The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  The country was certainly no stranger to using migrant workers to build its future. But where should they go to find the players? Ideally, it would be a place that was the polar opposite of Qatar. Somewhere with a large population of incredibly fit, highly motivated kids who spent most of their time playing street soccer, weren’t getting the formal training they needed to develop, and were poor enough that they would jump at the opportunity to come to Aspire with the hope of becoming professionals and transforming their lives. It didn’t take much digging to realize that many places in Africa fit the bill.

  When Aspire began its African recruitment, Bleicher and others simply reached out to contacts they had on the continent to find kids. They brought their first African player to the academy in the fall of 2005, a powerful defender from the town of Obuasi in southern Ghana, the site of one of the largest gold mines in the world. John Benson had loved soccer since he was a young child, when he would ride on his mother’s back carrying a small ball in his hand. His father worked in the mine, but there were periods when he was out of work, making life tough for John and his three siblings. They all lived together in a one-room house, and John spent as much time as possible outside playing soccer on a patch of grass near his home.

  He impressed the local coaches enough to join an academy run by Ajax in Obuasi. It was later taken over by a local team, Ashanti Gold, when the Dutch club pulled out. The head soccer coach at Aspire, Michael Browne, knew the CEO of Ashanti Gold, Andy Sam, a retired army captain, so he called him in 2005 saying they were looking for young players. Sam agreed to help, and Aspire sent one of its coaches to Obuasi to scout players at Ashanti Gold’s academy. He ended up inviting six of them, including 14-year-old John, to Doha for a trial in the fall of 2005. Sam, who would later become the Ghana country director for Football Dreams, came along as well.

  It just so happened that Josep Colomer was at Aspire at the same time for an interview. Bleicher had heard he left Barcelona and contacted him about possibly leading Aspire’s effort to scout foreign players. While Colomer was in Doha, officials asked him to take a look at the group of young Ghanaian players on trial. He said John was the only one who caught his eye. “I told them, look, my opinion is John Benson can stay. He has enough of a level to become a professional someday,” said Colomer. “I don’t think he will be a top ten player, but he can play professionally.”

  It was a wise choice. Aspire invited John back a few months later, and he helped lead one of the youth teams to victory in a tournament held in conjunction with the academy’s international launch. The other squads were from major European clubs like Barcelona, Arsenal, and Ajax. Aspire’s team may have been a year older, but it was still considered a major triumph when the academy beat Barcelona in the final. Sheikh Jassim came on the field to congratulate the players after the game, and John became the first African player to get a scholarship to Aspire.

  The academy brought Colomer on board as well, and he quickly added another African player to Aspire’s roster. It was Serigne Abdou Thiam, the young Senegalese boy Colomer found in Dakar in early 2005 when Lamine Savané invited him to scout players. Colomer also tried to expand Aspire’s recruiting efforts to Brazil because of his connections in the country. Before joining Barcelona, he had worked with Brazil’s national team coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari, during the country’s winning World Cup campaign in 2002. But it was a tough sell to convince Brazilian players to move to Qatar.

  One of the Aspire staff remembers asking players from a visiting Brazilian youth national team whether they would be interested in a scholarship. Even though many came from poor backgrounds in Brazil’s favelas, they had one thing on their minds. “The Brazilians wanted to know whether there were women they could sleep with in Doha,” said Roberto Solano, laughing at the memory. “If not, they didn’t want to stay.” The Brazilians weren’t excited to learn that Qatar was a conservative Muslim country where sex out of wedlock was illegal. “In Brazil they may be poor, but many have a really good life,” said Solano.

  Colomer’s initial scouting for Aspire in Africa and South America was piecemeal, but he hadn’t forgotten the ambitious plan hatched with Savané over dinner and music in Dakar months earlier. They had mapped out a scheme to scout all of Senegal’s players in an organized fashion, but with backing from Qatar, Colomer now thought they should aim much higher. “Josep called me up and said, ‘I think there is a possibility of doing what we talked about,’ ” said Savané. “’But we can’t just think about Senegal. We need to think about all of Africa.’ ”

  That was the vision Colomer and Bleicher presented to Sheikh Jassim in his stately office in Doha in 2006. Given Qatar’s goal of attracting the world’s attention, it’s perhaps no surprise that the sheikh liked the idea of carrying out the largest soccer scouting project in history. It could help achieve his dream of assembling a world-class national team, and they could pitch it as a humanitarian program helping African players. Also, if they could find and develop the sport’s next superstar, it would catapult Qatar to the forefront of international soccer. Sheikh Jassim was quick to say yes, and Football Dreams was born. Aspire even brought Pelé back to Doha to announce the program’s launch in April 2007 as Colomer set off across Africa to find the first class of kids.

  CHAPTER 5

  Final Tryout

  Colomer spent a lot of time at the Doha airport in January 2008 as the players he found all over Africa trickled into the city for their three-week tryout. When Diawandou arrived, he wasn’t sure where to go when he got off the plane. The airport looked like a labyrinth fit to hold the Minotaur compared to the four-gate version back in Dakar. But Diawandou came up with a solution. “If you are a little clever, you just watch the direction people are going,” said Diawandou. “When I went outside, I met Colo downstairs. He said, ‘You are very clever to travel by yourself and come here.’ ”

  Bernard showed up with the other two players from Ghana who had made it to the final, Hamza Zakari and Adama Issah. When they entered the arrivals hall, they also found Colomer waiting for them. He greeted Bernard by saying he remembered watching him play back in Ghana. “I asked why,” said Bernard. “He said the way I play seems like Messi.” Others came from South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Morocco, a stream of wide-eyed boys who couldn’t quite believe where they were and had no idea what new wonder awaited them around the next bend.

  Colomer had sifted through nearly 430,000 kids from seven African countries to choose the best 24 players: three field players from each country and three goalies. All the kids were undoubtedly good, but Colomer needed to find out who was the best. The plan was to offer the top three players scholarships to the academy. To find out who those players were, he planned to put them up against some of the best youth teams in the world, including top Spanish clubs Real Madrid and Valencia, one of the best sides in Portugal, Porto, and even a national team from Germany. That may have seemed daunting enough for a bunch of kids who were recently running around dirt fields in Africa, but Colomer didn’t think it was enough of a challenge. He was so confident that the 13-year-old African players he found were better than their European counterparts that he planned to pit them against kids who were one or two years older.

  The organizers had originally contemplated turning this stage of the tryouts into a reality TV show. “Every week we would invite a different European team for them to play,” said Lamine Savané, the Football Dreams country director in Senegal. “People would vote, and a certain percentage of the vote would count in the selection.” Months earlier, they opened talks with a TV channel in Dubai, ART, to develop the show and came up with the name “Football Dreams,” which Savané had based on the documentary “Hoop Dreams,” about two teenagers from inner-city Chicago trying to make it as basketball players. But they eventually abandoned the idea because of well-founded ethical concerns about turning the hopes and dreams of African children into a TV spectacle. They did keep the Football Dreams name though.

 
The reality show idea may have been scrapped, but the kids were still going to take on some of the best youth players in the world while they were in Doha. Before they could do that, though, they needed to do a little adjusting to the world around them. It wasn’t just Aspire’s massive dome or its half dozen pristine soccer pitches that amazed them. It was also the more pedestrian things like the all-you-could-eat buffet in the academy’s cafeteria, a revelation for kids who may not have grown up hungry but certainly had never experienced that kind of abundance. They discovered with delight that they could not only eat until stuffed but also could stockpile more food in their rooms for later.

  The rooms themselves held wonders for the kids as well. They were similar to those you might find at an average hotel in the West but seemed luxurious to boys who grew up in much more cramped and spartan conditions back home. “Everything was perfect,” recalled Yobou Thome, an Ivorian defender discovered during the second year of Football Dreams. “When I slept, everything was clean. When I went to the toilet and took a shower, my towel was clean. The TV in your room, free. I said to my family, ‘Hey, this place is very nice. I don’t want to come back. You stay in the Ivory Coast. Me, I stay here.’ ”

  When the kids weren’t marveling at their rooms or shoveling down food in the cafeteria, they were navigating new challenges like operating elevators and hot-water showers for the first time. “The reaction is very similar across the kids,” said Wendy Kinyeki, a Football Dreams staff member from Kenya. “For most of them, this is the first time they owned a passport. It’s the first time they traveled outside their village, let alone their country. They are visiting a place where streets are clean, people observe traffic rules, water comes out of taps, and there is no rationing of electricity. It’s a very foreign concept for them.”

  The local coordinators traveling with the boys had some adjusting to do as well. One sat in his room in the dark for two days because he didn’t know he had to insert his key card to operate the lights and figured Doha was experiencing power shortages. But the coordinators were just as impressed by Aspire as the boys. “The environment was fantastic,” said Diawandou’s old coach, Bousso Ndiaye. He soaked in Aspire’s dome, its fields, and its food. But what truly blew him away was the academy’s high-tech sports medicine hospital, Aspetar, the same facility that treated Ivorian star Didier Drogba when he was injured. “After visiting the hospital, I trusted that Diawandou could grow up in this academy,” said Ndiaye.

  All the Football Dreams kids who attend the final in Doha visit Aspetar to get a physical exam and vaccinations for diseases like polio and whooping cough. A Senegalese goalkeeper from the 2008 tryout was sent home early because they discovered he had hepatitis, reducing the group to 23 players. Other kids have been found to have more serious medical issues, like life-threatening heart problems requiring surgery.

  Aspire was more spectacular than anything the Football Dreams kids could have imagined, but they needed to focus on the battle that would play out on the field to have any hope of staying. Three scholarships. That’s what the Aspire staff said was up for grabs. Three spots for 23 kids, all of them bristling with talent and determined to grab an opportunity that would transform their lives. Diawandou tried to shut out the distractions from his new world by transporting himself back home. He sat on the bed in his room, headphones clamped over his ears, listening to the same Quranic music he relied on back in Thiès to center himself and get focused on game day.

  But the tryout started badly for the skinny midfielder-turned-defender. He rolled his ankle at the beginning of a game against the Under-16 German national team. Diawandou was in serious pain, but the head soccer coach at Aspire, Michael Browne, told him he needed to push through to have any chance of winning a scholarship. “Coach Michael told me there was no time to get injured here, so I played with it,” said Diawandou. They went on to lose the hard-fought match 2-1, but it wasn’t a bad showing for a bunch of kids who had just started playing together and were hobbled by an injured central defender.

  Diawandou was stuck with a bad ankle for the rest of the tryout. The trainer would tape it before every session, but it was still painful and hampered his play. He was often left out of the starting lineup for games because of the injury, but Browne was still impressed by his performance, even though he wasn’t one of the tallest defenders. “He was quick, he read the game well, he can pass, he tackled, he was brave,” said Browne, who previously ran the academy at the British soccer club Charlton Athletic. Browne’s opinion was critical. He not only coached the boys during their tryout in Doha but also had a big say in who would receive a scholarship.

  Browne was also impressed by Diawandou’s determination to play through his injury and the leadership he showed among his teammates, even though he couldn’t communicate with all of them that easily. Most of the kids spoke French and English since they were largely from Francophone and Anglophone countries in Africa. Diawandou grew up speaking French and Wolof and only knew rudimentary English, but always managed to get his point across. “Great kid, great attitude, he was always first class, everything he did,” said Browne. “Any situation he was in, you could rely on him. In training, in matches, he wanted to make sure he was the best.”

  None of these comments would have surprised Diawandou’s old coach, Bousso Ndiaye. They were the same qualities he noticed when Diawandou first showed up at his academy back home, prompting Ndiaye to appoint him captain. Colomer and Browne followed suit in Doha, despite Diawandou’s injury. He may not have been able to perform at 100 percent, but it quickly became clear to anyone who spent time with Diawandou that the team was best off when he was at the helm. “He is a born leader,” said Forewah Emmanuel, a Football Dreams staff member from Cameroon. “He is a very good example and knows when to talk to the guys. In the field, you can see how he is commanding.”

  Bernard also had a rough start to the tryout. He was left out of the starting lineup for the first game against Germany in favor of another small, speedy midfielder, Happy Simelela, whom Colomer found at the first field he visited in South Africa. “When they came to Ghana, I was the one they chose first,” said Bernard. “So when I went to Doha and was not in the first team, I was very sad.” He chalked it up to Michael Browne not having seen him play enough, but knocking Happy off his perch wasn’t going to be easy. Happy was from Soweto, the sprawling black township in Johannesburg that was plagued by violence when he was growing up. His father was stabbed to death in an attempted robbery when Happy was young, an experience that hardened his character and drove him to stand up to any challenge. “Happy asked me one time, ‘Why do you think I’m never afraid?”’ said one of the Football Dreams staff, Ndongo Diaw. “He said, ‘Maybe it’s because I saw people kill my father.’ He is very strong.”

  Happy was tough, but Bernard was just as determined to succeed and pushed himself even harder in training. “Bernard is a strong guy, mentally strong,” said John Benson, the first African player Aspire recruited. He would watch the Football Dreams kids play when he had a break in his schedule and was astounded when he spotted his fellow countryman, Bernard. “When I saw him playing, I just said to my friend, ‘Look at this guy, he is going to be one of the best,’ ” said John. “I saw the way Bernard moved, the way he passed the ball, and how seriously he was playing.”

  John was also impressed by another Ghanaian, Hamza Zakari, a defensive midfielder from Tema who had sublime skill but sometimes let his temper get the better of him, and by Anthony Bassey, a lightning-fast striker from southern Nigeria who had developed an amazing ability to manipulate the ball from years of juggling for money on the streets of his hometown, Uyo. But Bernard’s skill left the strongest impression, and the playmaker soon won over Michael Browne, even though he was one of the smallest kids on the field. “Bernard was technically very, very talented,” said Browne. “Excellent with the ball, great in small areas, he could do anything.” The days of sitting on the bench were over for Bernard. Browne shifted him into
the starting lineup for the next game, one that would stand out in the players’ minds for years to come.

  It wasn’t the opponent, FC Porto, that made the game so memorable. Nor was it the setting, the full-size pitch inside Aspire’s space station–like dome. It wasn’t even the result, a thrilling 3-2 victory over Porto’s Under-15 side. It was the guy with shoulder-length brown hair sitting next to Colomer in the stands, dressed casually in jeans, a white button-down shirt, and black and white Adidas sneakers. Lionel Messi didn’t say much but attracted everyone’s attention, just as Colomer knew he would when he invited him to Aspire to meet the Football Dreams kids.

  Messi even ruffled a few feathers back home to make the trip because he skipped a rehab session for a thigh injury that had sidelined him for a month. The bond between Messi and Colomer was clearly strong, and few players could inspire the African boys and attract attention to Football Dreams quite like him. The Football Dreams kids reveled at the chance to meet the Barcelona star, and Messi was quite taken by them as well. He certainly knew what it was like to be discovered at the age of 13 and was impressed by what he saw when he led the African players in a training session ahead of their game against Porto. “Aspire Academy is an astonishing facility, and the team I trained with today all have a great future in football,” he said.

  The Football Dreams kids made sure to grab a photo with Messi while he was there, crowding around him as he knelt on the field. The smiling star’s white shirt stood out against the wall of dark blue Nike jerseys worn by the boys. Diawandou smiled as he crouched down next to Messi in the middle of the frame, his right arm resting on the star’s knee. The other players spilled out around them, some of them laughing and leaning forward in an attempt to get as close to Messi as possible. But Bernard was all business. He stood as tall as his five-foot frame would let him almost directly behind the Barcelona star and cast a somber, tough-guy expression at the camera. There was work to be done on the field, and Messi’s presence had further raised the stakes.