Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're

talking about soccer and challenges and how recruiting is handled and how young players are moved

around the board. My guest is Sebastian Abbott. Sebastian has dual soccer and journalism credentials. He played

for Princeton and was later the AP Bureau Chief in Pakistan and Egypt. Sebastian recently

published a wonderful and engaging book, The Away Game, The Epic Search for Soccer's Next

Superstars. The book follows three soccer players as they compete amongst hundreds of

thousands of young Africans for places in Qatar's football dreams program. We'll start with the

story Sebastian tells in his book, and then we'll explore some of the more grim compliance challenges

and abuses that Sebastian touches on, but that aren't really central to his story. Sebastian, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

I so enjoyed your book.

I found myself, as I'm sure everyone does, pulling for these kids.

But the problems built into the plan come into increasingly sharp focus as you turn the pages.

So it's both exciting and very sad. Perhaps you could start

by describing football dreams, the program itself. Yeah, so football dreams is the largest

talent search in soccer history, which was carried out over the last decade by the fabulously

wealthy desert kingdom of Qatar. Qatar held tryouts for over 5 million 13-year-old boys,

mostly in Africa, looking for soccer's next superstars. The program was led by a Spanish scout

named Joseph Colomare, who was a former youth director at Barcelona and helped launch Lionel Messi's

career. And he and the other scouts every

year would pick a handful of players that they found across Africa and train them to become

professionals at a billion dollar sports academy set up in Doha, a process that was over a thousand

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