As the most successful African team in World Cup history (after South Africa 2010), there’s no denying it, Ghana is a now great footballing nation.
Fans the world over cringed and writhed at just how unjust their elimination from the 2010 competition was – handball off the line in the last minute, followed by a missed penalty and then, utterly deflated, the team lost the penalty shoot-out Uruguay went through to the Semi- Final. Africa had been cheated.
The national team’s nickname, the Black Stars, is quite representative of the cosmic reverence their national heroes are regarded by. But for all the cult Muntari, Essien et al. command, there is an opportunity for manipulation, fraud and profit. Because for every Essien, there are innumerable young Ghanaians who crave to be an Essien, to have what he has, be what he is and represent what he represents.
As a result, football in Ghana is prime ground for scam-artists praying on hopes, dreams and expectations, and there exists an underbelly of fake football agents scouring the country. Unawareness and desperation tricks many young Ghanaians and their families into producing thousands of Ghana Cedis to pursue fake invitations, contracts and trials at clubs in Europe, Asia and other African countries.
To the players they target, the sweet-talking agent is their key to a glittering football career. With the power of grand false promises, non-existent ‘connections’, and fake contracts, many lives are being ruined by the silent epidemic in Ghana’s domestic game.
I first heard about the issue when I went to the country for my second visit with two friends last summer. This feature is based on work I did there with their help. By the third week, we had managed to publish articles from our research in the two most highly circulated newspapers in Ghana. However, we also discovered an impossible network of vested interests, unacknowledged responsibilities, and social circumstances which make the scam watertight, and unlikely to end anytime soon.
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I’m waiting in a stuffy internet cafe in central Accra for Dominic Baltisser, a former Under 20 Swiss International football player who is now a coach based in Ghana. Asamoah Gyan’s (aka Babyjet) smash hit song ‘African Girls’ is playing in the background, accompanied by the distant honks of the African traffic. We end up talking for almost four hours. He shows me the documents and emails of attempted scams. He explains his disillusionment with aspects of the all-powerful culture of football in Ghana.
“It starts with every football player who’s aiming to become professional. They are willing to do everything in their power to do that. Most are really naïve about their skill, they think it’s God’s will for them to be a professional footballer,” he begins.
“If you travel through Ghana there are two things you see at the centre of every single village – a church, and a football pitch,” he says, to illustrate the centrality of football in people’s lives.
Baltisser paints a scenario for me he says he’s heard about all too often. “A family has four or five kids and one seems to be quite good at football and gets encouraged. There’s no comparison other than he is the best they’ve seen. A scam-artist comes and his family wants him to go. For many places, the situation’s desperate, and the opportunity to become a rich footballer may not come again. So by any means they find the money and he goes on fake documents. And once he gets there, he can’t tell his family it’s a fake… He can’t return without money but he has to provide for his family and will do anything for it.”
But he also says players actively seek the deals with the false impression they can make it internationally. Knowledge of the correct procedures is so bad that “as long as my number was on the Cantonments FC website in Accra, I’d get 20-25 calls a day because they’d see that it was a football club where whites are involved and assume or hope there is a contract there abroad for them”. Amateur footballers also advertise themselves on websites.
There was a Chinese contract offered which Baltisser had prevented one of his players being tricked by from one-such advertisement. “To us this is obviously a fake but the boy hadn’t been taught to read. He wouldn’t even know what a couple $100,000 could possible mean yet he was going to sign the little money he has away”.
Although they normally come in the form of scouts on the edge of the pitch, email correspondences between fake agents and club directors show the methods used by the scam-artists. A lengthy exchange between a man by the name of ‘Bismark Grant’ and Mick Beard from UK-based Projects Abroad Football Agency was one of many examples. Grant demands a 500 Euro advance on the deal, without which, he is “virtually powerless [sic]”.
When Beard contacted the German club in question, they responded promptly that the invitation was a fake and they were not in contact with one ‘Bismark Grant’.
The deal was over. However, the fraudster would normally bypass the club and attempt to scam the player directly, many of whom are unaware of the correct methods.
Eighteen-year-old George Amankwah from the rural Volta Region of Ghana was only stopped from making an illegal trip to Sweden on false documents after his coach found the invitation given to him.
Amankwah told me, “through a recommendation from my friend, I was offered a trial at a club called AF Ulous. I told my coach that the deal was done and I was going. But when he found the documents he said it didn’t look legitimate. All the official letter-heads were there so I thought it was real.”
“I paid 200 Cedi [80 pounds] to get the letter itself and then 700 Cedi [315 pounds] for ‘other costs’. I worked any job to get the money. It was very painful, I don’t know what to do now. Maybe this was my only chance,” he said.
It turns out that the phone number on the ‘invitation’ and the phone number for AF Ulous didn’t even match. But people don’t necessarily realise that they are a target, or a letter could be so easy to forge on the computer. The man that scammed Amankwah was European. “Because you are Obruni [white], because white people aren’t usually at the pitches, their presence is enough to convince them [players] that they are real agents. Now I know about this I’m a lot more aware of it and others should be too.”
Nineteen year old Denis Ofori had just returned after a ill-fated trip to South Africa when I met him at his club in Accra. “Football is all I want to do and now I am back in Ghana, I am playing with my old team, Proud United.”
His own pride disallowed him from telling me the whole story, yet his disappointment was extremely evident and his words suggestive. “I brought my flight ticket myself, the agent sorted out the visa. He telephoned me, he was like, do you know your friend, he has told me a lot about you and said you were a good player. Are you willing to go to South Africa to pursue your career?…Sometimes in life one must take chances. Ghana’s youth all want to pursue his football career. They are paying a lot for their soccer. When this thing happens [an offer], it’s like ‘yeah fine, let me give it a try’. That’s where I want to be. You believe and hype yourself and then the next thing happens.”
I was distressed to hear when Ofori spoke of his family, who had backed him “in a serious way”. The dream of transfer to Europe within a six month time frame was shattered and the astronomical amounts involved will take years to recover.
And many don’t make it back home. An email I saw by Nazeer Bowud, Treasurer of the Mauritian FA says many end up in his country. “Unfortunately there are some wrong minded agents in Ghana who organize these types of trips for footballers to Mauritius and promise them to use Mauritius as a hub to transit in Europe”. Bowud also speaks of at least some Ghanaians being held in prison. Many more were probably stranded there illegally without means to return.
It was difficult to begin to estimate the effect and reach of these stories. With the support of national newspapers, we found it would also be difficult to estimate who was in a position to solve it. After various interviews, we discovered a blame game which ran around in circles: Clubs to the Ghana Football Association (GFA) to the player associations to the police and back again.
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Two men at the top of very different institutions. Both of them are well known pillars of power, but both of them have very different focuses on the same issue. One was sitting at the top of the GFA’s luxurious offices in Accra – Emmanuel Gyimah, Deputy General Secretary of the GFA. A five minute taxi ride away, Francis Baah, Detective Superintendent for Document and Visa Fraud plies his trade at Ghana’s monolithic police headquarters.
There’s a tentative working relationship between the police and the GFA. It seemed to me they were both suspicious of the other. GFA officials had been arrested in the recent past over an incident where members of a national Ghanaian team disappeared in Australia. They were meant to be competing in an international disabled football competition (it was revealed those that disappeared were completely able-bodied).
Baah was quite candid. Obviously the GFA has the power to get whichever documents they need but he expressed fair concern. “When it comes to football, I expect the GFA to rather be up and doing. They should be alert. If the football authority comes to the police we give them respect. We assume they will tell us the truth.” Although Baah said there was not much they could do except ensuring correct processes. Taking responsibility for footballing matters was the GFA’s.
But the GFA told me they would not take responsibility for rooting out ‘fake agents’ or educating players. They felt it was more complicated, and crime was “a civil issue” not a sporting one. Furthermore, Gymiah denied it was too serious, “I can’t say that we have heard much – we sometimes hear from the clubs. we always advise clubs to demand the right documents. Look on the internet to see if the agent is licensed. It is between the player and the club.”
Jacob Ashun, CEO of Comprehensive Sports Ghana which oversees the business side of a number of lower division teams told me he was disappointed by the GFA’s approach. He demanded of the GFA, “you are the mother association and you are telling me we should deal with the fraud. The GFA is supposed to be the supervising body. They have the power but they pretend they don’t know.” He alleged due to back-hand deals, it is not in the interests of personalities within the GFA to root out the dishonest practice. “We have a lot of people in the GFA who are not educated and they rely on the corruption aspect to survive. It becomes a problem to stop it. If you stop it, they can’t ‘chop’ [make money],” he said.
All the drama with Dominic Baltisser has resulted in him turning away from football. He arrived in Ghana originally with the game on his mind but now he’s looking to change tack. Concerning children, he says, “The longer I stayed in Ghana the more I realised that football wasn’t necessarily the cure but the cause of many of their problems. I’ve seen so many negative aspects and a major reason I figure is that children have nothing else to do.” Baltisser is now in the process of setting up centres and clubs for creativity in Ghana as an alternative option to football for young Ghanaians.