The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  The Football Dreams kids posing with Messi at their final tryout in Doha in 2008.

  Colomer even called Bernard over as he was talking to Messi. “Colomer was telling him in Spanish, ‘This is the guy I was talking about,’ ” said Bernard, who relied on Colomer to translate. “I heard Messi telling him I was very good but I should work hard, keep calm, and obey the coach.” Those weren’t the only items on Bernard’s to-do list. He had also been praying to God to help him play well during the tryouts. “Sometimes when I was sleeping, I would wake up and pray to God that he should help me, that I should be the best,” said Bernard. He stepped up his prayers ahead of the Porto game. At first, it was simply because it was his initial shot at the starting lineup. Now he had the added pressure of performing in front of Messi. “I prayed to God that if he ever gave me any luck in football to give it to me that day,” said Bernard. “By God’s grace, I had a good day.”

  Bernard’s performance was good enough to keep him in the starting lineup for the final two games of the three-week tryout, a narrow 4-3 loss to Real Madrid’s Under-15 team and a scoreless draw against Valencia’s Under-15 side. The score of the last game didn’t reflect how much the Football Dreams players controlled the match. “The performance of the players was nothing short of outstanding,” said Michael Browne at a press conference the day after the Valencia game. “They absolutely dominated the game from start to finish, restricted the opposition’s position, and proved how talented they are.”

  Aspire had scheduled the press conference at the end of January to announce the three players who would receive scholarships to the academy. Colomer even wore a suit for the occasion. Journalists scribbled notes as the Spanish scout stood onstage and shared anecdotes about discovering the players. He started by describing how he spotted Diawandou at his academy in Thiès, wound his way around the African continent, and concluded with the last country he visited, Morocco. As Colomer went along, he called out the names of each of the boys at the tryout, and they assembled one by one at the front of the room in matching white Nike T-shirts and blue sweatpants.

  One of the most memorable stories Colomer told was about visiting the small Ghanaian town where he discovered the tall central defender, Adama Issah. Colomer arrived the night before he was scheduled to hold the tryout and couldn’t quite believe what he found. “All 176 players that were supposed to be tested the next day were already waiting for me on the field,” said Colomer. “I said, ‘What are they doing?’ ” It turned out the boys had traveled from all over the area and were so intent on showcasing their skills that some had been sleeping on the field for two days.

  The players’ determination clearly left an impression on Colomer, but not just in that small town. He recalled how Hamza battled his way through the final tryout in Accra even though he was fasting because it was Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims. But Colomer saved his highest praise for Bernard, telling the crowd at the press conference that the little midfielder reminded him of Messi. “He is a good player, and I think he will be somebody in football,” said Colomer.

  Bernard dribbling by a pair of Valencia players at the final Football Dreams tryout in Doha in 2008.

  Michael Browne stepped up to the podium next to describe how impressed he was that the boys had been able to coalesce into a team in such a short time. “When they arrived, my first impression of them was that individually they were very talented, but collectively they were quite poor,” said Browne. “When I saw the games we were scheduled to play, against the Under-16 German national team, the Under-15 sides from Porto, Real Madrid, and Valencia, we were a bit concerned. But as time went on, the progress the boys made was exceptional. They were always good individually, but now they function very well together. Sometimes it’s easy to lose track that these kids are not a team. They are 23 kids from seven different countries. For me personally, it has been a privilege to work with the boys because their application and dedication have been first class. I’m very sure many of them are going to have very successful careers in football.”

  This was the moment the crowd had been waiting for. With the 23 players assembled at the front of the room, journalists who had flown to Qatar for the press conference prepared for Browne to announce the names of the three winners. The boys stood together in their matching Nike outfits and cast determined looks at the TV cameras in the front row, each seeming confident that he would be one of the chosen few to stay at the academy.

  But the names of the winners never came. The plan had changed behind the scenes, or at least was in the process of changing. Colomer couldn’t stomach the thought of only taking three players and watching the rest slip away. They were just too good. He had been lobbying Sheikh Jassim’s right-hand man, Tariq al-Naama, to keep far more players. “I said, ‘Tariq, look, the level of the players we are finding is amazing,” said Colomer. “I don’t think we should take only three. I think we can take 20 and put them in an academy and develop them until they go to big clubs, and Aspire can have the best youth academy in the world.”

  Taking more players certainly made sense if Colomer really hoped to find the next Messi, since predicting which 13-year-old would become a star was such a complicated calculus. A kid might seem exceptional today, but myriad things could go wrong on and off the field to derail his progress. He might get injured, lack the motivation to work hard enough, get distracted by his personal life, or simply not progress as fast as his teammates. There was one certainty, though. No matter what the probability was that any one kid would make it, Colomer’s chance of identifying a future star would rise if he could take more players.

  Andreas Bleicher, who first dreamed up the idea of recruiting Africans to Aspire, agreed with Colomer. “By choosing 20, we increase the likelihood to really find the next top football player,” he said. But he didn’t think they could flood Aspire with so many foreign players, so they began brainstorming about setting up a separate academy run by Colomer in Africa for the kids who wouldn’t be staying in Doha. It was still a work in progress by the time the press conference rolled around, and they would need Sheikh Jassim’s approval before they could move ahead. “We do not have everything finalized yet, but we are very positive we will get the right decision so we can support the other players in Africa,” Bleicher told the crowd.

  Even though Aspire was thinking about taking more than the three boys initially planned, Colomer and Browne still needed to whittle the group down to the best players and figure out which ones would be staying in Doha versus training in Africa. Their method of doing so was surprisingly basic given that they were working at a gleaming new $1.5 billion sports academy. They didn’t employ the kind of sophisticated data analysis that has become increasingly common in the sports world and largely relied on what their eyes and years of experience told them was the right decision. That certainly wasn’t uncommon in soccer, especially at the time. The sport has a history of dragging its feet into the data world.

  Michael Lewis popularized the notion of data-driven analysis in sports with his 2003 book Moneyball, which described how the Oakland Athletics were able to challenge much richer teams through the innovative use of statistics. General Manager Billy Beane realized that the traditional statistics used to gauge players, such as their batting average and runs batted in, weren’t actually the most effective. Through rigorous statistical analysis, he discovered that alternative measurements like on-base percentage and slugging percentage were more useful indicators of a player’s offensive success. He used this insight to find undervalued players in the market who would provide Oakland with the kind of talent the team needed at a price it could afford.

  Since then, the use of sophisticated data analysis to find a competitive edge has exploded throughout the game of baseball and expanded to other sports, particularly basketball. But the pace of change has been relatively slow in soccer as veteran coaches and scouts have resisted the notion that statistical analysis can compete with old-school intuition derived from years of
experience. “In comparison to historical medicine, soccer analytics is currently in the time of leeches and bloodlettings.” That’s what the founder of one soccer analytics firm, Mark Brunkhart, told the authors of The Numbers Game, which was published a decade after Moneyball. Several years later, one of the authors, Chris Anderson, said, “There’s still a lot of leeching going on.”

  That’s not to say all clubs have resisted the move toward a more analytical approach. Many of the top clubs in the world now employ analysts who have access to reams of data that can be used to evaluate recruiting prospects, monitor their own players, and scout opponents, although this is happening much more at the senior level than on youth teams. Arsenal even bought a U.S.-based soccer analytics firm, StatDNA, for more than 2 million pounds in 2012. But many clubs have yet to fully embrace the potential of data analysis. “The purist analytic types want to use the data as a filter to identify undervalued talent, the classic Moneyball story,” said Anderson. “But it’s not really used to identify players from scratch. It’s mostly used to confirm or deny the choices that scouts or heads of recruitment wish to make.” At the senior level, those opinions are often formed by watching a player as many as twenty times over a period of several years. Then the number crunchers are called in to figure out how the player compares to others on the market and what the club should pay for him.

  Even then, the metrics are fairly simple. “It’s the common stuff you would imagine,” said Anderson. “A central defender needs to have very good defensive positioning, be good one-on-one, be able to head the ball, and be calm under pressure, and you can put some basic numbers against that kind of stuff. A number nine needs to be good on the ball, shoot really well, and have good finishing skill. In part, because geeks haven’t really arrived in full force in soccer at all, we’re still talking about relatively basic metrics.”

  That doesn’t mean metrics haven’t evolved at all, though. Many analysts have shifted from using simple statistics like assists, shots, and goals—the kind Colomer and Browne were focused on in 2007—to more advanced stats that have greater predictive power in determining the performance of players and teams from season to season. For example, statistics like expected goals and expected assists aim to decrease the elements of luck and chance that can reduce or magnify a player’s perceived talent. It’s easy to imagine how luck or chance could affect an individual shot. It could deflect off a defender or be saved by a particularly good goalkeeper. It also matters whether the ball was served up to a striker on a silver platter by a midfield maestro like Xavi or hammered in by a Sunday league duffer.

  The expected goals statistic seeks to reduce the effects of luck and chance by measuring the number of goals a player would have scored given the probability that shots taken during a match would normally go in. Different models exist to determine these probabilities, but they normally factor in the type of shot, location, and possibly a few other factors. A shot from very close to the goal might go in about 50 percent of the time, making it worth 0.5 expected goals. A strike from far out might only be worth 0.1. As shots are taken during a game, these probabilities are added up to produce an expected goals figure that can be compared to actual goals for an individual player or entire team. The new statistic gives a clearer view of whether a player is getting into good goal-scoring positions, regardless of whether an individual shot goes in or not. That’s what matters most. Analysts have determined expected goals more accurately predict a team’s performance over the course of a season and a player’s quality from year to year than actual goals. Expected assists operate in the same way.

  Advocates of more sophisticated data analysis in soccer don’t necessarily aim to replace the traditional network of scouts clubs have in place as much as provide them with additional information to enhance their decision making. Daniel Altman, founder of the soccer-focused firm North Yard Analytics, offers a service that can digitally clone a club’s best scout, thus allowing a team to assess players in dozens of leagues irrespective of where its favored scout is located. He does this by building a computer program that filters players based on the characteristics the scout deems most important. Perhaps the scout likes pacey midfielders with high expected assist numbers who rarely give away the ball. The program uses this information to spit out a list of players likely to be of interest to the club who can then be evaluated by the organization’s scouts in person. Altman, who has a PhD in economics from Harvard University, believes spending 200,000 euros on this kind of data analysis could save a club at least 50 times that amount in the transfer market, but generating interest has still been an uphill battle. “The number of clubs that are interested in being serious about analytics is still a minority,” said Altman. “But it’s growing.”

  The fact that Colomer and Browne didn’t have access to this kind of technology clearly made their job of picking the best players more difficult, but that wasn’t the only challenge they faced. Football Dreams also encountered criticism from those in the soccer world who didn’t think it should be happening at all.

  To Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, Football Dreams seemed less like a dream and more like a nightmare. A former professional player from Cameroon, Mbvoumin runs a Paris-based NGO, Foot Solidaire, that fights the illicit trade of underage soccer players out of Africa. He embarked on his mission in the late 1990s when the Cameroonian Embassy in Paris called him asking for help with a group of teenagers who had been invited to France by an agent, supposedly for trials with a professional club, and then abandoned. Mbvoumin showed up at the embassy to find the kids sleeping on the floor and was told they didn’t have return tickets to Cameroon even though each of them paid the agent 3,000 euros. “So you can imagine the money he made on this dirty business,” said Mbvoumin.

  He set off on a search across Paris to track down the agent but had no luck. Instead, he discovered that the teenagers at the Cameroonian Embassy were far from an isolated case. He ran into scores of young African players who had paid agents to travel to France for professional trials that weren’t successful or never materialized and were now living in the country illegally, sometimes on the streets. “I was shocked,” he said. He set up Foot Solidaire to provide the kids with support, including food, access to medical care, and tickets home, although some are too ashamed to return to families that made huge sacrifices to pay the agents in the first place. Mbvoumin has also lobbied FIFA to do more to deal with the problem but has often been frustrated by the response. “It is very difficult if the main stakeholders try to close their eyes and don’t want to see.”

  European clubs have long relied on imported African players, especially in countries that have colonial ties with Africa, like France, Belgium, Portugal, and England. This migration, and the associated problem of trading in underage players, ballooned in the late 1990s and early 2000s due to a confluence of factors. One was a ruling by the European Union in 1995 that improved the bargaining position of players and helped send compensation soaring. Many European clubs responded by looking for more affordable players from the developing world, especially Africa. The sorry state of professional soccer in many parts of the continent meant that even the best African players were often only earning a few hundred dollars a month and were ripe pickings for European clubs growing richer from spiking TV revenue. This exodus has further weakened African soccer to the point where relatively few people go to local league matches, preferring instead to watch the continent’s best players battle in Europe on TV.

  In 2003, FIFA President Sepp Blatter wrote a column in the Financial Times saying European clubs that had benefited most from the trade in African players had behaved like “neocolonialists who don’t give a damn about heritage and culture, but engage in social and economic rape by robbing the developing world of its best players.” He may have been playing politics since he relied on Africa for much of his political support at FIFA, but many people agreed with his statement. He also described European clubs’ recruitment of young Africans as “unhealthy if no
t despicable.” FIFA tightened its regulations on the recruitment of minors in the first half of the 2000s, stipulating that clubs could not transfer players under the age of 18 across international borders.

  The only exceptions were if a player’s parents moved to the new country for non-soccer reasons, the transfer took place within Europe, and the player was at least 16, or the player already lived within 100 kilometers of the new club. Some decried the new rules as too heavy-handed, saying they prevented Africans from training at the best academies in Europe. But many people say European clubs often break the rules with little consequence, and the flow of young players out of Africa has continued. Foot Solidaire estimates that thousands of underage players are shuttled out of West Africa every year with dreams of making it at clubs in Europe and elsewhere. Almost all fail, and many find themselves stranded.

  Mbvoumin was alarmed when he visited Cameroon in 2007 and learned Aspire was recruiting 13-year-old African boys on an unprecedented scale. “Trafficking is institutionalized in Africa because now everyone comes to these countries and takes the children abroad,” he said at the time. “It looks like a kind of exploitation and modern slavery.” He thought Aspire should be held to the same FIFA regulations that prevent clubs from transferring players under 18. “Even though Qatar has the best conditions, they must respect the rules,” he said. “FIFA needs to do something to prevent this.”

  Aspire argued it wasn’t bound by the rules because it wasn’t a professional club and the kids weren’t playing in an official league. The academy also highlighted that Football Dreams was supported by local African soccer federations and the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace. But the answers didn’t satisfy Mbvoumin, and he teamed up with members of the European Parliament to send a letter to Blatter in mid-2007 demanding that FIFA stop the program. At the time, FIFA refused to comment officially on Football Dreams, saying instead that it welcomed “any initiatives of solidarity between the more affluent countries and those who have less for the development of sport and of football.” But in a personal reply to the letter from the European Parliament, which was leaked to the media, Blatter expressed serious concern about the project, saying “their establishment of recruitment networks in these seven African countries reveals just what Aspire is all about. Aspire offers a good example of . . . exploitation.”