The Archive

Dermot Corrigan reviews a new film and its focus on young footballers chasing success and fortune in Europe

It is said that football can provide a route out of poverty, with FIFA often claiming that the game’s commercial revenues can “trickle down”. Soka Afrika, a new feature-length documentary which follows two young African players as they try to make it in European football, sets out to show another side to this story.

The film’s two subjects are well chosen. Ndomo Julien Sabo was playing youth football in Cameroon when a French agent persuaded his parents to mortgage the family home to “invest” in their son’s future. Brought to Paris, he trained in a clandestine network of camps around the city’s outskirts, playing trial games against other young imports.

When he got injured the agent disappeared, leaving 16-year-old Sabo completely alone and cold and hungry. He befriended fellow Africans sleeping rough and avoiding the police, and eventually managed to get back to Cameroon, but his parents were not overly happy to see him returning penniless. In Yaoundé he recovers his confidence and form, and returns to Europe better prepared for a professional career.

Ndomo’s story is cut with that of Kermit Erasmus, who was spotted by Feyenoord playing youth football in South Africa. This move went much more smoothly – at only 18 he is playing first-team games for satellite club Excelsior, showing off his fancy mobile phone to a former school-mate in a Port Elizabeth township and playing a football game on his big-screen TV in his nice apartment in Holland. He’s a cocky enough character but still likeable. We see him scoring three goals at the 2009 Under-20 World Cup in Egypt, but also struggling to make the step up with his club and the national senior team.

The film is stylishly put together by director Suridh Hassan and producers Simon Laub and Sam Potter, looking more like a relatively big-budget current affairs feature documentary than a typical fly-on-the-wall football film.

There are funky colourful credits and titles, an African drum-heavy soundtrack and edgy camerawork digitally filtered to bring out the greenness of Yaoundé and the greyness of Europe. The film-makers got great access, with the camera in the South African dressing room for pre-game team talks, on the touchline with openly unscrupulous agents at games in Cameroon and even with Sepp Blatter making a patronising contribution to a “Football for Hope” conference in South Africa.

The real star of the film is Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, a former Cameroon international who played club football in the 1990s in France before founding Paris-based NGO Culture Foot Solidaire. Mbvoumin describes the way promising young African players are brought to Europe as “child trafficking” and helps join the dots to make the film’s case.

Clubs and agents in both Europe and Africa, national football federations and under-age coaches, FIFA, even players and their families are all complicit in the system. Everyone involved knows the unwritten rules of the game. There is no surprise when Sabo is dropped from the Cameroon Under-20 squad as he cannot afford to pay the required bribe. “Corruption is everywhere,” Mbvoumin says. “I can’t say one country is more corrupt than others.” It would be better for everyone if African players stayed at home until they were ready – both in a footballing and personal sense – for the move to Europe he reckons.

Football for everyone in Soka Afrika is a means to get rich (or get by), not a goal in itself. Both Erasmus and Sabo really believe in the “rags to riches” possibilities. The film concentrates more on their concerns about making a living and building a career than training methods or tactics or trophies. We see a modern business structure feeding on the hopes of the resource and information poor. A few thrive and are successful, but many of those who make the big bucks are not the most deserving. The context could be any similar industry – perhaps fashion or music – where large numbers of talented young people with dreams are chewed up and spat out by the system.

Soka Afrika is produced by Masnomis and was screened in London during the Kicking & Screening Soccer Film Festival on September 23-29. For more information see sokaafrika.com

From WSC 296 October 201

Gavin Barber enjoyed seeing his son fulfil a childhood dream (for both of them)

Travelling on the Space Shuttle, appearing on Top of the Pops with my own synth band, playing for Ipswich: these were all ambitions that I had at various points during my childhood. Jimmy Savile heartlessly ignored requests to arrange the first two, and my lack of anything resembling football talent soon ruled out the latter. Which left me with one tantalisingly achievable alternative – to be the Ipswich mascot.

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The football world had a lot to say on the London riots. Paul Campbell believes not all of it was sensible

When the violence on the streets of north London began to spread across the country, it was inevitable that football would play a part in the discussion. Like most people, the football writer Ian Ridley watched the news and felt helpless. Unlike most people, however, Ridley thought that the game could somehow save the supposedly broken Britain.

“At times like these, you can feel helpless and peripheral in the sports pages, which always used to be known in newspapers as the toy department,” said a mournful Ridley in his Express column. “Maybe football can play its part in repair and healing, however. The thugs have won a battle. Let us hope they don’t, metaphorically, win the war… As the opium of the masses, it is far healthier than any liquid or substance. Or internet obsession.”

While Ridley bastardised the writings of Karl Marx, Henry Winter drew attention to the teachings of that other political heavyweight, Rio Ferdinand. Without sounding at all worried about the implications of his statement, Winter claimed that Ferdinand’s “voice certainly carries more resonance on inner-city streets than any politician’s”.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that those working in the football industry afford the game such importance. But it is a little concerning. Men who know a lot about kicking balls aren’t necessarily going to be great at constructing government policy, as Ian Holloway proved in the Independent. The Blackpool manager used his media platform to call for the rioters to stop smashing up shops and be more like Paul Scholes, “who went through his whole career without even a whiff of an off-the-field issue”. Holloway also pinned some blame on the media, arguing that “if the TV cameras weren’t there and we didn’t know about it I don’t think the rioting would have sparked up anywhere else”.

Holloway wasn’t the only football manager with an opinion. The Sun carried a double-page interview with a “sad, sickened and angry” Harry Redknapp, who blamed the riots on a breakdown in family values. “When I was 12 or 13, boys would meet their football manager dressed in a blazer or at least a pair of trousers. Now some of them turn up to see me wearing a pair of jeans with their arse hanging out. They just don’t care.” Stan Collymore called for help: “I want to know where the musicians, actors and rappers are at a time like this?”

With the great and the good of the football universe calling for action, it was left to a man still playing the game to offer some sense. David James, writing in the Observer, wondered how young people could relate to footballers at all: “While it is true that most of us have had a council estate upbringing, most now live away from those communities, enjoying a lifestyle that is light years from the kids we are talking about… Are people really going to listen to a millionaire footballer living in a plush mansion telling people who are struggling to make ends meet on a council estate to calm down?”

James went on to suggest that long-term engagement with a community would make more sense than taking a few seconds to type “Stop the violence” into a mobile phone. With this thought in mind it was heartening to see Peter Crouch and Benoît Assou-Ekotto involve themselves in the clean-up along Tottenham High Road. Football isn’t the opium of the masses and an involvement in the game doesn’t bring with it statesmanlike authority. But footballers, like everyone else, can help their communities most when they’re a part of them.

From WSC 296 October 2011

The struggle to become Asia’s top football executive has just begun, and it mirrors wider continental conflict, writes John Duerden 

Mohammed Bin Hammam’s global profile has certainly improved in recent months with fans and media outside Asia now familiar with the shiny pate and the goatee. Unfortunately for the Qatari this isn’t a consequence of becoming the president of FIFA. He is not even president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) any more after being banned from all football activities.

His crime? According to FIFA’s ethics committee, it is buying the votes of Caribbean Football Union members during the presidential election against Sepp Blatter, an act that earned him a temporary suspension on May 30, just two days before the vote was due to take place. According to supporters, it was having the audacity to challenge the slippery Swiss supremo at all. For the second time running, Blatter ran alone, while on July 23, the ethics committee turned Bin Hammam’s yellow card into a permanent red.

After nine years in charge of Asian football, the 62-year-old is not about to give up his seat at AFC House in Kuala Lumpur without a fight. Claiming that the committee is biased, he is to appeal the decision. That will take time but he has that on his side as the AFC agreed not to elect a new president until May 30, 2012, a year from his original suspension, at the earliest.

Labelled secretive and dictatorial in his running of the confederation, he did at least manage the football equivalent of running the trains on time and more besides. There is money pouring into the game from both outside and inside the continent, the Asian Champions League was introduced in 2003 and has prospered, his Vision Asia programme has helped some of the continent’s lesser lights, and standards have risen all over the continent, albeit inconsistently.

In Asia, progress is always going to be inconsistent. The sheer size of the continent and its population is both blessing and curse. It brings importance and growing influence but its cultural, religious and linguistic diversity makes it hard to govern. The divisions are strongest between the western and eastern sides of the continent. Bin Hammam did well to keep a lid on much and was fairly even-handed. Despite past battles, there would be no real problem in Seoul, Beijing or Tokyo if the Qatari was to continue in office. The issue is that nobody expects that to happen. The talk around Asia is that Bin Hammam is finished and now it is all about his successor.

East Asia’s big boys believe that it is time to bring the presidency back. South Korea, Japan and, to a lesser extent, China feel that the smaller nations, especially from the west, are much more concerned with political power for its own sake rather than genuine football development for Asia. Korea and Japan perform at World Cups, appear at FIFA Club World Cups and develop and send players to the big leagues but at the same time have seen their influence in the AFC diminish. Suspicions about the west are shared but what to do about it is a different question. The eastern bloc is rarely a bloc at all, unsurprising with the history between China, Japan and South Korea.

China’s Zhang Jilong is the acting president and a contender. Japan wants an East Asian president but not one who is Chinese. The Japanese grew tired of the AFC’s machinations but as improvements have come on the pitch, the country wants more influence off it. The popular head of the Japan FA, Junji Ogura, is too old to run. Korea’s Chung Mong-joon is the highest-profile figure in Asian football politics but the former FIFA vice-president has, as yet, given no indication that he has lost his traditional indifference to Asia.

The western side is much more likely to back a single candidate, though it remains to be seen who that is. Bahrain FA president Sheikh Salman ran Bin Hammam close in a May 2009 election for his seat on FIFA’s executive committee and is a possibility. UAE’s Yousuf Yaqoob Yousuf al-Serkal is another. There is room for a compromise candidate, probably from south-east Asia, and Malaysia’s Prince Abdullah Ibni Sultan Ahmad Shah could fit the bill. And Bin Hammam? As if we needed reminding, 2011 has shown that those in power hate to give it up but his campaign to clear his name is likely to be not much more than an interesting sideshow to the main event.

From WSC 296 October 2011

Saul Pope follows offical attempts to control rising racism in the Russian Premier League, which are proving ineffective and ill-targeted

The first phase of the Russian season has been a busy one but unfortunately most of the action has involved incidents in the crowd rather than excitement on the pitch. In 15 rounds fans have twice racially abused Anzhi Makhachkala’s Roberto Carlos with bananas, and other black players with monkey noises. Zenit, Spartak and Dinamo Moscow supporters have torn out seats, fought the police and thrown fireworks at several venues. There has also been tension between Moscow sides and the newly powerful teams from the Caucasus.

The problems are not new but they are on the increase. The most disappointing aspect has been the failure of the football authorities to find an adequate way of dealing with them. It is disappointing, yet to Russian football fans not surprising.

The Russian Football Union (RFU) regularly fines clubs whose fans have offended, but seems impotent when it comes to punishing individuals – and much less powerful than the clubs themselves. The identities of those who abused Roberto Carlos remain a mystery. Following the first incident at Zenit St Petersburg, RFU president Sergey Fursenko told the press it was “essential that Zenit seek out this perpetrator, prevent him from coming to matches, and give [us] his name and place of work”. He suggested this would teach like-minded people a lesson, but Zenit didn’t agree – the club claimed to have found and disciplined the racist, but wouldn’t reveal his name “for his own safety”.

An image of the fan who threw a banana at Roberto Carlos at Krilya Sovetov three months later was published just hours after the incident. Fursenko said he would be immediately brought to justice and the  Premier League’s security director said they would get his name. He is still at large.

Part of the problem is that current laws are outdated. A new “fans’ law”, which would make it possible to blacklist individual troublemakers, was first mentioned more than two years ago in WSC 265 and is supposed to be enacted later this season. Fan groups – who get the blame for much of the trouble at stadiums – are opposed, fearing the police would abuse any extra power they were given, and claiming they’re being made scapegoats for a general slide towards a more violent society.

The authorities are at least making a show of taking their concerns seriously, probably because they fear the worst. Led by intelligent but shadowy individuals with disaffected, nationalistic youths as footsoldiers, fan groups make up considerable parts of crowds and are capable of causing mass disorder as well as creating more articulate demonstrations. At the Russia v Armenia Euro 2012 qualifier held in St Petersburg in June, fan groups revealed a banner saying: “Before the law.” During the second half they emptied an entire stand, leaving behind a second slogan: “After the law.”

Of course, the fan groups may be resisting something that won’t work in any case: observing the law properly is a weakness of both law enforcers and citizens in modern Russia. Writing in Sport Express, Evgeny Dzichkovsky felt only draconian measures would truly overcome the problem: “If we don’t want fans to kick Russian football to the gutter, they need to live in fear of real punishments, not cardboard ones. Pavlov created an efficient mechanism for this a long time ago… So that the clubs don’t simply buy their way out of trouble and work seriously with their fans, they [the fans] need to be put into a situation where they are unable to act in any other way but one.”

Maybe efforts would be better put into tackling the root causes of the problems. While the talk is currently of punishment, few are asking why there are growing nationalistic and aggressive cabals at stadiums in the first place. Racists are usually criticised with the caveat that the whole world is battling with such problems, as if the monkey noises and the flying fruit are a regular part of matches everywhere. That such a famous player as Roberto Carlos was abused seems to have caused more upset than previous incidents among ordinary fans. However, regretful comments on Championat.ru were combined with banana jokes, moaning about political correctness gone mad and claims of Russians being victimised.

The first step to solving such problems might lie in Russia realising – at all levels of society – that their crowd problems are worse than in other European leagues of similar stature. The second would be trying to understand why. Expensive and long-winded it might prove to be, but it would bring about better results than even more cardboard laws.

From WSC 295 September 2011