The Portuguese Academy and its Global Football Trafficking Network
Before being dismantled in 2023, the Bsports Academy in Portugal held trainings around the world, allowing it to find plenty of young players who were lied to, trafficked and extorted.
In June 2023, Portuguese authorities raided a prominent football academy, Bsports Academy, based near Porto. Over 100 young players from around the world would be rescued. The case was seen as one of the worst recent examples of the human trafficking crisis affecting modern football.
However, the tale is not complete. The Sports and Crime Briefing has tracked how, over several years, Bsports Academy set up an elaborate network of partners on four continents, organising training camps to find young victims and lure them to Portugal.
The Raid
On a humid June morning in 2023, a convoy of police vehicles made their way towards Riba d’Ave, a small town of 3,000 people northeast of Porto.
The group was led by officers from Portugal’s Judicial Police and the Immigration and Borders Service. Operation El Dourado was under way. Its target: the Bsports football academy, a training facility for young players in the country that had signed deals around the world.
The raid was weeks in the making.
Authorities had slowly gathered evidence, piecing together numerous accounts of exploitation and abuse behind the academy’s polished façade.
"I saw the light at the end of the tunnel,” said one of those rescued, Abdou, a 17-year-old from Guinea-Bissau. “I spent almost two years in this mess and I could not see an end to it.”
Abdou was one of 47 young people to be found at the Bsports Academy, including 36 minors, during that first raid.
The police found them in cramped conditions, sleeping in dormitories where the doors were often locked. In total, once investigations were over, more than 110 players were rescued from this operation. These players had come from over ten different countries.
How did they ensnare players?
The Bsports Academy model is a common one in football. Its agents or coaches would go around the world, finding eager young footballers living in difficult conditions, entice them to come to Portugal, and fleece them and their families every step of the way.
The modus operandi used to ensnare Abdou was typical.
At 14, he started playing under a Portuguese coach at an academy in his native Guinea-Bissau. The coach singled him out for praise, met Abdou’s family, and encouraged him to go to Portugal.
"I was full of enthusiasm, ready to give everything to work hard and make my family proud. Everyone contributed to paying for the plane ticket, but also for a sum which the coach asked us to pay to cover administrative costs for the visa. My parents took out a loan, and I found myself in northern Portugal in July 2021, when I was 15 years old," he told InfoMigrants.
When he arrived, he said he was one of about fifty boys from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Burkina Faso, but also from Colombia and Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and Peru.
Within weeks, the scam became evident. Abdou was pressured to pay more money, his passport was taken, and he was given little to eat.
They could rarely communicate within their families and, even when they could report the conditions they were facing, the boys had no access to their papers to leave. Training conditions were a joke, with coaches insulting the players, providing no guidance, and playing no real matches.
“It was more like a prison than anything else,” said Abdou.
Why did the players trust Bsports?
From the outside, Bsports had cultivated a strong reputation. It offered trials and training camp for young children around the world. The Sports and Crime Briefing found evidence of Bsports Academy finding partners on four continents and finding young talent there, including Mexico, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Guinea-Bissau, Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ghana.
It typically lured minors or young players from lower divisions in these countries for three-year contracts with BSports Academy.
The oldest camp Sports and Crime Briefing was able to find happened in 2019. That year, it held a prominent trial in Lebanon under the label of Bsports Academy Lebanon, complete with glossy videos posted on social media, with players speaking openly about their dream to go to Portugal. Whereas most of the other partners have gone dark or changed their names, BSports Academy Lebanon seems to be still in business, having kept the name but changed its logo since the raid happened. There is no evidence the local Lebanese coaches were involved or aware of the conditions in Portugal.
In early 2020, it held a training camp in Armenia for boys and girls, aged 9-16, through FC Pyunik Football Academy. It had previously organised at least three such camps in Kazakhstan, from which six athletes reportedly went to Portugal for a trial. The man behind these training camps in Kazakhstan was former Armenian pro footballer, Levon Ghasaboghlyan. Within months of the BSports Academy camp in Armenia, Ghasaboghlyan was dead of a heart attack in Kazakhstan. Sources in Armenia said this came as a shock as he had been in good health prior to this.
In 2020, at least five young Mexican players, from the northern state of Chihuahua, signed an agreement with BSports, after trials conducted through LEF Chihuahua. Manuel Cardoso, the cousin of Costa and director of the Academy, posted on Instagram about a series of training camps in Chihuahua. He is now facing charges of human trafficking.
Also in 2020, the BSports Academy opened its branch office in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a location in Kinshasa. Its Facebook page showed it was actively recruiting local players and promised them they would become professionals in Portugal.
Bsports also had a semi-permanent presence in the West African country of Ghana where, in July 2021, it signed an agreement with Seedorf Soccerlink Academy to help young Ghanaian players progress. This led to a new facility being built in the town of Dawa, with facilities for up to 1,000 players. On the Instagram page of Seedorf Soccerlink owner, Seedorf Asante, players and staff can be seen wearing Bsports-branded shirts at official matches from 2021 to 2023. A few weeks after the BSports raid, this equipment disappears to be replaced by their old kits from before the agreement.
As of June 2023, just before the raid, BSports was still actively recruiting players, especially from Latin America. It posted an interview with its “national director in Brazil”, Joao Vinhas, and was planning an initiative to hold trainings in Costa Rica, although the camp never seems to have happened.
However, these academies were not the only way to find players. Riaan de Araújo, a young player from Mozambique living in South Africa, was contacted by BSports on social media. A deal was soon reached and he flew off to Portugal for a three-year deal in December 2021. In June 2023, days before the raid, BSports posted a video to Instagram celebrating his birthday.
How did they get away with it?
At the center of the controversy surrounding the Bsports Academy was Mário Costa, a highly influential figure in Portuguese football at the time. Holding the esteemed position of President of the General Assembly of Liga Portugal, Costa was not just another cog in the machinery of Portuguese football. He was a leading figure within the league, wielding considerable power and influence over the sport in the country.
Despite numerous complaints dating back months, Costa’s presence provided the academy with a sort of protective barrier, enabling them to operate with minimal oversight. But eventually, the complaints grew too loud to ignore. According to a judicial police inspector, between 400 and 500 complaints were received in 2023, leading up to the raid.
Following the raid, Mário Costa resigned his position, a move that was seen by many as an admission of guilt, even though he continued to maintain his innocence.
Could Authorities Have Acted Sooner?
The flood of complaints received in 2023 triggered police action, but they had been coming in beforehand. Kelly Coiate, the cousin of Barcelona star Ansu Fati, left Bsports Academy in December 2022 after spending 14 months there, according to an interview he gave to Portuguese paper, A Bola.
After being recruited from an academy in Guinea-Bissau, he joined BSports in October 2021 at the age of 17. “They even told me that I would train at big clubs, like FC Porto and SC Braga,” said Coiate. He directly pointed the finger at Mario Costa. “He told me not to worry, that he was taking care of the paperwork so that I could go and train here or there, but as time went by that never happened.”
Coiate revealed even more details about the conditions there.
Underage kids cried because they couldn’t see their families, lessons were provided but only about nutrition and football-related topics, the athletes slept 10-12 to a room in bunk beds, and padlocks were placed on the doors. The older players were allowed to go to the supermarket but their bags were kept. Coiate eventually managed to get his passport back from the academy, but his story is one of several that were available to authorities before June 2023.
So what happened next?
Condemnation was swift. The case was “unacceptable, shocking, and reprehensible,” according to João Paulo Correia, Portugal’s secretary of state for youth and sports. He pledged that more oversight, including a radar to identify such cases early. But plenty of alerts existed already.
Following the Bsports scandal, the Portuguese players’ association, the SJPF, put out a report detailing the state of human trafficking in football since 2015. The Immigration and Borders Service said they had identified at least 250 players who had fallen victim to such schemes between 2017 and 2022.
Portugal is a veritable dumping ground for players, the paradise of unscrupulous agents and recruiters, as well as criminal networks linked to human trafficking, who bet on local clubs with little visibility, which lend themselves to being ‘surrogates’, like a talent laboratory to test the footballing qualities of the young people they recruit,” Joaquim Evangelista, president of the SJPF, told FIFPRO.