Many go on to earn hundreds of thousands a week, but Fifa wants to halt the exodus of ‘under-age’ African players – a move that would not be popular with the players’ moms
Brian Oliver
Somewhere in northern Malaysia there are 12 teenaged footballers living in one large room and hoping to be selected to play for the local team so that someone will notice them and give them a contract. They are not being paid.
Somewhere in the Netherlands an illegal immigrant is sleeping on the floor of one of the country’s top agents, living on no more than expenses and again hoping for a deal at any club that can pay him a decent wage.
And somewhere in Spain there’s a footballer who does have a contract, but not the one he thought he was signing, which would have taken him to Real Mallorca.
His paperwork ties him for 10 years to a company, not a club, and he has already been moved to two second-division sides he had no interest in playing for. His pay is so poor he has been home to try to coax some money out of the club which sold him.
All these players are from Ghana, and there are hundreds more from other African countries dotted around the world. One of them, a 17-year-old international prospect from Togo, has disappeared altogether after signing up for a Swiss agent. His country wanted him for Olympic duty but no one has heard of him for four months.
All are victims of what the top man in African football calls “a hideous slave trade” that plunders the continent. It started slowly in the late Eighties when African teams started to excel at the under-17 and under-20 World Cups, and the players are getting ever younger – many of them 15 and 16.
Issa Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), is scathing about agents and the youth academies springing up all over Africa. He backs up his argument by recalling the 1998 Belgian government inquiry into a “slave trade” scandal in which club directors signed up young players as their personal property from which to make as much profit as possible.
Sepp Blatter, president of the world soccer body Fifa, agrees with Hayatou. “It’s time to fight against the exodus of young players to Europe,” he said.
“We must create an age barrier before which a player cannot be transferred to another continent.”
He promises new regulations by the end of June, after which no player under the age of 18 will be allowed to transfer to Europe. But there will be legal problems with such a ban and there is a flaw in the slave-trade argument – because many of the “slaves” earn more than 20E000 (R200E000) a week and hundreds even higher.
Roger Milla, Africa’s most famous player, is not so forthright. “Perhaps it’s not normal for players to move to Europe when they’re 15 or 16, but if you don’t get paid in your own league, or you are paid very little, you’ll want to move somewhere where you can get rich,” he says.
The two main reasons to move early, explains Milla, are the hopeless state of domestic leagues and national football associations that allow clubs to get away with not paying their players on time, or paying less than agreed; and the families.
“A young player in Europe can send money back to his extended family,” says Milla. “That’s very important. It means far more than most Europeans can imagine.”
The point is emphasised outside her home by Gloria Osei Kuffour, the wealthiest grandmother on the Ainet Road in Kumasi, Ghana. Ten years ago she was no better off than any of her neighbours in this busy shopping area; then one of her four children, Samuel, was taken away from her.
In 1991 a European agent caused a sensation by selling Samuel and two of his team-mates in Ghana’s under-17 team to Torino. There was uproar in Italy because the players were so young.
Osei Kuffour remembers it well. “Was I sad when he went? Sad? No, I was happy. Very, very happy.”
But wasn’t he a slave? She throws back her head and laughs, loudly. Osei Kuffour answers these questions while standing next to her BMW, having recently returned from a trip to Germany, where Samuel now plays for Bayern Munich.
“When Samuel was a young boy he was very good at football and I wanted to help him. I sold our television to pay for some boots, and the other children didn’t complain because they wanted to help him too.
“I always pray to God to help my son become a big man. I helped him – now he can help me.”
Osei Kuffour has discussed this with the mother of Tony Yeboah, once a Leeds striker, who left Ghana for Germany when he was a teenager and plays now for Hamburg.
Life was hard for Yeboah, who spoke no German or English, but his mother was “very, very happy too”, said Osei Kuffour, a football lover who supports her local club and watches Samuel play for the national team when she can.
Samuel himself is not sure Fifa are doing the right thing.
“It’s every man for himself,” he says. “I’m very happy with the way things turned out for me. I’m able to look after my family very well, I play for one of the best clubs in the world – I can’t complain about anything.”
The other two who signed for Torino have also prospered in Europe. Mohammed Gargo is earning Serie A money at Udinese – which has half a dozen young Africans in its youth team – and Emmanuel Duah has ended up at Leiria in Portugal. “They’ve got no complaints,” said Samuel.
He is more than happy with the man who did that controversial deal, Domenico Ricci, who is still his agent nearly 10 years later.
Ricci’s company, African Football Management, is probably the most active in the market – or at least the respectable part of it – and has been the target of much of Hayatou’s invective. Ricci, an Italian who is married to a Congolese woman, has 60 African players in Europe but sees himself as anything but a “slave trader”.
He laughs off much of the criticism and turns the argument around to blame Fifa and CAF for introducing a “racist law” themselves – the regulation that requires licensed international player agents to post a bond of 200E000 Swiss francs (about R800E000).
There are 534 licensed agents: one is in Egypt, and for the continent of Africa that’s it. More than 300 African players in the top division of Western Europe’s best leagues, many hundreds more at lower levels around the world – and not a single black African agent on their own continent.
Not that that stops Africans doing deals. France and the United States have licensed agents from Africa, and there are unofficial “local managers” doing deals with the Europeans. In eight days in Ghana I was asked three times if I was an agent, and if I wasn’t, did I want to have a go anyway and sell players in Europe?
‘Sure, there are good agents and bad agents,” says Ricci (46).
“Some of the unlicensed locals have no real idea how to operate, and some of the Europeans are unreliable too.
“But it’s no good Hayatou and his executive at CAF just blaming the agents for taking money out of the game. If there’s an exodus to Europe they should first of all be asking why.
“CAF is hiding behind reality. The young players are leaving because in Africa there’s no money, too little competition. They should be working to make the whole structure of African football more professional.
“Hayatou says we’re taking away, but we’re investing. And look at CAF – they’re not working for the development of African football, they just want as many years as possible on the Fifa or CAF executive so they can make more money and build a bigger house.
“What have they done to help African agents? The bond is too expensive. The Fifa agent law is racist and CAF should have done something about it when it was introduced. They need African agents to work with the African mentality, but CAF are only interested in lining their own pockets.”
They are not the only ones. The chairs of professional leagues in South Africa and Cameroon have ended up in jail, and four of the top five officials at the Ghana Football Association have recently been found guilty of corruption in transfer deals.
A Ghanaian club owner declared a transfer at $250E000 (R1,5-million) when he actually received $800E0000 (R4,8-million) – and this sort of thing is commonplace.
One man who knows all about the subject is Professor Pierre Lanfranchi, an expert in the development of football worldwide and a consultant to Fifa. “National federations can’t even build a middle-term plan for development,” says Lanfranchi, Regius professor of history at De Montfort University, Leicester. “There are absolutely no foundations to the professional game in Africa.”
Fifa aims to start putting those foundations in place by keeping promising young players at home, at least for another couple of years. The plan is that this will raise standards and attract sponsorship. “At least it’s worth a try,” says Blatter.
Ricci, who played for Cagliari and Torino in the Italian second division before coaching in Zaire, says the boys he sold to Torino were all old enough and happy enough to move.
“Is a boy going to refuse a move like that?” asks Ricci at his office in Brussels. “You can’t compare Africans to young players in, say, Russia, Norway or Croatia, who can stay in their own leagues until they’re 20 and beyond and still learn a lot. If you stay on as a professional in Africa till you’re 22, you’ll never get to Europe.
“The infrastructure is so poor that you’ll have no chance of developing.”
The benefits to Africa of players moving to Europe are beginning to surface. When a player returns he can help.
“The leagues have improved in the last 10 years, because the links to Europe are closer,” says Ricci, who believes the best are in South Africa (“which has an infrastructure and is completely unlike the rest of the continent”), Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Ghana.
If Nigeria is one of the best, it still has its problems. Of the 17 clubs in the top division only one, Julius Berger FC, paid their players their full wages on time last season. Julius Berger is also the only club to have had a home-based player in the squad of 22 for the Nations Cup. Apart from one in Tunisia, all the others earn a fortune in Europe.
A visit to a boys’ game at Nsawom, a run- down town of shacks and rusty corrugated iron near Accra, showed what the boys must overcome to make it to the top.
The pitch, hemmed in by school buildings and a community centre, was 90% red dust and 10% grass, and was unmarked. There was a dry stream bed running the length of the sloping, pot-holed pitch.
The goals were knocked up from off-cuts and the crossbars sagged markedly. Both goalkeepers were barefoot. Yet the level of skill was exceptional.
Ricci agrees with Fifa that investing in youth football is the best way to bring about long-term improvement.
And that’s what they are doing, along with many other individuals and top European clubs. As with the agents, there are good and bad youth academies opening up all over the continent.
The big money is coming from Ajax (in Ghana and South Africa), and in West Africa Feyenoord, Paris St Germain and Monaco.
English clubs have yet to catch on, though Manchester United have bought a controlling interest in Fortune FC, the South African second-division side, and one of Arsenal’s scouts has had a look at how things work in Cameroon.
An English-backed academy cannot be far away. One top-class player every five years would cover the running costs.
These academies, if well run like the Ajax set-up at Obuasi, Ghana, will offer boys not only top coaching, but an education. There will be structured schooling, occasional visits to Europe and, whether the Fifa age barrier works or not, the boys will at least be well prepared to move.
“We must leave the players here until they’re older,” says Blatter.
“It will be the first step in attracting investment in football here.”
Gloria Osei Kuffour, meanwhile, has a message to the mothers of Africa: “I want all of you to help your boys learn football. Give them everything you can.”