FIVE AWAY TRIPS 61 DEFECTIONS
Eritrea: the world’s most troubled national team. Every time they travel abroad, most of the squad disappears
“We first noticed when we went to get on the team bus the morning after the game,” Eritrea striker Sirak Beyene tells FFT. “We looked around and there didn’t seem to be the right number of players. Half the team was missing.”
The previous afternoon, they’d been playing an away match against Botswana; less than 24 hours later, Eritrea were looking for a new team. Again.
The Red Sea Boys’ patchwork side had been torn apart for the fifth time since 2009. First, some 12 players went missing after a fixture in Kenya. Then 13 more disappeared in Tanzania. Another 17 sought asylum after a game in Uganda, before nine more of the squad didn’t return from a second match in Kenya.
This time, 10 players were unwilling to return to Eritrea, a country notorious for human rights abuses and officially the only nation on Earth with less press freedom than North Korea. When they refused to take the flight home, saying they believed they’d be forced into the Eritrean army, they were arrested by Botswana’s police – much to the bafflement of Beyene, the London-based son of Eritrean migrants who moved to England in the 1980s.
“The players didn’t discuss it with us; they kept themselves to themselves,” says Beyene, who is looking to kickstart his career in the US after playing for non-league London Tigers.
“I don’t know too much about the political situation in Eritrea, but there’s clearly a good reason why they did what they did. From a football perspective it’s a huge blow: every time we try to build a team, this happens. Now we’ll be starting from scratch again.”
Not helped by the mass defections and resultant sparse fixture list, Eritrea are ranked by FIFA as the world’s joint-worst team, below the likes of San Marino, Macau and Papua New Guinea. They have lost every official fixture in the last four years and their 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign is already over, leaving players such as Beyene and Henok Goitom of Sweden’s AIK (below) to wonder when they might next get the chance to run out in national colours.
“It’s always an honour to play for your country,” says Beyene. “I think we showed against Botswana that we are capable of mixing it with some of Africa’s best sides. The challenge is to get a side that can stay together for a period of time.”
Of the 61 defectors, some have relocated to Houston, Texas; others have surfaced in the Australian city of Adelaide, making it ever harder to put out a competitive
national team.