Summary: Born from the misguided dreams of being the next Didier Drogba or Yaya Toure and the failure of international institutions in concert with the commoditization of African footballers and abject poverty, an alarming and increasing number of victims of the human trafficking trade has abandoned thousands on the meanest streets of Europe and Asia, begging questions of our governmental and sporting organizations who seem powerless to combat the flow of misery. It is a tragedy with no firm numbers, but the tragedy is real and joining us for an important episode on the escalation of displaced African men, herded like cattle along with other victims of a trade that amounts to modern day slavery, is photojournalist Jason Andrew whose most recent work - Black Diamonds - is the cover story of Leica Fotografie International. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, FT Weekend Magazine, and The New Yorker, and Jason was also a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2012, focusing on just one part of the world in Istanbul, Turkey where he has chronicled a three year descent into a visceral study into the despair and tragedy that has become life for increasing numbers of Western African footballers sold on the promise of riches and celebrity. For nearly a decade, Istanbul has become a dumping ground for athletes left abandoned after promised contracts with Turkish clubs failed to materialize, stranding many of them in a cycle of poverty and unemployment, a story that touches all corners of the sporting, law enforcement and immigration landscapes. Some would argue that this is not a football problem alone - and they would be right in pointing out that the aftermath lands in the immigration arena - but after decades in which unlicensed agents have been allowed to operate in loose association with football clubs and no institutional complementarity between the work of the European Union on human rights and the work of the Council of Europe, sporting institutions have been able to reap huge windfalls from the depressed economies found all over the African continent. Effectively, the clubs and the players agents have placed themselves conveniently in that all important central position where they alone can make lucrative deals for African talent and, in some cases, when an agent represents both the club and the player it has historically allowed the agents to accrue revenues from both sides. We examine some contradictions and also the huge blind spot of the FIFA Transfer Matching System, the perfect storm that lies ahead as women athletes seem poised to be the next commodity as football traffickers also link into global sex trafficking and what life looks like for the abandoned as the years begin to pile on. The answers to trafficking offer more blanks than answers, but ignore it any further is to claim ignorance in the face of what appears to be the biggest ticking timebomb in the sport today. Thousands will soon become millions displaced and it is the biggest and worse kept secret, where literally the human toll has spilled all over Europe, the Middle East and Asia with NGOs and even the United Nations left undermanned to combat this heinous practice.
