Barcelona’s illicit pursuit of teenagers reflects soccer’€™s globalization

The Mercedes rumbled along the untarred road of the New Bell district of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city. From the Parlement Café, where a group of adolescents had gathered, the car drew attention for its smartness. Winding down his window, the driver summoned one of the teenagers, and delivered a brusque instruction. “You have to fly to Madrid, now,” said the man in the Mercedes. “They’re waiting for you at the airport. I’ll let your mother know what’s happening. Pack a bag, you don’t need much, it’s warm over there.”

Thus began one of the most glittering soccer careers of the 21st century, a tale of against-the-odds achievement that continues to inspire thousands of teenagers from Africa. Samuel Eto’o was the boy from Douala summoned urgently that morning to a trial at Real Madrid, the most glamorous club in the world. Now 33, he smiles as he recalls disembarking at Madrid’s Barajas airport wearing a pair of shorts and a thin shirt. It was October, and he shivered in the European fall. When, after an hour, nobody had appeared to meet him, he realized that the club that had paid for his ticket had absent-mindedly forgotten to send a delegate.

Eto’o was 15 years old when he signed his first junior contract with Real, launching a career that has taken in four European Champions League gold medals with three different clubs, and league titles in Spain and Italy. It peaked during his five brilliant seasons with Barcelona, the club that now faces a year-long FIFA ban on transfer activity after being found to have violated international regulations on recruiting players under 18. Since Samuel Eto’o made his epic journey in the late 1990s, soccer’s world governing body has imposed higher age limits and conditions on transnational transfers of teenagers. And Barcelona is by far the most high-profile offender yet to be punished under the rules.

The club intends to appeal FIFA’s ruling that – in 10 cases over the past four years – non-Spanish nationals aged between 16 and 18 had been enrolled in Barca’s La Masia academy but have not met at least one of three criteria required for international transfers. The rules require that any player under 18 who moves to a European club from outside the EU must either: 

— have a parent who has moved to the same country for reasons independent of the child’s soccer career; 

— in instances where the teenager is an EU citizen moving to another EU country, be over 16; or

— be from a home located within 100 kilometers of the recruiting club.

Eto’o’s Madrid move would have violated those regulations, had they been in force at the time. So too would the transfer of Barcelona’s figurehead superstar Lionel Messi, who arrived at La Masia from Argentina as a 13-year-old in 2001.

The penalty applied to Barcelona, however, applies to far more than the recruitment of promising teenagers from abroad; the club is banned from recruiting players of any age over the next two transfer “windows” during which clubs are allowed to buy and sell players, including the traditionally busier June through August period. For an elite club, a freeze on squad-strengthening in pre-season is potentially devastating to its prospects of sustaining its place in the top tier. European football’s established hierarchies are being upended by the infusion of billions of dollars into the transfer market by wealthy new owners of clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Monaco, who are spending lavishly to rapidly elevate their clubs' status by signing the game’s top players.

At the same time, a number of key players in the Barcelona squad that has won the Champions League three times in the last eight years are set to leave, or retire. The club had been expected to replenish its ranks in the summer – it had already agreed, for instance, that the young goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen would join from Borussia Monchengladbach in June. The punishment handed down by FIFA would prevent the young German from replacing Victor Valdes, Barca’s current keeper who intends to leave, probably to join ambitious Monaco, when his current contract expires at the end of this season.

Similarly, Carles Puyol, the Barcelona captain, has announced his intention to quit, and to play on at a lower level because of chronic knee problems. The defensive vulnerabilities apparent during Puyol’s long absences through injury have highlighted the club’s urgent need for a new central defender, and the club was reportedly ready to spend in excess of $34 million to acquire such a player. According to sources within the Barcelona executive, an overall budget of close to $137 million had been earmarked for the most substantial squad overhaul in five years.

The character of the Barcelona academy, where young players finish their schooling while learning to play the game at the highest level, is also transforming. La Masia has become a shorthand for the kind of talent hothouse major soccer clubs envy, cultivating not only technical excellence but also instilling in young players Barcelona’s signature “tiki-taka” flowing pass-and-move game that prioritizes keeping possession of the ball. The club’s success has been founded on integrating a handful of top players bought from other clubs around a core of La Masia graduates who preserve the DNA of the Barca style.                              

It’s an approach that emphasizes skill and game intelligence over raw physical power, exemplified by the achievements of the diminutive Messi and the delicate Andres Iniesta, who at age 12 moved from the small Manchego village of Fuentealbilla to board at La Masia. The majority of their fellow students at the esteemed academy were from Catalonia, the independence-minded region of which Barcelona is the capital and Barcelona F.C. the cultural standard-bearer.

But La Masia has changed since the class of Messi and Iniesta, its dormitories no longer in the old farmhouse that gave the academy its name, but spread across the upper floors of a steel and glass building surrounded by practice pitches beyond the edge of the city. Today, La Masia’s boarders are from all over the world: Among those identified by FIFA as having been illegally recruited are Koreans, French and Dutch nationals, and a Cameroonian.

Barcelona’s recruitment of teenagers from all over the world is consistent with the trends of a rapidly globalizing game, in which all the leading European clubs – soccer’s global elite – scout players of school age from all six continents. Acquiring a player of the caliber of Messi or Iniesta as an established star in their prime could cost upward of $100 million today; producing one through an academy system would cost a fraction of that – and cultivating more stars than you could possibly need also generates massive long-term profits.

A further incentive to the sort of transnational recruiting that has put Barca in the spotlight is the rule that teams competing in the elite Champion’s League include at least eight “home-grown” players in their squad of 25. That rule, designed to limit the impact of rapid infusions of cash by billionaire owners, defined “home-grown” as any player, regardless of nationality, who had been trained by a club (or by a rival club in the same country) for at least three years between the ages of 15 and 21. The Korean and Cameroonian youngsters whose acquisition got Barca into trouble would have qualified as “homegrown” under those rules.

The regulations of which Barca have fallen afoul were introduced in 2009 to combat a rise in exploitation of minors, particularly from Africa and South America. But, as Arsene Wenger, the manager of Arsenal – the English club with a positive reputation for the scouting and schooling of young players from around the world – points out, the regulations are sufficiently vague to offer loopholes for top clubs. “You cannot move players before the age of 16 unless their parents move for ‘professional’ reasons,” said Wenger. “Of course that creates debate. Did the parents move for ‘professional’ reasons, or not?”

The Barcelona punishment has been interpreted by European clubs as a warning that FIFA intends to robustly enforce safeguards against the exploitation of vulnerable young men. The verdict against Barcelona has resonated in Africa, too. As one player agent, who represents a number of successful African professional players, told Al Jazeera: “The Fifa regulations ignore the reality of many cases, which is that by their early teens, some African players have become the major income-generators of a large extended family. That may seem like an unfair exploitation from a Western perspective, but it is a reality.” Regulations designed to protect them notwithstanding, there are tens of thousands of boys all over Africa and Latin America whose dream is to follow in the footsteps of the young Samuel Eto’o and Leonel Messi.