It had been a long journey from Ivory Coast to eastern Europe, but exhaustion did not diminish their excitement. The nine men had been plucked from obscurity to win the chance of playing for Dinamo-Auto, a football club in Transnistria. None of the men had heard of Dinamo-Auto (or Transnistria for that matter, an unrecognised republic that broke away from the state of Moldova in the early 1990s). But they didn’t care. They had been told they would be professional footballers in Europe. The players, most of whom were in their late teens or early 20s, believed they would be following in the footsteps of Ivorian football stars such as Yaya Touré and Didier Drogba.
It all started, the men told me, in the summer of 2021, when an Azerbaijani football agent arrived in Ivory Coast. He toured football academies in Abidjan, the commercial capital, and organised a trial for hundreds of young players. The men had heard stories about scammers posing as sports agents but the Azerbaijani, whom they later identified as Nail Zeynalov, seemed professional – as did his agency, Pelican.
After Zeynalov told the nine Ivorians that they’d made the cut, they waited for something to happen. At first they were told they would be signed by a football club in Turkey. Then it was Ukraine (this was before the war). Then Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and, finally, Moldova. | | |
