By SULEMAN LAZARUS

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.

The 76 young Ghanaian men were trafficked to Nigeria under the guise of football trials and academy placements.

Recruiters used Facebook posts, WhatsApp messages and targeted digital ads to present themselves as legitimate scouts, complete with the language, branding and rituals of real sports agencies.

When the victims arrived, the reality was very different. Their phones and identity documents were confiscated. They were confined to overcrowded compounds and cut off from the outside world. They were then coerced into contacting their own relatives and fabricating stories about training fees and travel costs to extract money from families back home. Their phones – and the trust embedded in their contact lists – were turned into instruments of fraud.

Some were pressured to recruit their peers, turning the scheme into something resembling a coercive multi-level marketing operation. Eventually, authorities intervened and the victims were rescued.

But the damage – financial, psychological and social – had already been done.

To understand why this works, you have to understand what football means in this context. For young men with limited access to education or formal employment, football represents a socially sanctioned path out of precarity. Families invest emotionally and financially in these dreams. To be offered a trial with a club in another country is not just an opportunity. It is a validation of everything a family has hoped for.

Traffickers understand this intimately. They don’t need to drag victims across borders by force. They simply need to make an offer that feels too real, and too meaningful, to question. The coercion comes later, once victims are far from home, stripped of documents and dependent on their captors.

This is a shift from more familiar trafficking patterns. Unlike the well-documented trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation, this case involved young men trafficked between two African countries for what researchers call “forced criminality” – being made to commit fraud against their own communities.

Sport-enabled trafficking barely registers in anti-trafficking policy or academic research. Most frameworks still focus on sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and irregular migration to Europe.

Intra-African trafficking, particularly through digital deception and aspirational manipulation, remains largely invisible.

There is also a structural problem. In both Ghana and Nigeria, cybercrime enforcement and anti-trafficking responses operate in separate silos. But this case shows how those two worlds overlap: digital recruitment, physical confinement and coerced online fraud are all part of the same operation.

Treating them as distinct policy problems means traffickers can exploit the gaps between them.

Research shows that some Nigerian cybercriminals move to Ghana to expand and protect their operations. The free-movement protocols of the Economic Community of West African States, designed to promote regional integration, also play an inadvertent role. With minimal border checks between Ghana and Nigeria, traffickers can move victims across borders with ease and near impunity.

Policymakers have been cautious about linking football to trafficking, partly because football is widely seen as a source of hope, prestige and opportunity in many communities. But that reluctance is itself a vulnerability.

Firstly, Ghana and Nigeria must improve cross-border intelligence sharing and coordinate enforcement, specifically around sports-linked fraud.

Secondly, awareness campaigns need to reach not just young men, but their families – the people who unwittingly provide the emotional and financial fuel that traffickers exploit.

Thirdly, digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, which serve as the primary recruitment channels, must take more responsibility for flagging fraudulent sports content.

Fourth, broader institutional reforms are also necessary. Ecowas, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) and national sports ministries must strengthen agent licensing, regulate intermediaries more rigorously, and embed athlete-protection measures into football governance.

The 76 Ghanaians trafficked to Nigeria are not an anomaly. They are a warning. Where football dreams are powerful, they will be exploited, unless the systems around sport, migration and digital life are brought into alignment.

Football has lifted many young men out of poverty across west Africa. That possibility is worth protecting. But protecting it means being honest about how the dream itself can be turned against the dreamers. (The Conversation, but headline rejigged)

•Suleman Lazarus is a Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr Suleman Lazarus is affiliated with the Police Foundation. However, this article was written in an independent academic capacity and does not represent the views of the author’s institutional affiliation.

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