Davies goes from refugee camp to MLS flag-bearer
Bayern Munich’s Canadian teenager showed against Chelsea the potential of the North American market
Bayern Munich’s Champions League demolition of Chelsea on Tuesday nights coincided with lunchtime on the west coast of Canada, and in the cafeteria at the Vancouver Whitecaps academy, players and staff gathered to watch the prodigy who had emerged from their club.
Alphonso Davies, who left Chelsea defenders trailing like leaves in a breeze, has become the club’s most famous alumnus in the past six months and changed the way in which Major League Soccer is viewed. On Tuesday, Davies, 19, announced himself as one of the best full-backs in the Champions League, having made his first start for Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga only on Oct 26, since when he has played every league and European game.
Watching in Vancouver was Craig Dalrymple, the academy’s technical director, born in Leicestershire and a trainee at Ipswich Town in the mid-1990s. “When he went on that run for the third goal, there was a gasp in the room,” says Dalrymple, 46, on the phone from Canada, where he has been for close to 20 years.
The Davies story is remarkable. He was born in 2000 in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana after his parents, Debeah and Victoria, fled the civil war in their own country, Liberia. While in the camp they were offered settlement by the Canadian government in Windsor, Ontario. “I studied the history but I didn’t know anybody in Canada,” Debeah said in an interview with the Whitecaps website, “but I said OK.” It has become one of the great stories of Canadian sport, and its implications for MLS have been just as significant.
It was Dalrymple, as head of the Whitecaps’ academy recruitment, who in 2012 took the 1½ hourflight from Vancouver to Edmonton, Alberta, to where the Davies family had moved, to follow up a recommendation for the 11-year-old schoolboy. It is significant he went that far, because scouting outside one’s native province takes effort and resources. “In Edmonton, Alphonso was playing seven-a-side indoor, because there they have snow seven months of the year,” Dalrymple says. “It’s a 15-hour drive to Vancouver and our climate is very different. It is like two different countries.”
From the camp in Ghana, to Ontario, to Alberta, on to British Columbia and then Germany, Davies has seen a lot of change in his young life. For the Whitecaps and Dalrymple, who persuaded him to move to Vancouver at 14, it is hoped he will be in the vanguard of a new generation.
“For MLS it has started to change us from a buying league to a selling league,” Dalrymple says. Last year Newcastle United broke their transfer record to sign Paraguay international Miguel Almiron for £21million from MLS club Atlanta United, the franchise who won the MLS Cup in 2018. Jonathan David is a Canada international who has gone to Europe direct from an amateur club in Ottawa, joining Gent in the Belgian top flight. But it is Davies whom Dalrymple says has the capacity to help change the sport in North America.
“For the club it has proved that we have a pathway,” he says. “Identifying his talent was not hard to do, it was making sure we have everything in place to convince his family we could nurture him and that he would be taken care of as a human.” Davies signed his first professional deal at 15 and made his MLS debut at 16, the secondyoungest to do so in the league after Freddy Adu.
Dalrymple cannot recall the story of a postponed trial at Manchester United in January 2018, but he says that by then the interest in the teenager was widespread. “It’s a hotbed for European clubs to scout. The playing population in youth soccer is huge,” he says.
Bayern had successfully recruited the 16-year-old Owen