The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Qatari players praying at dusk at one of the fields at Aspire Academy in Doha.

  In general, there wasn’t that much for the boys to do when they weren’t training or in class. The biggest treat was to get a pass to go next door to the Villaggio, which not only had luxury shops and a meandering canal, but also a 235,000-square-foot indoor amusement park, Gondolonia, with bumper cars, a mini Ferris wheel, and a bunch of other rides. Not far away was an indoor ice skating rink with a large banner proclaiming it to be the home of the Doha Ice Skating Club, which was likely a pretty small group since temperatures in Doha don’t normally drop much below the mid-50s. If that wasn’t enough, there was always the plethora of fast-food joints: McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Pizza Hut, Baskin-Robbins, Krispy Kreme, you name it. Serious competition for the healthy fare served in Aspire’s cafeteria.

  The kids were armed with around $300 in “pocket money” given to them each month by Aspire as part of their scholarship, often more than their parents made working back home by a significant margin. Aspire also sent around $5,000 every year to their families, money used for everything from buying food and paying school fees to building homes and starting businesses. Flush with their newfound cash, the boys roamed the Villaggio buying up clothes to show off back at the academy, snapping photos of each other in the process. One shows Bernard standing in a T-shirt shop inside the mall, with a white fedora jauntily perched on his head. He’s back in his room at the academy in another, dressed like he’s headed to one of P. Diddy’s white parties, with a long-sleeve Billabong shirt, capri cargo pants, and Adidas sneakers. But they could only get permission to go to the Villaggio every so often, and even that got a bit old after a while. Otherwise they mainly hung out in their rooms, listening to music or challenging each other on PlayStation. “It was often really boring,” said Bernard.

  But all this was just a sideshow to the real action at the academy, which took place on the field. Aspire hadn’t spent millions of dollars combing Africa so the kids could wander through the Villaggio or play PlayStation in their rooms. They were there to motivate Qatari players who had grown up with life delivered on a silver platter. Some were even dropped off at training in Bentleys and Ferraris. That’s not a recipe for producing players with the grit and determination to become world-class, as Sheikh Jassim dreamed when he founded Aspire, especially since Qatar had such a small talent pool to begin with.

  The Qataris were a far cry from the players that many of Aspire’s coaches were used to training at academies back in Europe. One coach, Luis Miguel Silva, showed up at Aspire from Porto, where he coached players who helped make up Portugal’s national team alongside superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. “When you coach these kinds of players and then you move to Qatar and coach Qatari players, it’s a shock,” he said.

  When Aspire first opened, the coaches noticed the Qatari players went down at the slightest hint of contact and rolled around the field like they had been shot. “We couldn’t quite get it,” said David Burke, who had been at Fulham’s academy before coming to Aspire. “It was completely over the top compared to the exaggerations you see on TV.” Kids also sobbed after matches if things didn’t go their way and were ready to blame anyone but themselves. “It was eye opening for me,” said Michael Browne, Aspire’s head coach. “We said, ‘Look, we don’t want to see anyone crying after games. Look at areas you think you can improve and don’t blame anyone else. Don’t blame the referee, don’t blame the conditions, don’t blame this, and don’t blame that.’ ”

  It’s easy to understand why Aspire’s top brass decided they needed to drop a few African players into the mix. Bernard and the others were not only far more talented than most of the locals, but they also possessed a relentless drive to succeed. There were no silver platters in their childhood, just dirt, sweat, and competition. They showed up at Aspire ready for more of the same and were surprised to discover many of the Qataris lacked their hunger. Sometimes they didn’t even bother coming to training. “Maybe five or six would show up and you have to train like that,” said Hamza. That likely wouldn’t have impressed Sheikh Jassim, who sometimes showed up unannounced at the academy and stood on a grassy knoll next to the field to watch the boys play.

  Some of the Qatari players didn’t take too kindly to the African imports, worried they were going to lose their spot on Qatar’s national team. “They were not happy,” said Bernard. “They thought we had come to take their positions.” It was a legitimate concern, and the naturalization question had sparked growing controversy around Football Dreams. Qatar had a long history of using its wealth to lure foreign athletes into taking Qatari citizenship and representing the country at international competitions like the Olympics. The list included Kenyan runners, Bulgarian weightlifters, Montenegrin handball players, Chinese chess grandmasters, and yes, African soccer players. The Football Dreams kids had been selected as the elite of the elite, and some of the Qataris at Aspire wondered how they could ever compete. Many outside the academy were also convinced Qatar was going to give the Africans passports.

  The issue was fuzzy to the African players as well, and several of them spent time training and playing friendlies with Qatari national teams of various age groups. John Benson traveled to Germany with one of the country’s youth teams to play in a friendly tournament, and the coach of Qatar’s Under-23 team repeatedly told John he wanted him to help them qualify for the Olympics. “I didn’t speak with Aspire because I didn’t know what was going on,” said John. Antoine Messi, the goalkeeper from Cameroon, also traveled with one of Qatar’s youth sides to play in Malaysia, and Bernard said he once trained with the national team at Aspire at the request of one of his coaches.

  At the beginning of Football Dreams, Andreas Bleicher had said the kids in the program might end up playing for Qatar, but Aspire eventually reversed course and insisted the boys would play for their own national teams. The shift came after FIFA made it a lot harder in June 2008 for countries to naturalize foreign players, although Aspire insists this had nothing to do with its new stance and now says there was never any plan for the Football Dreams kids to play for Qatar. FIFA acted in 2008 after President Sepp Blatter expressed concern about the number of Brazilian players taking foreign citizenship. At the time, a player only needed to live in a new country for two years, at any age, before changing nationality. “There is a danger that in 2014 half the players in the World Cup could come from Brazil,” Blatter told the media then.

  Qatar, of course, had tried to naturalize three Brazilians before the 2006 World Cup and became embroiled in a controversy over its naturalization of another Brazilian player, Emerson, in the fall of 2008. To stem such moves, Blatter pushed through a rule stating a player had to live in a new country for five years after reaching the age of 18 to change nationality. That made it a lot less feasible to naturalize the Football Dreams kids since they dreamed of playing in top clubs in Europe when they graduated, not staying in Qatar until they were 23 years old.

  Many continue to suspect Qatar will find a way to naturalize the Football Dreams kids despite Aspire’s denials, but the academy’s new stance helped ease fears among the local players there, to the point where some eventually warmed up to the Africans. Bernard became close enough friends with one of the Qataris, Nasser Al Meshadi, to visit his house on the weekend. Nasser’s father was a die-hard fan of one of Qatar’s clubs, Al Rayyan, and spent the weekend trying to convince Bernard he should join the team. But Bernard had his heart set on Barcelona or one of Europe’s other top clubs.

  In general, making it to Europe was the overwhelming focus of the Football Dreams kids. They gave little thought to their role in helping Qatar improve its own players. In their mind, they were at Aspire to receive the training necessary to become European stars. Bernard grew especially close to Paul Nevin, who came to Aspire in 2007 after heading Fulham’s academy and ended up coaching the Football Dreams kids. He even invited Bernard and the other Africans over to his house for dinner. Nevin, who
would go on to become head of academy coaching at the Premier League, saw great promise in the left-footer from Teshie. “He told me that like Ronaldhino, I have a lot of skills,” said Bernard.

  Nevin sought to shape Bernard’s decision making on the field to make him an even more effective player. He wanted Bernard to push the ball forward more often, rather than simply looking to pass, so he could become more of a goal scorer like Messi. Bernard was hesitant at first, thinking about what happened to players back in Ghana who held the ball too long. “In Ghana if you do that, they will kill you,” said Bernard. “But in Europe, people are afraid they will get a card.”

  The Aspire coaches focused much of their training for the Africans on these kinds of tactics, helping them understand how their decisions fit in a team’s game plan and how they should position themselves relative to their teammates and opponents. While the coaches were generally blown away by the Africans’ technical skill, physicality, and drive, they found tactics to be the weakest part of their game. That’s understandable given that many of their coaches in Africa had little if any formal training, but that wasn’t what some of the Aspire coaches thought.

  They wrongly speculated that the Africans were tactically weak because they had only played in the street and never on a full-size field. That might seem like a sensible conclusion to someone who had never visited Africa, but this type of thinking revealed how little the coaches actually knew about the conditions that had shaped the development of the African players back home. They might have a relative shortage of well-trained coaches in Africa, but they do have full-size fields, even if many of them are dirt.

  Other theories strayed even closer to the kinds of stereotypes that have long dogged Africans. Some coaches speculated the Africans were better at short passes than long passes because they could lose the ball in the bushes if they kicked it too far. They also guessed that the African players weren’t always the strongest finishers because someone might steal their ball back home if they shot it past the goal. These theories underscore just how little most of the officials at Aspire really knew about the backgrounds of the Africans they had drafted into the academy and what the experience was like for them to be there.

  Since the African players were so much better than the Qataris, they had to rely on competition with each other to really push themselves forward. John Benson remembers what it was like in training when he had to go up against Bernard, who had bulked up from a mix of weightlifting and a steady stream of healthier food from the cafeteria. “When I met Bernard one-on-one, it was crazy, it was like war,” said John. “I wouldn’t let him take the ball from me, and he wouldn’t let me take the ball from him. Sometimes we just kicked each other, but after the game we would go take a shower, and it was normal.”

  John, Hamza, and Adama weren’t the only Ghanaians Bernard went up against at the academy. Ghana sent a couple of its youth national teams to Aspire for training, and they played against the academy side that included Bernard and the other Football Dreams kids. The Under-20 team showed up in September 2009 to prepare for the Under-20 World Cup, which it won later that month after a penalty shoot-out with Brazil in the final.

  The national team players were blown away when they watched Bernard showcase his talent for the first time. “When we played against them, even our Under-20 boys said, ‘Hey, this guy is going to be one of the best,’ ” said John Benson, who ended up joining the national team for the World Cup. “They said he was going to be one of the best because the way he was playing was unbelievable.” The Ghanaian team had a pretty good reference point since the squad included the son of one of Africa’s most famous players, Abedi Pele, who surprisingly got his start playing for a club in Qatar before moving to Europe.

  It’s easy to understand why the Ghanaians were so impressed with Bernard based on a highlight video of a game a couple months later that he played against Ghana’s Under-17 team. Bernard is everywhere, skipping past defenders, feeding passes, and tracking back to muscle an opponent off the ball to avert a fast break. He has hinges for ankles as he changes direction on a dime, always a few paces faster than the players around him.

  In one memorable clip, he steals the ball in the center of midfield, and as his opponent lunges to get it back, he gracefully moves the ball past him with a flick of his left foot behind his right. The next player dives in, studs-up, but Bernard nonchalantly taps the ball to his left and jumps over the defender’s legs. A third player moves in for the kill with just as little luck. Another flick of his left foot behind his right and Bernard is past him. Finally, he slides a pass to a teammate on his left at the top of the box, but a defender just manages to intercept the ball. The defender may have stopped a clear goal-scoring opportunity, but not before Bernard had made several of his teammates look like fools.

  Colomer spent relatively little time in Doha during this period, but the progress that Bernard was making at the academy didn’t go unnoticed. When Colomer was in Accra for the second year of Football Dreams in the fall of 2008, he raved about Bernard’s performance at Aspire to Eugene Komey, the coordinator at the field in Teshie where the Spanish scout first spotted his little Ghanaian Messi. “He said the boy was doing very, very well,” said Komey. “He said Bernard was even smarter than Messi was when he was in Barcelona’s academy.”

  Others began to take notice as well, especially the coaches of European teams that played against Bernard. Aspire often flew clubs to Doha to play against the academy teams, and the kids also traveled to tournaments in Europe. After Bernard played a match against the Spanish club Valencia in Doha in 2009, one of the coaches approached him in Aspire’s cafeteria and gave him his business card. “He told me that I should be playing with him because I have the quality,” said Bernard. On another occasion, Bernard’s coach, Paul Nevin, called him into his office at Aspire after they returned from a trip to Italy, where they played against one of the country’s top clubs, Lazio. “He told me that after the game, Lazio said they liked me,” said Bernard. “I said, ‘Why don’t you sell me over there?’ And he said, ‘No, I can’t do it unless Aspire gives me an order.’ ”

  After less than two years at the academy, Bernard was getting impatient. With European coaches whispering in his ear, he decided he was wasting his time at Aspire and was ready to move to a club in Europe, where he could earn a lot more money for himself and his family. “My heart was boiling,” said Bernard. He sat in his room at Aspire and watched young players in Europe on TV, thinking to himself, “The ones playing over there, I can play better than them.”

  Training with the Qataris only strengthened his belief it was time to move on since they didn’t provide much competition. Aspire brought in the Africans because they realized the best Qatari players would lose the motivation to push themselves if they weren’t sufficiently challenged. Coaches insisted the program was working, but Aspire simply transferred the problem to the Africans since they were now the ones who lacked a proper challenge day in and day out. Even Colomer grew disillusioned with the strategy because it was impeding the progress of the African players. “Three players cannot raise the level of the team,” said Colomer. “These three players will get the level of the rest. I don’t think this is the way.”

  Bernard finally ran out of patience and began badgering Andreas Bleicher and other Aspire officials involved with Football Dreams to let him transfer to a European club. “They would tell me no, I have to wait, I have to wait, I have to wait,” said Bernard. They told him FIFA regulations prohibited him from moving to a club in Europe until he was 18 years old. Bernard didn’t know much about the rules but thought a club could simply appoint someone to look after him until he turned 18. That wasn’t true, but many clubs danced around the regulations or broke them outright to get foreign players they wanted, even major teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid, according to FIFA. In any case, Aspire told Bernard the rules were the rules and he wasn’t going anywhere until he was 18. He would stay and train with the Qatari player
s as planned.

  Aspire’s head soccer coach, Michael Browne, began to sense something was wrong with Bernard but didn’t know exactly what it was since he wasn’t as close to him as some of the others. Bernard’s performance on the field began to drop off. “There was something that held him back,” said Browne. “He lacked that self-drive to really push on and make it.” The conflict with Aspire over moving to Europe was taking its toll.

  But that wasn’t the only thing troubling Bernard. There were problems at home as well. Tension was growing over the roughly $5,000 Aspire sent to Bernard’s parents every year. They were tremendously grateful for the money, which amounted to roughly ten times what Bernard’s father made as a security guard, and used it to begin construction on a house of their own for the first time.

  But as aid organizations have experienced, injecting money into African communities can spark conflict over the newfound resources. Bernard’s old coach, Justice Oteng, felt he should get some of the cash since he had raised Bernard like a son for several years, but the player’s father only gave him about $125. “In Teshie, everybody was annoyed with the man,” said Oteng. “Many people were saying he should have given me a proper share of the money.” This wasn’t an isolated case. Other Football Dreams kids experienced the same: coaches fighting with families over the cash and families bickering among themselves.

  Bernard told Oteng he should forget about the money from Aspire since he had something potentially far more valuable: the player’s license. The coach effectively owned Bernard. Oteng had registered the player with the Ghana Football Association when the boy first joined his Colts team, and the coach expected a cash windfall when Bernard finally transferred to a European club. This is the dream that fuels the trade in young players across Africa, although so few actually make it to Europe that many coaches fail to earn back the money they spend on their teams and watch the cash dribble out of their pockets for years.