The dark side of transfers

Even with only his workaday shoes and a scuffed football, Souleymane Oeudraogo exudes instinctive talent.

Close control skills, keepy-uppy, volleys on the spin: all are effortless. This spartan municipal training pitch in southwest Paris is his habitual terrain. But something is amiss.

Oeudraogo looks too gaunt to be a central defender. The 21-year-old is wearing only a gilet to stave off the piercing late-afternoon chill. He tells me it is his only jacket.

Two years ago he stood on the cusp of joining the Burkina Faso national team. He arrived in Paris eight weeks ago, after 24 months of moving between clubs and academies in Senegal, Portugal and Belgium.

He is one of thousands of young players hoping to catch a break this month. For January brings the absurd largesse of football's mid-season transfer window, when an estimated £150-million will be lavished by European clubs.

In the final week of the last summer window, Argentina's Angel di María joined Manchester United for £59.7-million, a British record. Colombian Radamel Falcao also moved to Old Trafford from Monaco on a£6-million a year loan.

Oeudraogo, however, belongs to a growing underclass for which the top European leagues are but a shimmering mirage. Enticed on false promises from West Africa, South America and parts of the Far East by unscrupulous agents, their transfers to Europe are less about chasing the dream than living through a nightmare. Oeudraogo has wound up in the French capital as a victim of football's version of human trafficking. He has no contract, no connections, and couch-surfs between apartments in the Paris projects.

He was still at school when an agent plucked him from an academy on the assurance of a fulfilling career in Portugal.

But his agent abandoned him in Portugal without a job or any formal documentation.

His best friend grew up two streets away from him in Burkina Faso's second city of Bobo-Dioulasso. He was lucky enough to be approached by a reputable football agent, and has become one of the highest-rated young talents at a top-four Premier League team. But Oeudraogo has found himself on a parallel track to perdition.

His circumstances are commonplace in football's lawless subculture.

In 2007, a dilapidated fishing trawler washed up on La Tejita beach in Tenerife, deserted by its skipper, leaving 130 dehydrated people on board, including 15 footballers, who had been duped into thinking they were en route to trials at Marseille or Real Madrid.

These boys' families are often blowing their life savings to pay the agents' fees for representing their sons. Sometimes, they are also charged for their sons' travel to Europe and living expenses.

When the agents, who tend to be European or Middle Eastern, actually deliver players to a club, they receive a commission. And if those players make it through trials and go on to make a footballing career, they frequently remain under the thumb of middlemen, who confiscate their earnings and their passports.

Jake Marsh, head of training and youth protection for the International Centre for Sport Security, a non-profit organisation set up to protect the integrity of sport, has heard estimates that there could be as many as 15000 trafficked players in Europe.

The vast majority of players in Oeudraogo's predicament remain silent, preferring not to risk retribution from those who brought them here, or to highlight the fact that they might be outstaying their visas. But Oeudraogo reached out to Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, a former Cameroon international.

Mbvoumin established the charity organisation, Foot Solidaire, 14 years ago, after he learned there were dozens of homeless footballers sleeping rough in the parks of Saint-Denis.

Today, that number is measured in the hundreds. Some are as young as 11.

The intensity of the quest for fresh recruits is such that some clubs knowingly take risks by bringing in underage players or by acquiring them via murky means.

"In Paris, there are a lot of young players like Souleymane," Mbvoumin says.

Oeudraogo's sense of alienation is palpable. He grew up in an impoverished homestead, where his elder brother, Ismael, "still tries to fend for himself".

Why not accept the thwarting of his dream and go back to Burkina Faso? "These kids are the ambassadors for their families," says Gilles Ratiarson, a financial adviser who works with Foot Solidaire to find proper trials for abandoned young players.

"They represent a livelihood, so heading back to Africa is perceived as a failure. They're ashamed of not having made it. They're ready to do anything. You see them at Sangatte, the asylum-seekers' refuge in Calais, trying to cross into the UK. You see them everywhere," says Ratiarson.

It is football's great unreported scandal. Earlier this month, the Santa Marta Group, a global assembly of law enforcement chiefs and religious leaders working to eradicate human trafficking, held its second conference in London. But it was not until Cardinal John Onaiyekan, Archbishop of Abuja, raised accounts of vulnerable players being prised from Nigerian academies on the spurious incentive of fame and fortune in Europe that most of the delegates were even aware of the practice.

"What struck me most at the conference was the extent and type of enticement and abuse of people that goes on in Africa," he says.

He says the Premier League is affected by the same problem. "There are schools for football excellence which promise youngsters careers in the Premier League, and then as soon as they get to England these children become trapped or are simply abandoned."

Marsh spent years as a private investigator looking into match-fixing allegations. He says he has never encountered a wall of silence like the one obstructing his inquiries into trafficking. "No one is tracking these people," he says.

He has made an appeal to the UN for cooperation.

Not that this deters Mbvoumin, who is defying his small budget by creating a "passport", a thick booklet tailored to academy students in Africa. "It illustrates what to do when they are approached by an agent, how to read a contract [and] how to understand whether the offer of a trial in Europe is real or not."

As he returns to Ratiarson's office from the freezing football pitch, Oeudraogo hears some rare good news. Ratiarson has a promising lead in Orléans, at their second-division club, where Souleymane may have hope of a trial. It's too early to say for sure, but it's something. Ratiarson also hands him a real winter jacket to put over his gilet. It is far too big for him, but it will keep him warm on the cold nights ahead.

• Some names and identifying details have been changed.