Out of Africa

Looking for your next great soccer read? Pick up a copy of Sebastian Abbot’s The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars (W. W. Norton & Company; March 2018). Whether you’re a player, fan, or just interested in the elusive science of talent scouting at the sport’s highest level, the story is sure to inspire and illuminate.

The Away Game opens on Josep Colomer, the Spanish scout who helped launch Lionel Messi, standing on a dilapidated dock in the Niger Delta. He is surrounded by militants, there to provide escort to dirt playing fields in remote fishing villages and other far reaches of west Africa, as he searches for soccer’s version of the diamond in the rough—that teenage baller with enough talent, intelligence, and grit to maybe, just maybe, become the next Messi.

Colomer’s search soon gets a massive cash infusion from Qatar, the desert kingdom intent on punching a gilded (some would say ill-gotten) ticket onto soccer’s international stage. The result is Football Dreams, a gleaming academy located in the capital city of Doha, with air-conditioned training facilities and the best sports medicine money can buy. It’s all as far from the sunbaked pitches of Senegal and Ghana as Colomer’s hand-picked prodigies could ever imagine.       

Of course, even the deepest, petrol-lined pockets can’t guarantee passage to Europe’s top clubs, which is what makes the search in The Away Game so epic, and at times heartbreaking. Abbot, through meticulous reporting and an insider’s understanding of the game (he played at Princeton under former U.S. national coach Bob Bradley and is still a fixture on New York City’s pickup scene), does a masterful job of unpacking the myriad forces at play in the making of a superstar.

I have many favorite passages, but as someone who also plays a lot of pickup ball, I most love those moments where Abbot describes the impact of unstructured play on game intelligence. For example, he references a 2012 study of the English Premiere League which found that the players with the highest soccer IQs played one and a half times more pickup as kids. This type of training, Abbot writes, “creates the opportunity for players to experiment with different skills and tactics in an unstructured environment, leading to better anticipation and decision making.”

In addition to writing the book, Abbot shot all the photography, including this image of a Messi-topped keeper making a diving stab on a sandy pitch in Senegal. For more photos and videos, check out Abbot's website.  

At the launch party for The Away Game, appropriately housed at Smithfield Hall, one of the New York’s biggest soccer bars, I asked Abbot more about the transition from pickup to organized play. In my own experience, the ease and confidence I feel in the unstructured setting doesn’t always cross over. Is it the same for some kids of Africa?         

“It’s more that they have great technical ability from years of street soccer, but need to learn the tactical side of the game,” Abbot said. He added that there are times when the pace and skill level of organized play is so much greater than the street or sandlot, and players simply can’t keep up.

I told him that in my case, it’s definitely the latter—which at the age of 43 is just fine. For the teenage ballers of Africa, however, who see soccer as their only ticket out, not being able to compete at the next level can be life-shattering. It’s these stories of hope and desperation that fill The Away Game with such empathy, making it not just an engaging soccer book, but a hugely important one as well. “For every player who makes it, there are literally millions whose name you will never hear,” Abbot said. “I wanted those kids to have a voice, too.”