THE MATCH FIXING SCANDAL THAT GRIPPED ZIMBABWE

What a match-fixing scandal!

Zimbabwe’s 2017 Orange Africa Cup of Nations soccer qualifies in Gabon was once again marred by another clandestine match-fixing scandal. That was unearthed prior to the Group L encounter where Zimbabwean players were to rub shoulders with Swaziland. The former Zimbabwe international, Edzai Kasinauyo was implicated in the match-fixing scandal. For this reason, Kasinauyo was instantly suspended on pending investigations. The Zimbabwe Football Association headed by the business magnate, Phillip Chiyangwa boastfully indicated that it had evidence that Kasinauyo was working with popular Asian match fixers to rig the outcome of the match pitting Zimbabwe and Swaziland that was slated for 25^th of March this year. As Kasinauyo was named in the match-fixing scandal, thorough investigations were conducted. Zimbabwe Republic Police had to summon the national team’s coach (The Warriors) to testify in the case that had claimed Edzai Kasinauyo who had been on the Zifa board as well as Pasuwa’s Assistant, Nation Dube. Despite investigations reached an advanced stage, Kasinauyo and company who were shell-shocked stuck to allegation denial insisting that they had made no contact with anyone in Asia. The former Zifa Chief Executive Officer, Henrietta Rushwaya was also dragged into the matter. Unfortunately, that brought no fruition but only capitalism proved that it sucks from all angles of the status quo.

Going back memory lane, Zimbabwean soccer was once again hard-hit by another similar multimillion-dollar betting scandal in Asia named. Around 80 players were implicated in a major match-fixing scandal that rocked local football in 2012. The coaches and players were accused of receiving payments from an Asian betting syndicate - involving the now convicted and imprisoned guru Wilson Raj Parumal - to lose friendly matches on trips to Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Oman, Jordan, Bulgaria, China, Yemen and Thailand between 2006 and 2011. 15 players and officials received life bans and more were suspended.

 It was insane for these players and their leaders fooled everybody in Zimbabwe pretending that they had the country at heart yet there were after clandestine activities with global match fixers. Even President Robert Mugabe used to treat them to state banquets before sending them out on national duty.  The episode is the sending of the fake Warriors team to Malaysia and what transpired at the Merdeka Cup that is Malaysian tournament of independence celebration. The then famous world match fixer Wilson Raj Perumal, is said to have been in charge of the team and their welfare including paying the players to throw away matches. Team officials were offered 5-Star Treatment including chauffeur rides, drinks, and sex. Fingered as the engine room to this madness, the then former Zifa CEO, Rushwaya was arrested by police and hauled to court to answer charges on match fixing involving 11 counts of concealing transactions from a principal, two counts of fraud and 15 counts of bribery involving $1,000,000. She was remanded on $500 bail. 13 players were banned for life and nearly 70 received their suspension for their part in the then Asiagate scandal.

 However, this was put to a halt and everybody was spared from the noose following the intervention of the world body, FIFA, led by the then Seth Blatter. Fifa cited irregularities on how the investigations were carried out thereby refusing to sanction the penalties. What a mad system that siphoned a scandal that brought a devastating impact on the now declined Zimbabwe’s football standards. The Zimbabwean government and its Zifa should be aware that soccer is a big business project being cogged by the head of imperialism that doesn’t value concrete investigation findings. Not that in this unfair world, even if the players are well paid by their governments, offers by those involved in soccer betting are exorbitant and ever attracts the watchful eyes of wealth gathering soccer players. To express this, read about 1915 British football betting scandal

Bigboy Musemwa

       

Migrants they pay a fortune for

10. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Gabon), Borussia Dortmund: 3 million euros per year.

9. Salomon Kalou (Côte d’Ivoire), Hertha Berlin: 3.1 million euros per year.

8. John Mikel Obi (Nigeria), Chelsea: 4.4 million euros per year.

7. Kolo Touré (Côte d’Ivoire), Liverpool FC: 4.9 million euros per year.

6. Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon), Everton and Sampdoria: 4.9 million euros per year.

5. Didier Drogba (Côte d’Ivoire), Chelsea: 5.2 million euros per year.

4. Michael Essien (Ghana), AC Milan: 5.8 million euros per year.

3. Emmanuel Adebayor (Togo), Tottenham: 6.5 million euros per year.

2. Medhi Benatia (Morocco), Bayern Munich: 8 million euros per year.

1. Yaya Touré (Côte d’Ivoire), Manchester City: 13 million euros per year.

Homegrown V Homeflown

As South Africa take on Senegal in Group C in the African Cup of Nations, it will be Africa versus Europe.

Of South Africa’s 23-man squad, 18 play in their own country. Senegal have none: every footballer in their squad plays in Europe.

The football slave trade

FOR SALE

Ivory Coast footballer, Wilfried Bony, has moved from Swansea City to Manchester City for 28 million pounds and a salary of a 100,000 pounds a week. It is a profit margin for Swansea of about 130 percent on their original investment. He is now the most expensive footballer from Africa

Such wealth is obscene but let us think a bit further. Isn’t it a continuance of a trade in people except the chains are not of iron but of gold. It is little different from the buying and selling of expensive throughbred race-horses.

German midfielder, Christoph Kramer, released to thenewspaper Der Spiegel about the transfer market and its position in this regard: “The transfer market is a modern slave trade. If I do not want to play in a team, I will not play on that team. I'll decide where to go.” 

UEFA president Michel Platini, speaking to the European parliament in 2009, said: “Paying a child to kick a ball is not that different from paying a child to work on a production line. Both amount to exploiting child labour. And when you pay a child or their parents to travel overseas, when you uproot them from their home environment, when you make them emotionally disorientated, I call that child trafficking.” 

No matter how many official protective measures are in place, bad practice is the norm. The gap between the riches on offer for successful footballers and the poverty-stricken reality of the young players who dare to dream is so wide and the lure of an opportunity – no matter how unlikely – is too great to resist. The youngsters and their families are easy to string along. Last year, FIFA-listed Cameroon agent Robert Nkuimy was caught on camera allegedly offering to sell trafficked African footballers as young as 14 for £25,000 apiece to undercover reporters posing as representatives of a European club. The exploitation of young Africans not only continues – but is on the increase. It seems that football’s slave trade has never been healthier.

For now all eyes are on the African Nations Cup but, for sure, there will be many eyeing up the players' physique and prowness, much as they would at a slave market in times gone by.  

Join The Club - Football, Like Politics, Is Corrupt

Nigeria and Algeria both fell out of the World Cup at the last 16 stage, competing heroically against France and Germany and showing amazing discipline and shape for 70 of the 90 minutes. Then tiredness clearly began setting in. Brief lapses in concentration allowed the European teams to win.
Few African teams, especially sub-Saharan ones, ever progress beyond the last 16, and so it went this year. Before Algeria and Nigeria were knocked out, The Ivory Coast, Ghana and Cameroon had already left the tournament. Surprise upstarts have come not from Africa, but from Latin America.
Costa Rica, a small country with only 5m inhabitants, played with admirable style and effort. Chile gave Brazil a huge extra-time fright. Colombia delighted everyone by being even more stylish than the Brazilians. Whether Costa Rica or Colombia progress beyond the quarter-finals remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the African teams were once again wracked by controversy. Seven Cameroonian players were accused of match-fixing. The Nigerian and Ghanaian teams threatened “industrial action” to ensure they received their bonuses. The tournament was treated to the spectacle of an aeroplane flown from Ghana with a shipment of banknotes to pay the players in cash, since no-one seemed to trust the Ghanaian football authorities to honour their undertakings in any other way. Then, when Ghana went out, the country’s president mooted an official inquiry into the team’s poor performance.

Throughout Africa, high hopes and huge expectations are counterweighted by meagre national resources, which are widely subject to corrupt pilfering. National football associations become sources of personal income, and people fight to become association presidents – not because they are experts in football development, but simply to have leverage over money.
And so organised football, like organised civil society with foreign links, becomes an alternative to a corrupt political life lived for personal enrichment. In this sense, at least, corruption is diversifying. But it does no good for the sport, especially at the prestigious international level.

The African teams of today are very different from those of even recent World Cups. Nearly every player is now a professional employed by a “big” team. They work at Chelsea, at AC Milan, Galatasary, and, even when playing with minor European teams, they are participating in aspirational set-ups. These players know what goes into a successful team.
But as soon as they get to national level, their coaches (Stephen Keshi aside) tend to be a step down; their national associations are inept, as well as corrupt. At a certain point, and this point was clearly avoided by both Nigeria and Algeria, teams think they are destined not to win, wonder why they should try, and think instead of maximising their compensation for the inconvenience the World Cup has caused them.

The president of Ghana can order as many enquiries as he likes, but football today is a big business and should be treated like one. That means African football associations need to have the efficiency and dynamism of international corporations. It might take some of the glamour and romance out of the game – but it also might do something to cut down on the embarrassments.
It’s not just football, of course. Earlier this year, Kenyan athletes threatened to stop competing if their international prize money was subject to taxation. The athletes were wrong to think they should be exempt from what should be a widened tax base designed to boost the country’s revenue; all countries simply have to do this. But even if in some cases they themselves were the nation’s emerging sporting oligarchs, they still refused to pay money into a system used by political figures to steal money for personal gain.
To that extent, the president of Ghana’s enquiry might come to a simple solution: football gets better as the nation gets better. Football wins if the nation’s government wants to win as a nation – not as a grouping of sectional, personal, and often very petty interests.

from here

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"A bunch of losers"

As the Brazil World Cup approaches, South Africa reflects upon the legacy of its own hosting of the event.

Nine stadiums  built or renovated for the World Cup to the tune of 10 billion rand - a quarter of the overall budget - all are in the red, unable to attract regular sporting events or concerts. The Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in the decaying industrial city of Port Elizabeth supports the case.

The current tenants of the state-of-the-art 47,000-seat, 2.1 billion rand venue are the Southern Kings, a second-tier rugby side excluded last year from the lucrative Super XV competition that includes teams from Australia and New Zealand. The Port Elizabeth region has also not had a team in the Premier Soccer League (PSL) since 2006, and even if a local side clawed its way into the big time, the turnstiles will not be overworked - the average PSL game attracts crowds of just 7,000. Since it opened its doors before the World Cup, the stadium has been attracting on average just over 300,000 visitors a year, only three times the record 94,700 who turned up on one day at Soccer City to watch the South African Springbok rugby side play New Zealand in 2010. Its annual up-keep costs may be as high as 65 million rand, according to two university studies, but the owners concede that it runs at a loss of 13 million rand a year - a bill that the municipality has to pick up.

The bill for the under-used and loss-making stadiums' up-keep falls on cash-strapped municipalities, a salutary lesson for Brazil, where hundreds of thousands have protested, sometimes violently, against state spending on this year's tournament. The bill for their up-keep falls on cash-strapped municipalities, a salutary lesson for Brazil, where hundreds of thousands have protested, sometimes violently, against state spending on this year's tournament.

Brazil's anti-World Cup movement argues that the $11.7 billion earmarked for Cup-related spending - three times South Africa's budget - would have been better used on hospitals, schools and public transport. Many in South Africa feel the same way.

"If 50 per cent of the collective resources deployed around the World Cup were deployed around these critical issues, I think the country would have made a big, big leap forward," said Achille Mbembe, a social scientist at Johannesburg's Wits University.

 FIFA and the South African Football Association (SAFA) urged people to focus on "non-tangible" benefits such as an improved national team and the rebranding of a country plagued by violent crime. Whereas tourism numbers have risen since the tournament the sporting benefits are debatable. The national soccer team, Bafana Bafana, failed to qualify for the 2014 World Cup and are currently languishing at 65 in the world rankings, having slid from a short-lived post-World Cup high of 38th in 2011. Since 2010, the side has also struggled in the bi-annual African Nations Cup, qualifying for only one tournament by virtue of being the host. The under-20 and under-23 teams have also failed to get in to any major events.  Bafana Bafana manager Gordon Igesund - the 17th coach since South Africa's admission to international football in 1992  got his marching orders as national coach this week after presiding over a string of lackluster performances and goal-less draws that prompted sports minister Fikile Mbalula to brand the side "a bunch of losers".

From here

World Cup -White Elephants

South Africa spent a whopping 38 billion rand (£3.7 billion) on stadiums and infrastructure to realise the vision of Africa's first World Cup.

Neal Collins, a South African-born author and journalist explains Fifa left behind them a shameful legacy of empty stadiums.
"The white elephants - 10 magnificent football stadiums lying empty and unused - serve as a constant reminder of the expensive legacy of the Fifa World Cup,"

Collins says: "In Polokwane, the new Peter Mokabe stadium, capacity 45,000, sits unused next to the old Peter Mokabe stadium, capacity 20,000, which was quite suitable for South Africa’s northernmost city. In rural Nelspruit, the Mbombela Stadium has no suitors. Neither city has a side in the local Premier League."

In Durban the Moses Mabhida stadium was recently snubbed by neighbouring rugby team the Sharks as its operators searched for a new tenant, whilst cricket bosses are unhappy that the playing areas of all the new stadiums are too small for their sport.

Soccer City in Johannesburg served as the flagship stadium of the World Cup and largest sports venue in Africa. The 95,000 seater venue underwent a £300 million renovation before the World Cup and costs around £250,000 a month to maintain.It is regarded as the de facto national stadium for the South African football team but other than the occasional derbies between local rivals Kaizer Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates, the stadium has struggled to generate post World Cup revenue.

Cape Town's Green Point stadium, which hosted England's second group match against Algeria, hosts the odd Ajax Cape Town football match, luring an average of 7,000 supporters to the venue which has a capacity of 55,000 (reduced from 64,000) after the World Cup.

The World Cup - the homeless cry "FOUL"

It's all warming up for the World Cup now . We have had the tournament's draw for the sections and we have the homeless being forced from the streets.
Isaac Lewis said that police have arrested him for loitering six times in the past month. Before that, Lewis said police mostly left him alone.
Police harassment he said "is increasing, everyday it's increasing," he said. "It's because they want to make a good impression for the foreigners coming. We are like insects to them, or flies."

Lesley de Rueck, Cape Town's director of 2010 operations, denied the city was pressuring the homeless for the World Cup's sake. Felicity Purchase, a city councilwoman and member of a mayoral committee on economic development and tourism, said that the city wanted to get people off the streets for their own good as well as to keep the city "tidy."

Jason Brickhill of the Legal Resources Center, an independent human rights group based in Johannesburg, stated homeless South Africans in Pretoria and Johannesburg, two of the other cities where the tournament will be staged, are also being arrested by police for loitering, and illegal evictions are on the increase.
"In my mind it's linked to the World Cup . There has been talk of the need to clean up the streets, where the dirt is the people."

world cup blues

We read that SOUTH AFRICA'S 2010 World Cup looms in less than a year now at a cost to the host government and FIFA, world football's governing body, of at least £4 billion. When the month-long football fest is over, South Africans will be left with 10 magnificent state-of-the-art stadiums.
Stephen Maseko lives in a corrugated iron and mud shack without electricity, running water or a toilet in the shadow of Mbombela Stadium. He knows his home will be demolished before the stadium hosts the first of its four World Cup matches. "I find it difficult to feel proud that we are hosting this World Cup," he said. "To tell you the truth, I do not have time to think about football. My worries are greater."
The 46,000-seat, billion-rand (£74 million) Mbombela Stadium, bristling with 21st-century technology and supported by 18 giant pylons resembling giraffes, was built on 118 hectares of ancestral land from which the Matsafeni, a Swazi tribal clan, were forcibly removed and offered compensation of just one rand, or 7 pence sterling (raised to 8.7m rand, or £655,000, after a series of prolonged court cases).
Pretoria high court judge Ntendeya Mavundla told Mbombela's African National Congress-dominated council that its treatment of the Matsafeni was not much different from that of "colonialists who usurped land from naïve Africans in return for shiny buttons and mirrors."
When the ANC speaker of the Mbombela Council, 44-year-old Jimmy Mohlala, blew the whistle on a 40m rand (£3m) scam between his fellow ANC councillors and the stadium's commercial developers, senior ANC politicians demanded his resignation.
Mohlala refused to step down and was subsequently shot dead by masked gunmen at his home. His assassins have not been caught and police have not investigated the fraud.

Some 70,000 labourers working on the 2010 stadiums, and other World Cup infrastructure such as the new futuristic railway system with British-built engines and carriages, between Johannesburg Airport and the city centre, went on strike last month for better wages. Some labourers on 2010 projects were earning as little as 800 rand (£60) a month. Mildred Mpundu, a single mother of four, was earning 2000 rand (£150) a month with overtime as a labourer at Johannesburg's Soccer City, where the opening and final World Cup matches will be held. Mildred said she could only give her family meat on Sundays, and she added: "People will come to the stadium and think it is very nice. They won't even know that the people who built it can't afford to go inside."
Union official Lesiba Seshoga, who oversaw negotiations at Cape Town's Green Point, Durban's Moses Madhiba and Port Elizabeth's Nelson Mandela stadiums, said:"These workers are not going to benefit from the World Cup in that none of them will be able to afford to watch a game."

Andile Mngxitama, a columnist for the mass circulation Sowetan daily newspaper, said he fears the 2010 World Cup will turn South Africa into a big fun park, with foreign visitors enjoying levels of comfort, safety and security that ordinary people can only dream of. "When the tournament is over," Mngxitama continued, "we will be sitting with major world-class stadiums in a country that can't feed or educate its people. The truth is we don't need the World Cup. Politicians and their connections need it."

The cup of plenty ?

South Africa’s budget for hosting the 2010 World Cup this week hit an estimated $3.7 billion. The cost has risen more than twelve-fold from an original estimate of $295 million.

Is the continent’s first hosting of the world’s biggest single-sport event worth the money?

How many hospitals, clinics and schools have been built or improved, in a country where more than four million people live on less than a dollar a day? Will the expense eradicate crime, reduce joblessness, reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS, feed the hungry ?

The legacy of the World Cup is of questionable value, as the country already has good football facilities. A new stadium in Cape Town was built, against the wishes of residents, on a golf course, in a city where there are already two perfectly good stadiums.Other venues are being expanded, at huge cost, but will probably never be filled to capacity after the conclusion of the World Cup.

Football Trafficking

The African Nations Cup tournament is over and Egypt are the winner , defeating Cameroon . Whoooooopeeeee !!

Socialist Banner reported previously on the new exploitation of the football scout and the poor yet talented youngsters of Africa and and now another BBC report describes the people trade industry in the world of soccer :-

Football is more than a sport; it is a weaver of dreams.
It can fulfil the hopes of a young boy and his family trying to escape poverty like Michael Essien - now worth millions and playing for Chelsea - or Didier Drogba from neighbouring Ivory Coast, one of the best strikers in the world.
A well as hope there is greed, as unscrupulous adults traffic increasing numbers of African youngsters to Europe, exploiting their dreams, then abandoning them.

Fahd Abu Bakari is a 16-year-old Ghanaian who lives in Accra.
He told us he wanted to be the new Michael Essien and that agents were always turning up to his club's games.
"Finding the money for the visa and passport to go to Europe is not easy," he said. "Some boys ask their families to help them and then when they're successful they will pay them back."
Fahd's mother Christiana Kissiwah says she would love her son to go to Europe. She makes a modest living cooking and selling food from a stall outside her home. Success in Europe will of course not only realise her son's dreams but also those of his family - to live a better life.

But Fahd and his parents are easy prey for the growing number of unlicensed so-called football academies and agents in Ghana. They claim - for a fat fee - that they can introduce a youngster to a top European club. Sometimes that fee is raised by desperate parents selling their home, handing over the deeds or selling family heirlooms like jewellery.

The European Union says it is concerned about the trafficking of African children for football . The charity Save the Children is working hard to inform African families of the dangers of dealing with unlicensed agents and middlemen.

Karim Haggui, a 24-year-old Tunisian who plays for Bayer Leverkusen in Germany but competed this month in the African Cup in Ghana in response to the Quatari largest talent search in soccer history, a screening of 400,000 boys his age across seven African countries., said :-
''There are a lot of youngsters a lot of talent who are here and who finish their careers in Africa without anyone ever seeing them,'' Haggui said. But if Africans end up playing for another country's national team, he added, ''it becomes commerce.''

But for the poor, football will always be an attractive way to escape poverty-stricken lives - so stamping out exploitation won't be easy.

"Ball and Chains"

The BBC carries a report of a documentary called "Ball and Chains" on African football players in Europe and their particular exploitation .

Every year hundreds of young African players come to Europe in the hope of striking it rich, following in the footsteps of stars such as Chelsea's Didier Drogba or Barcelona's Samuel Eto'o. But for the handful who make it, far more fail. And yet they keep coming. The few successful examples are skewing the perceptions of young Africans, and in many cases encouraging them to abandon their education.

Raffaele Poli, a Swiss academic, has studied the career paths of African footballers in Europe.
He looked at 600 players who played in the top European leagues in 2002.
Four years later, only 13% had progressed upwards. A third had simply disappeared from professional football.

Many clubs have made a business out of importing cheap African talent and then selling it on to wealthier European clubs. In the global football business, though, the talent is at the mercy of unscrupulous agents and clubs. Dirk de Vos of the Belgian football players' union showed us a contract between a club and an African player.
Or rather, two contracts.
One, properly printed, gave the player the correct minimum wage and benefits, and was lodged with the football federation. The other, hand-written, showed the true salary - less than a quarter of the official figure.
"They have no choice but to sign the second contract," says de Vos.

Other players we met had simply been abandoned on the streets by their agents when they failed a trial, or had their contract terminated.

Scams and false paperwork are common. In Ghent a young Nigerian player was recruited at the age of 15. Too young to play officially, his agent had taken his passport to the Nigerian embassy in Brussels, where he had paid to have it "amended" to make him appear older.
A Cameroonian player for Bayern Munich turned out to be travelling on a passport that actually belonged to a French woman.
"You can bribe anyone," says Jean-Claude Mbvoumin a former Cameroonian international player, who now runs a support group for abandoned footballers in Paris.

"It's important to dream," says Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, "but the dreams about football now are not realistic."

The Guardian also reports soccers exploitaion of African football talent . In the slums of Jamestown, outside the Ghanaian capital, Accra , a weather-beaten billboard poster shows Michael Essien holding out a ball dotted with black stars, his country's national symbol, the Ghana and Chelsea midfielder beckons fans to 'Be Proud' . There are an estimated 500 illegal football academies operating in Accra alone. Thousands more are spread across Ghana. Many are run by the roadside; most have no proper training facilities . According to the Confederation of African Football, the sport's governing body in the continent, all such institutions must be registered with the local government or football association. The reality in Ghana and neighbouring Ivory Coast is that the greater the success of West African players in Europe, the more unaccredited academies spring up. Most demand fees from the children's parents and extended families, who often take them out of normal schooling to allow them to concentrate on football full-time. Since having a professional footballer in the family would be the financial equivalent of a lottery win, many reckon the risk to their child's education worth taking.

Coaches, as well as European and Arab middlemen, haggle over the best players, signing some as young as seven on tightly binding pre-contracts - effectively buying them from their families - with the hope of making thousands of dollars selling the boys on to clubs in Europe. In other cases, they extort the cost of passage from their families. Many take the deeds on houses and even family jewellery in return for their services. This process of exploitation is raising alarm among West Africa-based NGOs including Save the Children and Caritas.

Tony Baffoe, the former Ghana captain, now an ambassador for this year's African Nations Cup, admits that 'the trafficking of children to play football is a reality we must all face'

In West Africa serious money is being invested by European giants such as the Dutch clubs Ajax and Feyenoord, who both operate academies in Ghana. Just one top-class player every five years would cover the running costs of these accredited academies . French clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain and Monaco also maintain scouting networks in the region. Manchester United have bought a controlling interest in Fortune FC, a South African second-division side.

The exploitation of young footballers has even been called a new 'slave trade' and is leaving a tragic legacy of homeless young footballing hopefuls across Europe.

'This football-related trafficking and the widespread creation of so-called schools of excellence is an area of huge growing concern for Save The Children,' says Heather Kerr, the charity's Ivory Coast country manager.

Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, football's world governing body, accused Europe's richest clubs of 'despicable' behaviour and engaging in 'social and economic rape' as they scour the developing world for talent.

Marie-George Buffet, a former French Sports Minister, recently claimed that many French-run academies, both in France and in Africa, were corrupt and run by unlicensed agents who needed controlling.

Professor Pierre Lanfranchi, an expert in the development of football worldwide and a consultant to Fifa. He says corruption in Africa, with poorly run national governing bodies, makes it easy for European clubs to cherry-pick the best young players and that there are no foundations to the professional game in Africa

Culture Foot Solidaire is a charity set up to help African teenagers trafficked or sent to Europe for football trials, then abandoned. Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, the president of the charity said:-
"One-month visas are easy to get with bribes in Africa, but after they fail their trials they stay on. They have nothing to go back to. These kids are as young as 14, they end up on the streets, worse off and in more danger than they could ever be at home." There is now a huge business to be made from football, says Mbvoumin, and it feeds on people's dreams of a better life for their family. "...vulnerable people are lured into a kind of debt slavery in the expectation of a better life. These brokers are getting $3,000 per child and offering to smuggle them out on the promise that they will sign for a big club. So many boys have gone missing in this way... "