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.
If you wish to help Free 2 Play, join our Patreon for exclusive news on our human trafficking investigations, on how players are trafficked, and on our campaigns in Africa. Your support means more fact-checkers, more trainers on the ground, and more children being reached.
What is Free 2 Play?
After speaking with a lot of stakeholders, we designed Free 2 Play, a fact-checking service for football transfers.
This allows crime to thrive.
Free 2 Play offers a simple solution: a platform where academies, players, even their families can upload documents they receive. We’ll check whether they’re true or not within a week. Best of all, the service is completely free and utterly anonymous.
We check:
Agents & Academies: We check whether agents or academies offering contracts or trials that seem too good to be true are real.
Contract Cross-Referencing: We verify football contracts against red-flag criteria, such as excessive fees, non-existent salary minimums, or predatory clauses that coerce debt bondage.
Risk Profiling: We go on the ground with clubs across Africa and Latin America to educate and inform.
Free 2 Play will not end human trafficking. There will always be players to be lured with promises of glory, and corrupt agents and clubs to lure them.
