A senior British diplomat remarked the other day that, in the global contest for attention and investment, he could always count on a glamorous ally. “Football,” he said, “has become the UK’s Hollywood.” There were few corners of the world, he added, where conversation could not be lubricated by mention of the English Premier League (EPL), one of the most widely watched forms of entertainment on the planet, and a product over which broadcasters scrap fiercely.
Elite football, the upper end of a professional game where the leading players’ salaries can be more than $10 million (Dh36.7m) a year, has its heroes and villains, its gossipy subculture and even its lavish equivalent of the annual Oscars ceremony. It is Hollywood. But it has never inspired very good feature films.
What the diverse storylines around football's glamorous and sometimes brutally unforgiving industry do generate is some fine, big-screen documentaries. The Kicking and Screening festival, starting on Thursday at NYU Abu Dhabi, brings together some of the best of the past five years.
Each explores the transformative power of elite sport, its capacity to lift an individual from the constraints of his or her background, to change an institution. The rags-to-riches narrative is a favourite of Hollywood scriptwriters. The reality is usually more nuanced, as Suridh Hassan’s Soka Afrika, screening on Saturday, makes clear.
It is the story of two teenagers, one from provincial South Africa, the other from a working-class family in Cameroon. Both have talent as footballers, and ambition. You’ll not have heard of Ndomo Sado, the Cameroonian, but you may have heard of his compatriot, Samuel Eto’o, who for the past 15 years has been a football superstar and role model for millions of young Africans.
Sado was 15 when a man named “Mr Filbert” approached him in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, just after Sado had scored a dazzling goal in a junior match. Mr Filbert made vivid Sado’s dreams of becoming just like Eto’o, who played for Barcelona, Inter Milan and in the EPL, and once had the status of the best-paid professional footballer in the world. Naturally, Sado, gifted and apparently grounded and sensible, was open to Mr Filbert’s suggestions that that sort of career path was open to him.
So were Sado’s parents, even when it was put to them by Mr Filbert that it was necessary for Sado to fly to France to meet high-level coaches and recruiters. The cost of the plane ticket and the visa took up most of Sado’s parents’ spare resources. They sold a piece of land where they had hoped to build a house. Sado recalls: “Mr Filbert simply said, ‘What’s a little house in Cameroon compared with what you’ll be earning in a couple of years time?’”
In less than a couple of years, Sado found himself wandering the streets of Paris, without winter clothes, unclear where he would sleep, fearful of the police sweeping for illegal immigrants. He had become injured, not so seriously that he needed hospital, but badly enough that he could not play football at his best. Mr Filbert had vanished.
According to Jean Claude Mbvoumin, who heads the NGO Foot Solidaire, the number of minors abandoned in Europe is in the thousands. “When it doesn’t work out for them as junior footballers, they are cast aside,” says Mbvoumin, a former professional player who lobbies governments and football administrators about child trafficking.
Most are young enough to return home and go back to school. But part of the problem is persuading a young man nursing a broken dream to face the journey home, because the disappointment of family and community can seem crushing. Sado says he knew it would be “better to go back now, than send home my corpse”, but felt guilt about his failure. On returning to Yaounde, he was unwelcome in the family home. He was told: “We gambled everything on you.”
The obligation to be a long-term breadwinner for their family, and sometimes a whole community, is felt not only by aspiring young sportspeople but by millions of migrant labourers. The difference with football is that the line between failure and success can scarcely be disguised. Cameroonians need only turn on a TV to see if a compatriot is playing for a European club that weekend.
The Senegalese novelist, Fatou Diome, explored this in her best-seller, The Belly of the Atlantic. “When everybody knows our sportsmen, who restore our national pride, live and work in France, how can we dissuade young people from believing they should go and seek their triumphs there?” she writes. “But those brave players might also tell those at home that they spend most of their time sitting on the substitutes’ bench, so others can star.”
The ones on the bench count among the lucky few. The percentage of teenagers enrolled in football clubs as trainees who become professionals by their mid-20s is tiny. For those who travel to the wealthy centres of the sport in Europe, the probabilities are diminished by other obstacles, including obtaining work permits and making cultural adjustments. It is in these areas that the Mr Filberts, the agents on large commissions, make themselves seem invaluable.
Which is why, if you drive around West African cities, sooner or later you will see a signpost for a “soccer academy”. These places tap into the dream, tempting schoolboys and their parents with their promises of expert coaching and the “right” contacts in Europe. Some are legitimate; many are set up by charlatans.
And for the would-be brokers of the dream, there are always enough role-models to point to. Just over a year ago, many of the best young footballers in the world gathered in UAE for the Under-17 World Cup. There would barely be a teenager among them whose ambition is not to live and work in England, Spain, Germany, Italy or France, to be on TV each weekend before a live audience across more than 150 countries. A small number from the last Under-17 World Cup are already doing that.
Others have been living the dream for years – including Eto’o, who was once also hiding from police in France as a 14-year-old whose visa had expired, and Yaya Toure, the Ivorian who has helped turn Manchester City into a global heavyweight.
The story of Manchester City, of how a slightly ragged institution was made rich, how it pushed itself into the new Hollywood via a big idea hatched in the UAE, is also a story of how sport works in the modern era. For that, check out Stuart Sugg’s Blue Moon Rising, also screening on Thursday, to kick off the festival.
Ian Hawkey is a regular contributor to The National's Sport section. The Kicking and Sceening festival will be held at NYUAD's Saadiyat Campus Conference Centre, March 12-14. Details at nyuad.nyu.edu
