We're Launching Free 2 Play - The First Fact-Checking Platform Against Human Trafficking in Sport

After spending months investigating human trafficking in football, including fake agents, corrupt academies, and players scammed and abandoned around the world, we decided to do something about it.

For the last year, we’ve been covering human trafficking in football. Hundreds of players, mostly from Africa, but also from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle-East, are scammed and lured far away by corrupt agents and academies.

Don’t get it twisted, this is human trafficking, often of children. We’ve tracked it in Portugal, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, The Gambia, Cote d’Ivoire, Uzbekistan, Paraguay, Brazil, Cyprus, the USA, and beyond.

But we wanted to do more. Raising awareness wasn’t enough, most players, academies and clubs in Africa know this scam very well. So what did they need?

The problem is structural: When a vulnerable 17-year-old moves from an academy in West Africa to a low-tier club in Eastern Europe, no single governing body is going verify the legitimacy of the agent, the player’s age, the contract’s content, or the transfer’s actual financial flow.

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