— EPISODE 3
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A journey into the perverse world of football trafficking, which every year involves thousands of young people who dream of becoming the new stars in international leagues. Thousands of desperate people end up in the hands of fictitious agents and unscrupulous intermediaries for the few who succeed. Exploited, robbed, and abandoned, many of them find themselves without hope in unknown countries. Yet, the traffickers are only part of a more complex problem involving families, media, and sports clubs. (Versione italiana)
“There’s one thing you’re convinced of when you grow up surrounded by the billboards of great footballers like Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto’o or Yaya Touré: if they did it, you can do it too. You are young, and you feel like you can accomplish anything. But then you arrive in Europe, and if you are lucky enough to have a trial, you realise that the reality is different, that maybe you have only one shot to be successful and that the temperature is ten degrees, and you are not used to it. Nor are you prepared to play with a bunch of strangers who speak a language you don’t speak. And after the trial goes wrong, you’re stranded: alone, in a country you don’t know.”
The words of Joseph* – whose story will be told later on – a twenty-five-year-old Senegalese man, who arrived in Italy in 2014 and now lives in Liguria, summarise an experience shared by thousands of children. Children who are mostly from West Africa and fall victims to a phenomenon known internationally as football trafficking, which refers to all the cases of irregular migration linked with football.
Football trafficking is a complex phenomenon requiring an approach that doesn’t reduce the matter to a mere division between heroes and villains. Admittedly, there are victims and exploiters. However, at the root of the problem is actually a widespread vision in the “football system” expressed through two pervasive metaphors: 1) athletes are commodities; 2) athletes are machines.
Let’s reflect, in the former case, about how nonchalantly we use phrases like “buying”, “selling”, “sending on loan” when we refer to players, as though they are some packages that we move from one place to another. Regarding the latter metaphor, let’s think about statements such as: “That athlete is a machine,” “a youth academy churning out talents,” or “that footballer is a machine.” In both situations, the footballer is perceived as an industrial product deprived of their human characteristics.
Without this reflection on the failure to consider the humanity of the person in question – which can also be extended to other fields outside the world of sports – we risk focusing only on the effects of the problem without understanding its causes.
Another crucial point of football trafficking is the dream, by which I refer to the unstoppable desire, however disconnected from an aware analysis of reality. We’ll be speaking about this too.
The power of the dream provided the foundations for the success of Sadio Mane, Liverpool FC’s Senegalese footballer who won the English and European titles with the Reds. “Football has always been my life and, as I grew up, I had no other desire than to become a footballer,” claims Mane in Made in Senegal, a documentary film about his career. The ambition to be successful in one’s favourite sport—shared by millions of kids from all over the world—is particularly strong in places where “making it” to top-level football goes beyond realising one’s legitimate individual aspirations. In such environments, fulfilling the dream is a powerful way to break free from unstable financial conditions while also helping friends and family to do so. The desire to contribute to the well-being of one’s country through foreign remittances is common to a number of footballers coming from the Gulf of Guinea.
Going back to Joseph’s story: considering these premises, it isn’t hard to imagine the emotions he felt when, at the end of a game played in a tournament in Dakar, his native city, the young footballer was approached by a person known in the area for his contacts in European football.
“Come to Italy with me, and I’ll make you have a great career,” says the man. Joseph is over the moon: he trusts his own skills accompanied by impressive body size. True, competition in Europe will be tough, but he doesn’t care. He keeps repeating to himself that if his fellow countrymen who’ve become famous like Sadio Mane have made it, he’s going to make it too.
However, there is something that doesn’t check out. His “agent” – quotation marks are a must, as the man has never shown any formal credentials – demands to be given an amount of money by the kid’s family. “How’s it possible?” Joseph asks himself. “If he thinks I’m so good, why is he asking for money upfront before I’ve had a trial with a club?” But his concern immediately disappears, crushed by the young man’s blind desire to take his chances in Europe. The kid’s family disagree with the transfer, though. Risks are too high. What if things don’t go well? By dishonestly using Joseph’s expectations, which are used to pressure his parents, the intermediary manages to make the money he was asking for and persuade the family to let the kid leave.
From the landing at Rome Fiumicino, Joseph has the intuition that his doubts before leaving were well-founded. When he rings up his agent – we’ll conventionally continue to call him like that – he sounds surprised. “You really have come,” is his response. Joseph feels a sense of despair: he is alone, just a little more than a teenager, in a new country whose language he does not speak. “I wanted to cry, and I was already regretting my choice as soon as I landed. However, I took courage and went on,” tells Joseph. The aspiring footballer somehow manages to get to Rome’s train station from which he heads for Milan, where his agent is waiting for him.
The 10 Steps in Football Trafficking
Up to this point, its story traces a pattern common to the victims of football trafficking outlined in ten steps by Professor James Esson of the University of Loughborough, UK, who wrote a paper on the subject that is worth illustrating to better understand Joseph’s story.
The first three steps take place in the country of origin and correspond 1) to a self-defined agent approaching a young man with football ambitions, 2) to the request for one payment of an amount of money generally between € 3,000 and 5,000, and 3) the payment of this money to the agent by the family of the boy concerned, which often involves a debt at the limits of sustainability for the family itself.
In the fourth step, the footballer travels to the country of destination with a regular visa, as in Joseph’s case. Upon arrival – step five – the agent immediately takes the player’s money and documents “to keep them safe, or so he assured me,” says Joseph.
And here Joseph is already lucky, so to speak, as once he arrives in Milan, the intermediary tells him that he has a club, which in those years was floating between Serie B and Serie C, interested in making him support an audition.
But for others things go in a different way. It is Patrick’s case, for which we will stop the narration of Joseph’s experience for a moment. Patrick arrived in Paris from the Ivory Coast at 16 years of age with the ambition of following in his hero and fellow countryman Didier Drogba’s footsteps. The youngster has a massive body size and is over 1.90 m tall. During a meeting in Saint-Denis, in the outskirts of Paris, he tells his story, which stopped at Esson’s step 4. Nobody was waiting for him in Paris when he landed, despite the money already paid and the promises made to him in his country of origin about the prospect of a shining career in the European Eldorado. Understandably, Patrick isn’t too willing to speak—partly out of shyness and partly because recalling how his dreams have been exploited reopens a painful wound. This reluctance is confirmed by Jean-Dimmy Jéoboam, now coach of a youth team at the Paris-based Racing Colombes club and vice-chairman of Kampos Saint-Denis. The latter is an organisation that was spontaneously created to help children left alone in similar circumstances to Patrick’s.
“Unfortunately, in recent years our association has met hundreds of young people like him. Some came directly to Paris, others arrived after trying in vain in other countries, such as Spain or Italy. What they share is having gone through the same negative experience and the subsequent sense of deception and abandonment. Therefore, in addition to providing them with the opportunity to keep fit by organising four free training sessions every week, we try to be a point of reference, for example by pointing them to the local administration which offers training and orientation courses. This is the case of Patrick, who, while continuing to play football, is also learning other skills off the pitch.“
Going back to Joseph’s story, his trial – Esson’s step number six – does indeed take place, but, either for the reasons already mentioned at the beginning, or for the thrill of taking all his chances in single one game, he does not shine and the club shows no interest in him. At this point, two possibilities open up: either the young player has other trials until a club decides to have him signed on conditions that are generally disadvantageous for the player – steps number seven and eight – or the intermediary tries to get rid of him, which is exactly what happens to Joseph.
In fact, his agent tells him that he has an acquaintance in another city who will host him while waiting for a new opportunity at another club. Joseph, however, senses that this is a lie and that if he joined this person, he would be asked for services that have nothing to do with football. “They know that you are young, naive and desperate, so it takes very little for them to get you into some nasty stuff. Maybe they make you start with something seemingly harmless like taking someone a package, which then becomes maybe stealing, or starting dealing drugs and so on. I know so many stories like that.“
This is where we come to Esson’s step nine: at the end of one or more trials that went wrong, the player is left to himself. And it is precisely in the space between this and the next and last step – according to which the young aspiring footballer decides to stay in the country of destination, albeit in an illegal condition, as he has no documents – that the vulnerability of his position emerges and other individuals and organisations can exploit him for different types of crimes. This leads us to a reflection on numbers and figures.
Estimates of the number of football trafficking victims range from the most optimistic of 3,000 people a year to the most pessimistic of 15,000 a year. If we take as a reference a value halfway between the two data and consider that the phenomenon has assumed worrying dimensions since the early 2000s, we have a total of well over 150,000 people.
It is evident that such a number of athletic young people ready to work for little money is certainly enticing to many organisations, especially if they operate illegally or on the margins of legality. Here, however, we are moving in the field of assumptions, currently unsupported by reliable data. Suppose Esson’s description is very accurate with regard to what happens to children up to the moment of abandonment in the country of destination. In that case, it is also desirable that future research and investigations cast light on the path that opens up at the end of the ten steps, about which the available literature is practically non-existent.
Still in relation to the tenth step, a question legitimately arises: why, if his football dream has been shattered, should a boy persist in staying in a foreign country where he came with the sole purpose of playing football? The answer is provided by Lucas, another young man of Senegalese origin residing in Liguria, who arrived in Italy in 2016 in order to make a career in football.
“In my country, it is a common belief that Europe is a kind of paradise that provides work, money and well-being. Going back home empty-handed is unacceptable: I would be considered an idiot, an incompetent, and life in Senegal would be even harder for me than it is here. “
Lucas says he has a legal job in a restaurant that occupies him only for a few hours a week, barely allowing him to pay the rent. Although football played a fundamental role in his decision to migrate to Italy, his path was very different from that illustrated by Esson’s ten steps.
“I came here because I’ve always been a fan of the Azzurri at the World Cup. At the moment of departure, I would not even have been able to find Italy on a map. Still, I was sure of one thing: I wanted to become a footballer in the Italian league like my idols Pirlo and Totti, and I blindly believed that I would succeed. But, as soon as I landed, I realised that instead of playing football, I would first have to think about finding a job to support myself. From that moment on, football ball immediately lost importance. “
The Responsibility Pie
Unlike what happened to Joseph and Patrick, Lucas received no push or pressure from self-proclaimed agents. Even though this cannot be classified as a case of football trafficking, his experience still allows us to go back to reflecting on the causes from which this phenomenon originates.
If we stop at the most superficial level, we might think that the responsibility for the problem is only attributable to the “fake agents” who exploit the dreams and naivety of their young victims. Although the actions of these people are reprehensible, the case of Lucas shows us how the foundation for the football dream is actually a misleading narrative of European football, which creates on the one hand idols and on the other a mass of young people who are ready to abandon everything in order to rise to the status of football stars.
It is right and desirable that young people want to realise themselves in the field they love. However, if the blinding – yet illusory – lights of glory, money and success do not find an adequate counterweight in the surrounding educational and social environment, thousands more young people will inevitably continue to swell the ranks of football trafficking victims rather than those of professional clubs.
The latter are also involved in the problem with varying degrees of responsibility. Think of the case of Joseph, tried and then discarded by a Serie B team. It could be argued that a club is not at fault if a boy brought on trial does not live up to expectations. However, it is also true that it is thanks to trying and eventually discarding hundreds of boys that a team then manages to find one with enough talent to let the club make the much-desired millionaire profit.
Big clubs also have responsibilities of various kinds. Think in terms of the direct responsibilities found by FIFA itself, which in the past, at different times, imposed sanctions on top-level teams such as Barcelona and Chelsea for infringing Article 19 of the regulation on player transfers, prohibits—with particular exceptions—the transfer of minors from one country to another for football reasons. But also think about indirect responsibilities. Of which clubs are the jerseys of the boys kicking a ball on some dusty pitch in Abidjan, Accra, or Lagos with the dream that one day, on the back of that shirt, the name printed will be precisely theirs? Certainly not the often ramshackle local teams, impoverished by what the Italian writer Pippo Russo defines as “the muscle drain circuit, the depredation of physical-athletic abilities carried out by the sports systems of the North of the world”.
Let’s be clear, we certainly do not want to blame the clubs as the villain, but only to reiterate that all the organisations in the system have to make a part in changing things.
And what about the role of the media? On the one hand, they continue to feed the football dream by daily broadcasting what happens on the pitch and conveying sparkling images of what happens off the pitch. This way, media help build the myth of the star footballer, blindly chased by many hidden boys whose face is only revealed among a few investigative articles on football trafficking.
However, let’s not delude ourselves that the problem concerns only the children of sub-Saharan Africa, for it would be a short-sighted attitude. There are growing reports of young aspiring footballers “seduced and abandoned” by squalid middlemen on the South America-Europe route. Moreover, Italy and other European countries are not immune to cases of payments to dubious intermediaries by families eager to see their children make a career in football.
There is a considerable difference between an Italian boy who fails to impress a local professional club and a young Senegalese, Nigerian or Ivorian player. If things go wrong for the latter, the disappointment for the broken dream is also added to the despair of being thousands of kilometres from home. Not surprisingly, the three young people whose stories have been reported have not met their mother in person for some years now. Otherwise, if things go wrong for an Italian boy, he can rejoin his family much more easily.
In conclusion, it should be clear by now that the phenomenon of football trafficking involves various players – sporting and non-sporting institutions, clubs, media, intermediaries, families and children – both internationally and locally. In its complexity, however, the problem is not only football but also the vision of the athlete and, therefore, of the human being.
According to Matthew Edafe, a Nigerian videomaker and journalist and a former victim of football trafficking who now collaborates with Mission 89, an NGO that promotes educational campaigns on human trafficking in and through sport, raising awareness is the starting point for remedy. “Nobody tells that side of the story, and because nobody is telling that story, we’re getting locked up in this logjam.”
Regarding the fundamental role of education, it is worth mentioning an episode that occurred at the end of a meeting on football trafficking organised in a secondary school in Genoa. After the question and answer session, one of the participating students wrote: “My desire is to turn my sport into my job, but my family nor I had ever reflected, before today, about the possible difficulties along the way. From now on, I will also seriously think about an alternative plan in case things go wrong in sport.“ As American educator John Dewey once said: “Democracy begins in conversation.”
*The names of all people mentioned in this article have been changed.
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Author Profile
- Daniele Canepa is a freelance teacher of English as a Foreign Language and a copywriter. He graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Genoa with a thesis on metaphors in Football English and taught English at the University of Genoa from 2005 to 2013. Since 2018 he has written articles and conducted awareness-raising campaigns with Mission 89, an NGO aiming to mitigate child trafficking in sports through research and education.
