How Nigerian players fall prey to dubious agents

[Punch]

NFF President, Aminu Maigari and FIFA President, Sepp Blatter

| credits: File copyYoung Nigerian players have fallen victims to dubious agents in their desperation to play football abroad, writes KAZEEM BUSARI in this special report

Like many Nigerians seeking greener pastures abroad, Elvis found his way to Johannesburg, South Africa, looking forward to playing professional football in the Rainbow nation or, better still, find a players' agent that could take him to Europe. He had beautiful dreams about his future and had relations waiting for him back home in Nigeria hoping to see him play for big clubs. That never happened.

Back in 2007, when he was in Nigeria, Elvis had contacted his friend who lived in Johannesburg on the possibility of playing in South Africa. The friend convinced him to come over and thus began his nightmare in the land of Madiba.

"My family sold everything to see that I came down to South Africa to play football. I had nothing doing after I left secondary school in Port Harcourt in 2005 but I was able to convince my mother and my uncle that I wanted to play football," Elvis, a native of Imo State, said on a cold afternoon in Johannesburg.

It turned out that the club Elvis got was an amateur football team in Kempton Park, Johannesburg . During his interaction with his unnamed friend, a Nigerian football agent was mentioned. The agent promised to take him to one of the big clubs in the South African Premier Soccer League but that he had to join an amateur side before the transfer could happen.

"And that was it," Elvis said. "I paid him some money for the deal but he never got back to me.

"I was squatting with that my friend during that time and we tried several times to locate the agent, but we couldn't. Initially, he would visit me, promising that the transfer would soon take place, but later he completely disappeared."

Frustrated, Elvis left the club to start trading on the streets to make ends meet. As at May, 2011, he had about eight pieces of women's artificial hair extension displayed before him at the intersection between West Street and Park Street in Kempton Park.

That was all he had to sell.

"I can't go back to Nigeria because I don't have the money, and it would be a disappointment to return empty-handed," he said.

Elvis case is just one of many. Some other victims of similar situation would say Elvis was even lucky he got to fly abroad and had a place to stay. Some of these victims had worse experiences.

There abound several ugly tales of Nigerian players who were stranded abroad in their quest to join a club outside Nigeria. Interestingly, some of these incidents take place in Nigeria.

Madu Nobei, a 27-year-old footballer living in Mushin, Lagos, got the offer from the manager of DAFA Football Academy to play in Europe in 2002 and he wasted no time in jumping at it. He had played in the team for two years with the hope of getting an opportunity to move to Europe. The catch, however, was that he had to cough up about N400, 000 to facilitate the movement.

He was not the only one that was interested in the offer. His teammates, numbering about 45, caught the bait and cried to their parents to make the money available.

Madu was just a naïve 17-year-old who had displayed impressive skills in football. His parents had no choice but to provide the money in order to give the lad a promising future. Unknown to them, the operator of the academy, one Akeem Fagbayi, had other plans.

The players were taken to a makeshift football camp on the outskirt of Badagry in Lagos while their parents were told they were in Europe.

"We were constantly told that some foreign scouts would come to take us to Europe but that never happened. We were in the camp for close to three months, training and hoping to impress the expected scouts," Nobei said.

"I don't know if it was hypnotism or sheer determination, but it never occurred to us (the players) that we were more like slaves in the camp. There was just a sleeping quarter and we had to clear the bushes to make room for the playing pitch."

Madu and the other players were later 'rescued' by the Oodu'a Peoples Congress vigilance group in Mushin, who acted on a tipoff that the players might have been hypnotised and defrauded.

Akinde Samuel is the coach of SATECH Football Club, a grass-roots club also based in Mushin . Despite his knowledge of the game and the rules governing it, he was unable to stop some of his players falling victim to the dubious activities of fake football agents.

An agent from Benin Republic had approached some players in his club in November, 2011 to tell them about a competition in Cote d'Ivoire. He ended up defrauding them of thousands of naira in the process of taking them across the Seme border.

One of the players, Tayo Saheed, said, "The man told us he was an agent and a scout, and said so many other things to convince us that he was genuine. We believed him and we travelled with him to Cotonou but on getting to the hotel where we planned to spend the night before heading for Cote d'Ivoire, we discovered that the agent had somehow left us while in transit."

Unfortunately for the players, the agent, who said his name was John, had taken all the cash they had in the guise of securing transit passes for them at the border.

"We were stranded in Cotonou, only to be helped by passers-by who gave us money that took us to the Nigerian border," Saheed recalled.

Samuel said it was not the first time such would happen to players in his club. He said the fake agents would always come back as long as there were desperate footballers, hoping to play in Europe .

"A couple of years back, a man came to tell players of our neighbouring team that they would not need to pay for tickets to fly abroad. He said they were only going to pay for accommodation and visas, which totalled about N30,000 per player," Samuel said.

It sounded unbelievable to the players. The man collected the money from about 38 of them and took them to Kaduna. He lodged them at a cheap hotel and asked one of them to follow him to get food for the rest. That was the last time they saw him; the player that followed him returned, saying the man deliberately lost him in the maze of Kaduna streets while on separate commercial motorcycles. He made away with over one million naira.

A FIFA-licensed agent based in South Africa, Mohammed Lawal, said he had had to rescue some Nigerian players who were still in the age bracket for his football academy. He revealed that the operations of fake agents had threatened the work of the genuine ones, causing mistrust between players' parents and the agents.

"I've lost count of how many cases I've come across in South Africa alone. The situation is embarrassing because the majority of these victims are Nigerians," the owner of Future of Africa Football Academy said from his base in Johannesburg.

"Unfortunately, there is nothing the genuine agents can do about the problem. The solution is left for the various FAs and the players. There's no way we can know what is going on."

A FIFA report released in March revealed that Nigerian players moved the most within Africa in 2011. The report showed that 13 per cent of the global transfers in the same year involved Brazilians. The statistics was computed using the FIFA Transfer Matching System, which was made compulsory for all football associations in 2010.

According to FIFA, over $3 billion was spent in 2011 on international football transfers worldwide, with over 11,500 moves registered on its Transfer Matching System between January 1 and December 31, 2011.

It is also on FIFA's record that the largest percentage of Africans playing in Belgium and the Netherlands are Nigerians.

As rightly pointed out by a former Technical Director of the Nigeria Football Association, Kashimawo Laloko, a larger number of transfers involving Nigerians had taken place and not registered on the TMS.

Laloko, who is the Director of Pepsi Football Academy in Ogun State, has seen some of his wards move to various clubs in Nigeria and Europe without his permission.

"Until the football authorities criminalise such activities, we'll continue to have the fake agents around," Laloko said.

"The Pepsi academy has been a victim of fake agents for so long. We produce good footballers but when it is time to cash in on them by getting them a reasonable club, they simply disappear only to be heard of in some clubs in Europe.

"Most times, the players' parents allow this to happen after being convinced by these so-called agents."

The NFF on its part is faced with the dilemma of identifying who the fake agents are and how they can successfully register for another club.

A registered player moving from Nigeria to any other country would need the International Transfer Certificate, only issued by the NFF. But the players and the agents devise means to bypass this check.

What a registered player with the NFF needs to do is change his name and age and obtain new travel documents. He goes to a new country as a minor – below the age of 18. With the new information, he is not compelled to produce the International Transfer Certificate; instead he seeks citizenship or asylum in the new country before joining a club.

The NFF admitted it received numerous reports of such activities but found it difficult to address the issue because the characters involved were not known.

NFF Legal Officer, Okey Obi, said the players involved in the clandestine transactions made it difficult to address the issue.

He said, "Sometimes when the cases are reported, the players would not know the names of the agents. They would refer to them as Coachie or Manager or some other nicknames that cannot be used for legal purposes.

"These players become desperate to play abroad and escape poverty and eventually fall into the wrong hands. Inasmuch as they want to better their lives, they should make efforts to check up the names of the agents on FIFA website before dealing with them. All the agents are registered on FIFA website through the football associations."

As players get poorly remunerated in the Nigeria Premier League, even as they seek better living condition, it is unlikely that the operations of fake players' agents will abate soon.

Nigerian players are already shifting focus on Asian countries where they get paid a few thousand dollars a month for their services.



The Punch