THE trouble with Kolo Touré is that he is not only a role model and a hero in Ivory Coast, but he is the cause of a massive social problem, too. The trouble with Touré is that he represents the dream come true — wealth — and he is a perpetually televised example of it. And parents in his homeland who see this are making the decision: I’m not sending my boy to school, I’m sending him out to be a footballer instead.
In Abidjan, the economic capital, there are now some 300 football academies up and running. They call themselves “academies” or “schools”, but they give no education to their boys and have no facilities bar a stretch of bare earth. They survive by charging parents who cannot afford it but see it as an investment and they lie about their boys’ ages because if they unearth a gem, the younger he is, the more he sells for on the Continent.
This is economics made simple in a country with few other options. Only four years ago, Ivory Coast was a financial oasis, with cocoa, coffee and cotton industries that were the envy of West Africa. But civil war sent the remnants of the old French colonial class packing, killed tourism and trade and left almost nothing. But Touré’s trade never dried up and those 300 cowboy academies know the production line off which he came: welcome to the Académie ASEC MimoSifcom, by a considerable distance the best football factory in Africa.
In a nation losing a battle against poverty, this one academy is truly uplifting. Nestling on the beach on the Abidjan lagoon, its 50 students share nine classrooms, 15 teachers, 20 hours of classes a week, three proper meals a day, a doctor, a physio and the two best grass pitches in the country; they sleep on site so, unlike in many of their homes, they each have a bed of their own. An invitation here is an opportunity for a boy to change his life.
But the best introduction to the Académie is the African Super Cup final of 1999, ASEC Mimosas, of Abidjan, v Espérance, of Tunisia. The ASEC team were ageing and attracting interest from European buyers, so Roger Ouégnin, the president, decided to play their academy side instead. This controversial move attracted, in various African dialects, a torrent of Hansen-esque criticism chorusing: “You’ll never win anything with kids.” Slim Chiboub, Espérance’s president, called it a “scandal to be playing against children”.
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The ASEC academy, however, had been running since 1994, the brainchild of Philippe Troussier, a former ASEC coach, supported by Ouégnin and run by another Frenchman, Jean-Marc Guillou. By 1999, the first kids picked from the slums by Guillou had done five years, were 17 or 18 and it was believed that they and the ASEC social experiment were now ready to be put to the test.
It was in extra time that they passed it, winning 3-1. And from the team that day came Touré and six others who are now playing for the national side. The Ivory Coast squad preparing for the African Cup of Nations thus consists of two groups: those such as Didier Drogba, who were brought up in France, and those who are products of ASEC.
And the factory continues to churn them out. Of the 50 boys there at present, 24 are capped at various youth levels. Small wonder, then, that there are 300 imitations trying to do an ASEC on the cheap.
The copycat football trade appals Pascal Théault, the Académie director, who is a close friend of Arsène Wenger. “I go to the quartiers every week to look for players and every week I see boys with one shirt, no shoes. You have to look after these boys, a lot of them are thin, they haven’t eaten properly, they have had diseases. You have to teach them how to be clean, how to eat properly and how to listen to a coach.
“But foremost, you have to put them in school. Nine out of ten of our boys haven’t been to school since they were very young. Schools exist but their parents push them to play football instead. They hear about Kolo Touré, they have many children whose needs they cannot meet, so if they have one who can really play, they push them to play football and bring back the money.
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“This is the biggest problem in African football because you need a broader education to succeed. Wenger is very strong on this. Kolo, for example, wasn’t the best player when he was here, but he was a good student. You need to know how to behave and conduct yourself and to understand what coaches tell you. But we have five kids here who had never done a single day in school. When they came, they were afraid to speak, they didn’t even know their left from their right.”
Yet it is by no means only the desperate parents who are governed by money in all this. A couple of years after the African Super Cup coup, Guillou, realising the value of what he had created, moved to another academy in Abidjan and took all the players with him, promising them futures in Europe. This he duly provided: putting together a syndicate that bought a club in Belgium, Beveren, and then began importing his boys. Of the 26 players in the Beveren squad, four are Belgian, 18 are Ivorian. And when Théault came to Abidjan, 3½ years ago, the ASEC Académie was empty and he had to start recruiting from scratch.
Unsurprisingly, the Guillou-ASEC fallout went to court — in Abidjan, Luxembourg, Paris and London, where Beveren have close links with Arsenal. This was an argument over ownership, but Beveren continue to run their African import business. “The problem with Beveren,” Ouégnin said, “is they only wanted one thing: to get more and more players, to sell them and to make money from them that way. For our academy boys, the ASEC professional team is a step, but Europe is where they really want to go. If you had 100 African players and asked them to go to Europe, every one would go. If Théault said to the players now: ‘Come with me and we’ll go to France’, they’d all go.”
Producing and selling players, Théault acknowledges, is the reality at ASEC, but what infuriates him are the 300 cheap imitations across town that work with agents, shipping players to small European clubs, often lying about their age and promising an income to keep their family, too. “Very often, the money doesn’t get back home,” he said. “It often stops with the agent. And often the player will not then come back home because he feels shame that he has let his family down. Africa is a victim in this and Europe takes advantage.”
There is a right way, though, to make Africans into footballers and that is what we find at the ASEC Académie. And having seen what ASEC have achieved, some decent imitations have used their blueprint; Feyenoord, for instance, have an academy in Ghana, Patrick Vieira has launched his own in Senegal, Guillou closed down in Abidjan and is now up and running in Madagascar.
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This, surely, is the way forward for the continent. “People ask whether an African team could win the World Cup,” Théault said. “I tell them: ‘When we have more academies like this, then we will see it happen.’”