[ Chemical engineering to football ]

Initially, I wanted to be a forensic detective but during my A-levels, I was looking into work experience that involved going to a morgue and realized I was probably too squeamish for that! So, I started looking at other careers - I was good at maths and chemistry, so I applied to universities for chemical engineering. I really enjoyed my studies and started working as an engineer when I graduated. I enjoyed it but there was always part of me that didn’t think that was my ‘calling’.

Then through a friend of mine, I met some Ghanaian international footballers socially. After spending some time around them, we realized that there was a bit missing - of course they were really good on the pitch - but there were lots of things off the pitch that they, and footballers like them, still needed help with. So we decided to set up a small PR company.

It was Michael Essien and Stephen Appiah. They were really good players - Michael was playing for Chelsea and Stephen, he was at Fenerbahçe after Juventus and was also the captain of the Black Stars, Ghana’s national team - so they were a big deal and received a lot of respect. They were both such amazing guys. We worked on a lot of community projects which incorporated health and education. We also organized football matches where communities competed against each other.

I started to really enjoy it! I liked working with young players and trying to guide them and educate them.

[ Becoming an agent ]

Back in the UK after one of my trips to Ghana, I contacted the FA and started the process to qualify as an agent. In 2010, I passed the exam and started working as a football agent. It was a roller coaster, I was coming into an industry that I didn’t really know much about and just like everything, theory is so different from practicality.

I had some good experiences and some bad ones. In 2015, FIFA decided they were going to scrap the exam for agents and we became ‘intermediaries’ - so instead of an exam, you just had to be able to afford the yearly payments and prove you were a ‘person of good character’ - like a background check - I think this worked better in some countries than others…

I remember the late Mel Stein - he was Paul Gascoigne’s agent and a mentor to me - he was more or less the head of agents in the UK at the time. He really fought against this change but it still went ahead.

Of course, they’ve brought it (the exam) back now!

So that’s how I got into it, but as I mentioned, it wasn’t all easy. As an agent, you’re approached by tons of players who say, ‘Madam, I’m a really good player, can you help me?’ And due to my lack of experience, I just kept saying ‘yeah, come on, I can help you!’ Then you end up with a lot of average or below average players that you can’t do anything with!

It comes with the territory but you often end up having to help these players or their parents financially - maybe they’re dealing with eviction, or hospital bills or school fees, etc. I found myself dipping into my own pocket trying to help them all - all while I hadn’t made anything from any of the players.

Anyway, I had a bad experience around 2014 or 2015 with a player I’d invested a lot in - financially, emotionally, physically. He was injured when I started working with him, no one else was interested in him because agents want to make money - it is what it is - and it’s hard to make money with an injured player. Of course, I want to make money too but I’m a humanitarian as well, I believe people should be treated right.

I was told that he was a really good player and that he had a bright future - I thought, okay, I’m going to support him. I could see, mentally he was struggling because he’d been out of the game for a while - he’d been injured for a long time and wasn’t sure if or when he would play again. Still, I worked with him and supported him.

A really long story short, after 3 years of nursing his injury, we managed to get him back on the pitch and, through a sub agent, get him his first deal outside his home country. He came to Europe and his attitude changed, he started “misbehaving”! He was doing well on the pitch and other agents got in his ear and he told me he wanted to work on his own. Of course, I knew he had other agents after him. It’s very common, especially with African players. In my current role in the legal side of the game, I have experienced grown men crying on the phone because they have invested in and trusted young players, only for the player to excel and leave them behind.

As a player, you don’t have to switch agents every time a new agent brings you an opportunity, you can just connect the two agents! I don’t think players understand this. At the time, I was studying law, working full time as an engineer and as an agent - after this experience, I decided to leave the agency side of things for a while.

[ Transition to law and advocacy for players ]

I was studying law and my mindset was already changing, I'd read a few contracts and knew I needed to understand a bit more about the legal side of things. I obtained my LLB in 2017 (first class :) ) and went into sports law and started focusing a lot more on trying to help players and clubs.

There are a lot of clubs in Africa that transfer players to European clubs and never get paid or they often don’t know what their rights to training compensation or solidarity contributions are. There are players who end up in clubs where they don't get paid their salaries.

So I started working on a lot of cases like that. In late 2019, someone introduced me to an academy in Nigeria that needed the support of a sports lawyer. I stepped up and within a short period of time realized they had a lot of really talented players. When I mentioned that I used to be an agent, they asked me to come back and work with them as an intermediary, which I gladly accepted.

[ One of the big topics you work on is debt recovery for clubs and players - what exactly does this mean and how can you help? ]

The main problem with clubs is when they transfer players, especially abroad - i.e. an African club transferring a player to Europe - they may have a contract in place that isn’t watertight, or they might have no contract at all. Lots of things are done by word of mouth - things like the (buying) club saying ‘don’t worry, let’s see how he (the player) gets on, we’ll definitely look after you’. Then, they just cut off communications with the club in Africa - it’s very cutthroat.

Sometimes, the buying club just defaults on the payments and the selling club doesn’t know what to do. A lot of clubs can’t afford to hire lawyers to fight for the money that is owed and just leave it.

On the player side, it’s similar. Recently, a player contacted me, he hadn’t received his sign-on fee - he’d been at the club for 7 months! I contacted the club and they said that they were ‘waiting for the president to sign off on it’. These are the kinds of things we see all the time. According to FIFA regulations, if a club owes a player for more than 2 months, they can break out of their contract. But it’s not always as simple as that.

I worked with a player at a big club in Africa, he was supposed to be paid $5,000 per month and everything sounded really good. When he contacted me, he’d only been paid once in 6 months - by the end, he was owed 13 months’ salary (!). We looked at his options and if I had broken him out of his contract in the middle of the season, there would have been nowhere to go. He was a solid player in his national team and I didn't want a situation where he'd end up sitting at home for 2-3 months, become rusty, maybe lose his place in the national team because he’s not in a club, etc.

You have to be smart in these situations. The club was providing him accommodation and food, so he had the very basic stuff - of course, he was still in a bad financial situation but in the grand scheme of things he had what he needed to keep moving. A couple of months later, another big club in Africa showed interest in him, they were ready to sign him and then I broke him out of his contract using article 14bis of the FIFA Regulation on the Status and Transfer of Players and he was able to move to this new club and sign a contract there.

You can take the club to the FIFA Tribunal and collect the money. This club (in the previous example), when we eventually threatened to go to FIFA, they said, ‘oh no! Don’t go to FIFA, let’s come to an agreement’. They owed 13 months but in the end, they agreed to about 8 months worth of salary. It depends on the situation but sometimes I do advise players to just take it, cut their losses and make a fresh start at their new club. I’ve seen a few times where players have decided to go to FIFA and get all the money they are owed and the club has gone bankrupt and they’ve ended up with nothing.

When I first started, a case at FIFA could take 2-3 years, now the turnaround is much faster, usually around 3 months. When you go to FIFA, you have to first contact the club and put them on notice - then they have 15 days to rectify the breach. There’s an admin process and you have to submit evidence and share your side of the story. A lot of times at that point the club will call you and negotiate or even give you the money. But they can also argue it! I’ve had cases where fake contracts and stuff like that have been submitted.

[ I’d imagine that if a player isn’t getting paid, they’re usually not the only one at that club in this situation? ]

I've had cases where a couple of players who haven't been paid, will come to me and I’ll work on the case for two players at the same time.

I’ve heard of a few issues where players have told me that the foreign players are treated very differently. Situations where they say, the homegrown players are being paid on time but the foreign players haven’t received their salary in months - or ever. I have been instructed by a few Nigerian and Ghanaian players in India and Bangladesh in these situations.

I remember an African player contacting me for assistance, and when I asked where he was, he stated that he was in Iraq! Wherever the opportunities are, players are taking them and the thing is, playing in Iraq, will pay you more than many leagues in Africa. That said, some of the leagues that claim to pay well, end up being the ones that owe their players and don’t pay salaries on time!

[ You’ve created lots of educational content about fake agents and the human trafficking of footballers - how common are these scams and how do they work? ]

When I even say ‘fake agent’, sometimes I feel like I'm doing an injustice to agents, because a lot of these people are not actually “agents” at all… they are just scammers and criminals. They are individuals with no intentions at all of finding a club for the player - they're just criminals. They go online, especially on social media, knowing that a lot of the players are very vulnerable and they exploit their situations. Even if you have a look at my LinkedIn articles, when I post things, you’ll see players just place their profile on there, introduce themselves and ask for help. Straight away a criminal minded person can see they are desperate to get out and identify them as a target. It’s much worse on Facebook and Instagram where you get a lot of these, ‘fake agents’.

I have a meeting planned with somebody at CAF to try and understand how big the problem is. I think they've started something on the human trafficking side as well. When I was in Ghana, I received quite a few calls from distraught players who had basically just given money away to ‘agents’ who turned out to be scammers.

It seems obvious to someone with my experience and my education but a lot of these players are very young and don’t have this knowledge. You have players playing Sunday football in a local park in their country being approached by these individuals and told that Chelsea is interested in signing them, and they fall for it. Maybe in the future, but right now, that’s not a possibility - on the work permit front alone it’s impossible!

There’s a common online scam, which I outlined in one of my YouTube videos, where the scammer massages your ego, tells you how good you are and makes all these promises. Then they ask you to forward money for your visa and travel insurance. Usually, they use Western Union or MoneyGram accounts and things like that because it’s harder to trace.

I’m meeting players who’ve borrowed money to pay a fake agent all the time. I started a project to help players who’ve been the victim of these scams and help them to start new lives. For example, I’ve helped a player start a rabbit farm in Ghana, and another one started raising goats and sheep. Unfortunately, it’s much more capital intensive than I initially realized and I haven’t been able to do as much as I’d like. Probably I’d have to set up a charity and find sponsors and donations - and find the time - to package everything properly.

I’ve made lots of educational content and set up the STAR project - STAR stands for stop, think, ask, react. This is something a lot of players don’t do! As soon as someone tells them something, they just believe it. I’ve asked players before, why did you believe this guy - and they said, ‘because he was white’. So there's clearly a mindset shift that needs to be worked on as well.

[ Has FIFA licensing for agents improved this? I see on LinkedIn, lots of agents include their registration numbers in their profiles… ]

You can look up all the registered agents. That’s the whole point - if someone contacts you and tells you they’re an agent, you should be able to go and have a look.

All agents licensed by FIFA are given an ID card and this is something that new agents are posting on LinkedIn. I can understand the excitement, but it’s not a good idea. I posted an article about this. By putting it on LinkedIn, criminals can copy it and show this to young players and pass themselves off as an agent. I tell agents that they don’t need to post it online! It’s something you’re meant to show to the player - like when you show your passport at immigration, it’s not something for social media. But, I guess to be fair - the exam is tough and they’re probably just proud that they’ve passed the exam and want to show off a bit without really thinking about what could happen.

That’s the flip side of having all the names on the FIFA website too. If you’re not very visible (as in if people don’t know what you look like), anyone can use your name and ID and claim to be you. Players have sent me invitation letters they’ve received from “Chelsea”, “LA Galaxy”, “Bursaspor”, “Manchester United” and others on fake letterheads from an ”agent” who is supposedly licensed and listed on the FIFA website - but in reality, it’s not that agent at all, and they have nothing to do with it. I saw one letter that was so fake, it said Manchester United, but it said “Old Trafford, London”. Clearly fake, but a young player might not catch this or know the difference, for lots of people in Africa (who have obviously never been to the UK), London is the UK.

[ It seems an exceptionally difficult problem to solve - is education the only way to prevent this or are/can other things be done in addition? ]

I think education is very important - for the players and their parents, and even some of the academies because in some cases they act as parents for these kids too. A lot of the player’s parents are illiterate and they more or less give parental consent to these academies, so they must be educated on this as well.

Another interesting thing is that a lot of countries are tightening up their immigration processes for footballers too which helps. It obviously depends on which country, as some are stricter than others, but I know a lot of them are now asking for “introduction letters”. In Ghana and Nigeria - the two countries I work in - we have been asked for an introduction letter from the football federation as part of the visa application process. This means that basically, the Nigerian Football Federation or Ghana Football Association is introducing or ‘vouching for’ a player, saying they know who the player is and that he is a bonafide Association football player.

A Ghanaian player contacted me some time back for some advice. He presented me with what I believed was a fake trial letter. I advised him not to take the ‘opportunity’ but he insisted on trying anyway. However, the Ghanaian FA refused to give him an introduction letter because they also saw that the letter didn’t look genuine. Without the introduction letter from the FA, he wasn’t able to apply for the visa.

There are some countries, like Finland, that don’t allow trials at all and will only grant a football player a resident permit if they have a contract. This means the club has to come to your home country and check you out there, make sure it’s a fit and if they’re happy, give you a contract.

It’s different in every country and probably if you’re looking at a transfer to Azerbaijan, it’s not as watertight but the European countries are more organized and you hear of players getting their visas refused all the time because there's just not enough evidence that it’s a genuine opportunity.

[ What makes you most excited about the future of African football? ]

There's a hell of a lot of talent in Africa. Every time I speak to clubs in Europe, you can tell the interest in African players just grows all the time. I think as we develop better academies in Africa - like Right to Dream in Ghana - the potential will only grow.

It’s very exciting because it can only improve. I think when I first came into the industry, there was a lack of understanding of what was required. Now more people are coming from Europe and abroad, with more focus on coaching education and developing elite players. But it will still take a lot of work. I really respect the likes of Tom Vernon (the founder of Right to Dream) a lot because when I first went to Ghana in 2006, I was already hearing about him, back then he was just doing his thing quietly. Now people see him and say, ‘I want to set up something like Tom Vernon’ - but after a few years, they give up. They don’t realize how much work and sacrifice has gone into it.