Source: The Conversation. By Suleman Lazarus, London School of Economics and Political Science
For a young man growing up in Ghana or Nigeria, few dreams burn brighter than becoming a professional footballer. Icons like Michael Essien (Ghana), Jay-Jay Okocha (Nigeria) and Nwankwo Kanu (Nigeria) didn’t just win trophies. They escaped poverty, provided for their families, and earned the respect of entire communities.
Football, in much of west Africa, isn’t just a sport. It is a promise.
This promise has led to an elaborate trafficking scheme that claims many young, African victims every year. Victims are lured with promises of football trials, academy placements or opportunities in Europe, only to end up in exploitative conditions in Nigeria. They may be confined, stripped of their documents, and forced to solicit money from relatives, while their devices are used in further fraud schemes run by traffickers.
I am a criminologist who has also researched the socio-cultural dynamics of online offending and victimisation for over a decade. In a recently published paper I examined how deceptive football recruitment can be a form of trafficking.
The paper focused on the case of 76 young Ghanaian footballers who were trafficked to Nigeria for fake trials in 2025 (before being rescued). I examined how digital tools, legal loopholes and emotional appeals were used to entrap the victims.
I concluded that this case was unlikely to be exceptional but part of a wider, emerging form of exploitation in which traffickers weaponise young people’s sporting ambitions through digital deception. That conclusion draws not from this case alone, but from a wider body of research showing how football ambitions can be channelled through exploitative recruitment networks, deceptive intermediaries, and precarious migration pathways.
The key argument is that football migration, cyber-enabled fraud, and human trafficking cannot be treated as separate domains of research. Treating them in isolation has harmful consequences, because this fragmentation creates the very blind spots traffickers exploit. I suggest that prevention requires coordinated regulation, athlete protection, digital monitoring, and stronger oversight from sport and regional bodies.
I also challenge the policy framework that treats sport aspiration and cybercrime in west Africa as separate domains. Read More.
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