Maybe Bellamy was naive, but at least he made a difference
Laughable for FIFA fatcats to criticise his efforts to give Sierra Leone kids a chance
THERE are a couple things I have to declare straight away when it comes to my opinion of Craig Bellamy. The first is that I was the ghost-writer for his autobiography, GoodFella, which was published in 2013. I got to know him well during that time. He is bright, engaging and articulate, a ghost-writer’s dream. I enjoyed his company. I still do.
The second is that a few years earlier, a sporting organisation in Rio de Janeiro called Instituto Reacao asked for help sponsoring the education of Arthur, a kid from Rocinha, a sprawling Rio favela. I asked Bellamy and Kieron Dyer if they would contribute and they gave a significant sum each.
Arthur became one of the best students in his school. He is now in his third year at the prestigious Pontificia Universidade Catolica (PUC) do Rio, studying Engineering. Bellamy and Dyer, who were stereotyped as brats when they were players, helped to change the course of Arthur’s life.
It was a drop in the ocean but they were willing to do something, at least, which is more than most of us do. By then, Bellamy was also heavily involved in setting up a football academy outside Freetown in Sierra Leone. Inspired by a visit to the country to see a friend in 2007, he ploughed more than £1million of his own money into the establishment and maintenance of the academy and helped to fund a national league in Sierra Leone .
In the following years, the academy sent 10 boys to college in the US on football scholarships and one to Denmark. Whether you think the US is the land of milk and honey or not, it is a fair bet that their lives improved.
BELLAMY said that helping them was the best thing he had ever done and that he hoped he would be remembered more for his work in West Africa than for his goals for Newcastle, Liverpool, West Ham and Cardiff.
Bellamy was desperate to try to make the academy self-sustaining. He knew that when his playing career came to an end, he would not be able to keep paying hundreds of thousands of pounds towards its upkeep. He flew out to Freetown as often as a Premier League career would allow but no sponsors came forward and the Ebola outbreak that dealt Sierra Leone such a devastating blow made investment in football seem rather peripheral.
Bellamy tried as best he could. He employed sponsorship managers to try to raise funds. They kept coming up empty. In the end, he had to admit defeat and the academy closed last September. He found it hard to take but was proud of the good he had done. He had tried to make a difference in a country most people ignore.
The demise of the academy was reported last week. There were legitimate questions to be posed about why it had folded and they were duly asked. Where had Bellamy’s money gone? Why had accounts from the Craig Bellamy Foundation not been filed since 2015? Was the academy properly regulated? What was its relationship with the Sierra Leone FA?
There were also poignant accounts of what had happened to some of the kids who were among the last residents. Some of them were living in squalid conditions in a nearby village. Sierra Leone’s poverty had swallowed them back up.
It is right that charity initiatives should be properly scrutinised like this by good journalists. Bellamy was clear from the start that his academy was a not-for-profit organisation and he abided by that. But not every organisation in this area can say the same.
Football academies in Africa and elsewhere can sometimes be fronts for cynical money-making exercises. Some see young footballers as a lucrative opportunity. They see the money swilling around in the European game and sense the chance for a new kind of people-trafficking. But now for the bitterly amusing part. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, chose to get involved and castigated Bellamy as if FIFA were somehow a moral authority on matters of this nature. And so the head of one of the most corrupt, venal, sick, cynical, exploitative, debased, discredited and greedy organisations in the world, condemned Bellamy for all those years of trying to help children in Sierra Leone.
‘It is not right to sell hope to some kids, boys or girls, and then let them down,’ said Infantino. ‘They have to be sustainable, they have to be seriously managed and they have to be realistic as well. The worst thing is indeed to abuse the dream that many kids and their families can have in countries where it is more difficult to live.’
IWONDER how much FIFA, with their billions in television revenue, contributed to Bellamy’s academy. I wonder how much they helped. I wonder how much they have done to improve the football infrastructure in Sierra Leone, as Bellamy had done with his efforts to fund a youth league.
Maybe Bellamy was naive. Maybe he was badly advised. Maybe he was too ambitious. But, for a while, he made a difference. He was genuine in his desire to help. And for people who made no difference at all to be sneering at him now is rather sad and dispiriting.
In England, we condemn footballers for their conspicuous consumption and the way they squander wealth on empty symbols of lavish living. And when they give their time and money to trying to improve lives in a country most of us would be too timid even to visit, we condemn them for that, too.