had been forced to play barefoot like the other kids. These neighborhood games not only honed his skills but also earned him his first break when he was about 10 years old. That’s when Bousso Ndiaye, a coach at a local soccer academy, first spotted him playing in the street. “When I saw Diawandou, I knew he had talent,” said Ndiaye.

  The coach lived in the neighborhood and would often roam the streets looking for young players to recruit to his academy, the Centre National d’Education Populaire et Sportive, which was run by the government. CNEPS, as it’s widely known, was a far cry from the academies operated by top clubs in Europe but was considered one of the best in Senegal at the time. Two of the academy’s three fields were grass, a rarity in the country. The school also had a few buildings that could house players, although most of the boys were from Thiès or had family in the city and didn’t normally l
ive at the academy. They usually trained in the afternoon after school.

  When Ndiaye spotted Diawandou, he asked why he was playing in the street when he could be training at CNEPS. Diawandou told him he would have to speak to his family to get permission. Normally it wasn’t much of a challenge for Ndiaye to convince a family to say yes. Nearly half of Senegal’s population lives on less than a dollar or two a day, and many kids view soccer as their best chance for a better life, even though only a tiny percentage actually achieve their dream of playing in Europe. That’s true in many other parts of Africa as well, and there’s a problem with kids dropping out of school hoping to make it as professional players. Sometimes their parents even support the decision or simply don’t have the money to continue paying school fees.

  Few players end up succeeding, but those who do often come from relatively poor backgrounds. These kids have few other opportunities, so they end up playing soccer for thousands of hours, the kind of training that is necessary for success but certainly doesn’t guarantee it. The dynamics are the same in many other parts of the developing world. Rasmus Ankersen, the author of The Gold Mine Effect, found that 90 percent of Brazil’s top players grew up in poverty.

  It’s less common for a child like Diawandou, who comes from a relatively prosperous family and attended private school, to gamble on becoming a professional soccer player and commit to the training necessary to give him a chance. Diawandou’s uncle wanted him to focus on attending university one day. That’s why Ndiaye had some convincing to do when he showed up at Diawandou’s house seeking the family’s permission for the young boy to attend his academy.