The strange case of the disappearing football team

It had been a long journey from Ivory Coast to eastern Europe, but exhaustion did not diminish their excitement. The nine men had been plucked from obscurity to win the chance of playing for Dinamo-Auto, a football club in Transnistria. None of the men had heard of Dinamo-Auto (or Transnistria for that matter, an unrecognised republic that broke away from the state of Moldova in the early 1990s). But they didn’t care. They had been told they would be professional footballers in Europe. The players, most of whom were in their late teens or early 20s, believed they would be following in the footsteps of Ivorian football stars such as Yaya Touré and Didier Drogba.

It all started, the men told me, in the summer of 2021, when an Azerbaijani football agent arrived in Ivory Coast. He toured football academies in Abidjan, the commercial capital, and organised a trial for hundreds of young players. The men had heard stories about scammers posing as sports agents but the Azerbaijani, whom they later identified as Nail Zeynalov, seemed professional – as did his agency, Pelican.

After Zeynalov told the nine Ivorians that they’d made the cut, they waited for something to happen. At first they were told they would be signed by a football club in Turkey. Then it was Ukraine (this was before the war). Then Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and, finally, Moldova.

Two of the men in the group, Jean Etan Essis and Taha Caleb, later spoke to me in detail about their experiences. They said they were instructed to bring around €2,000 ($2,220) with them to Moldova to pay for visas and travel expenses. The young players’ families went to great lengths to fund the trip: one man’s father borrowed from a neighbour. Another man’s parents, who were farmers, sold their fields.

According to Essis and Caleb, Zeynalov met the nine players at Moldova’s Chisinau airport when they flew out in the summer of 2022, and put them up in a hotel. Then the arrangement seemed to change. Zeynalov and other representatives claiming to act for Pelican visited the hotel, asking for more money for visa extensions. Essis and Caleb said that the men threatened to throw them onto the street if they didn’t pay in full.

The Ivorians asked their families to wire more money, assuring them they would pay it back when they got their first cheque from Dinamo-Auto. After the players paid up, Essis told me, they were taken to a dusty village in Transnistria where the Dinamo-Auto players were living. (By then, bizarrely, Pelican had taken over the club itself.)

The players’ compound was a cluster of beige buildings overlooked by a mural of a smiling peasant girl. Inside the players met a Gabonese footballer with a friendly smile but an ominous greeting. “Welcome to hell,” he said.

The men didn’t know what he meant, but realised soon enough that the reality of the club fell far short of their dreams. After a couple of training sessions, Zeynalov seemed to disappear. Essis and Caleb said they gave their last payment of visa expenses to a Cameroonian coach at the academy. After this, Caleb said, the club announced that they were signing a few of the Ivorians (including one from a different group), and ordered the others to leave.

According to Caleb, club representatives hinted that they might be allowed to stay if they paid more money, but the furious young men refused and insisted they wanted a trial. Once they had moved to a hotel, club officials relented and offered them one. The men were delighted. They sent a photo of themselves kicking a ball around Dinamo-Auto’s bobbly pitch back home, and it was posted on the Facebook page of their old football academy. “Things are getting serious in Moldova”, read the caption. But the Ivorians were subsequently told they had failed the trial.

Rassul Allahverdiyev, the chief executive of Pelican who also became the head of Dinamo-Auto, said that the club hadn’t made any promises to the nine players, and they had been brought to Moldova without proper authorisation by Nail Zeynalov, who had since been dismissed from the agency (Zeynalov did not reply to requests for comment).

Allahverdiyev added: “As a club leader working with Africans I received them, they stayed at our base for more than two months, we trained and checked them. Then we agreed that I will keep three to four people among them and the rest will return to their homes. However they refused it. They themselves said that we want to stay and live here. As a professional club manager I can tell you that no club in the world signs every player who comes to his camp for a trial.” He said he offered to pay for their return tickets to Ivory Coast.

Essis and Caleb didn’t recall any such offer from the club. In any case they felt they couldn’t go back after having borrowed all that money without anything to show for it. They ended up homeless in a breakaway republic, on the other side of the world from their families.

Transnistria is a thin strip of land between Moldova’s eastern edge and Ukraine’s western border. When you enter the breakaway republic from Moldova, a guard in a shipping container hands you a “visa” that looks like a restaurant receipt, with cheap ink that comes off on your fingers. Transnistria declared independence in 1992, after a 20-month-long civil war between pro-Moldovan and pro-Transnistrian forces – the latter were supported by the Russian army. Hundreds of people died and more than 3,000 were injured.

Transnistria’s government claimed victory and quickly erected a façade of nationhood to prove its independence from the Moldovans on the other side of the Dnipro river. Transnistria, which has a population of around half a million, has its own currency, passports and flag. Under international law, it remains part of Moldova, which is a candidate for membership of the European Union. But Transnistria’s government and virtually all of its residents would rather it were part of Russia.

Over the years, the Transnistrian government has asked Russia to annex it several times, most recently after the country’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. These  advances were politely batted away, as a war with Moldova is not a priority for the Kremlin. Still, Russia appears to have the run of Transnistria. Walking through the capital, Tiraspol, you are much more likely to encounter a Russian flag than a red and green Transnistrian one. There is a mural of Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut and the first man in space, and many statues of Lenin, including one outside the parliament building. Other Soviet heroes are also memorialised, and there are even monuments dating back to imperial Russia. There is also a small garrison of Russian troops.

For now, the only place where Transnistrians do battle with Moldovans is on the football pitch. Three decades after Transnistria declared independence, its clubs still play in the Moldovan league. Indeed, Moldova’s most successful club is from Transnistria: FC Sheriff Tiraspol have been league champions 21 out of the past 23 seasons and have qualified for the Champions League, a pan-European competition. (In 2021 they unexpectedly beat Real Madrid 2-1 in the group stages.)

Founded in 2009, FC Dinamo-Auto Tiraspol can only dream of the success enjoyed by its local rival. Dinamo-Auto is based a few miles outside Tiraspol in a village called Ternovka, which is also home to the Butylka Museum of Alcohol, a 28-metre-tall building in the shape of a bottle. Its stadium, near the banks of the Dnipro, has a capacity of just 1,300.

In the summer of 2022 Dinamo-Auto was struggling in the first tier of the Moldovan league and – according to local sources – in financial difficulty. It was at that point that Pelican intervened.

Pelican, a Turkish company founded in 2019 by Allahverdiyev and Zeynalov, describes itself on its website as “an international football agency”. It boasts about talent-spotting projects it has run in Ukraine and Nigeria, about the career guidance it gives young players, and about the scouting services that it can offer football clubs. From summer 2022 the Pelican logo was displayed on Dinamo-Auto’s website.

After taking over the club, Allahverdiyev promptly sacked the whole squad and replaced them with 23 new players. Most were from Africa: Gabonese, Ivorians, Equatorial Guineans, Liberians and Nigerians. Within weeks of arriving, many were let go, replaced by other, mainly African, players.

Throughout the 2022/23 season the team’s turnover continued to be very high. This was perhaps a factor behind Dinamo-Auto’s lacklustre performances. Finishing eighth out of eight clubs in the Moldovan Super League, they were relegated to League 1. They seem to have dropped out of the 2023/24 season altogether. This year, the club’s website vanished. The URL now displays Indonesian advertising for an online Thai casino.

I first met Essis, Caleb and the others in their cohort last spring in a café in downtown Tiraspol, when they were stuck. Essis ordered a green tea, and tried to tell me his story over the Russian pop music blaring in the background. Soon three of the other footballers rolled up; they’d been hanging out in Hooligan Hair, a hipster salon. The waiter stared, openly amazed at seeing Africans in this corner of eastern Europe. “Bonjour,” he said, giggling. “Francais?”

For the first few weeks after being thrown out of the club the players had survived on bread and Coca-Cola. They wandered into shops looking for work but were shooed away; they ended up washing cars to make ends meet. Messages of concern poured in from back home: “Where are you? Are you alive?” At first they were too embarrassed to tell their families what had happened, but eventually had to come clean. Their relatives were shocked and upset.

Members of a local evangelical church helped out the footballers financially and found them accommodation in a hostel in a village just outside Tiraspol. Those small  rooms became their sanctuaries. They prayed, lifted weights and danced to Afrobeats. “We have tried to make Ivory Coast in Transnistria,” Caleb said. “When we are at home, it is our music, it is our vibes, it is as if we are still in Africa.” They even tried to cook west African dishes to ease their homesickness, but local shops didn’t stock the right spices.

The Ivorians found Tiraspol sleepy and rather boring. Its restaurants were empty and by dusk the city was virtually deserted. They managed to find a few other foreigners to hang out with – a Chinese tourist who had come in search of relics of European communism; a man from the Basque Country who had decided to join the Russian army to escape from the racism he had experienced in Spain. The players had picked up on the pro-Russian sentiment of the locals. “Putin is an all-round great guy, right?” grinned Jerome Assi Assande, one of the players.

The plight of the Ivorians did not go unnoticed in Transnistria. The owner of the hostel where the players were staying was so angry about it that he contacted a local journalist. In February 2023 Transnistrian media broadcast a short report on the men’s story. In response, Dinamo-Auto issued a statement saying that the agent who brought the men over to Transnistria was not an employee of the club.

When I met the remaining members of the squad later that spring, the men were determined not to return to Ivory Coast until they had made it as football players. “We can’t go home. We have no life there anymore,” said Assi Assande. “If your father has sold everything that he had for you and you come home empty-handed, it would be almost deceitful.”

Adding to their stress was the fact that their Moldovan visas had expired – meaning they risked being arrested if they crossed over into Moldova proper to go to the airport. They had up-to-date Transnistrian paperwork, so they could remain in the breakaway republic – but they were essentially stuck there indefinitely.

Shortly after I met the players, they went to Moldova to try to explain their situation and get their documentation in order. They were immediately picked up by Moldovan police for overstaying their visas and put in detention.

While in a detention centre they had a game of football and one of the men, Jean Tizie, was injured. Tizie was one of the two Ivorians from their group who had been taken on by Dinamo-Auto, but later found himself ejected from the club and ended up rejoining the others.

When asked about the player by 1843 magazine, Allahverdiyev said that the club had been willing to send Tizie to Belarus, where an offer from a professional football club awaited him, “but he refused”. Allahverdiyev also referred 1843 magazine to the statement he had given the Transnistrian media in February 2023, which said that by the time he became aware of the Ivorians at his club their visas had already expired.

After the injury, Caleb saw Tizie go off to seek medical attention. Later, to his surprise, he heard the player had died in hospital. No one is sure what happened. The others were deported soon after their friend disappeared.

Several African players did regularly take to the field for Dinamo-Auto. I met Chibuike Kalu, a stocky Nigerian defender, at the compound where he had been living for eight months. He led me into a dining room where his teammates were eating dinner. “Are you a new player?” asked a goalkeeper, one of the few local men on the squad. Chibuike shot back: “Shut up bro, he’s here to speak to me.” There was a ripple of excitement. Could I be a talent scout? When it became clear that I was not about to sign Chibuike on behalf of a Premier League club, the players returned to watching clips of Liverpool and Manchester City on their phones.

Chibuike didn’t even know that he lived in Transnistria until I contacted him on Instagram. “I thought, what is this word?” He googled the name and recognised the flag. “I thought I lived in a state called Tiraspol.” What did it matter? When he wasn’t playing football he lived so much of his life online – chatting to friends on Facebook Messenger, live-streaming services at his old church – that he could’ve been anywhere.

He showed me a photo on his phone of his old football team back in Nigeria. “Everyone was dreaming of Europe, but none of them made it out of Nigeria – zero – only me.” The Ivorian players, and the rest of the rejects, simply weren’t good enough, he reckoned. I thought about the claim which Essis made that he wasn’t allowed to stay at the club because he refused to subsidise his own footballing career. Was Chibuike actually being paid? He swatted away questions about money. The day before he had made his debut on the pitch, playing to a few dozen fans in a tiny stadium. “The happiness was overwhelming,” he said. “I couldn’t concentrate. I was just thinking: finally I am a professional footballer.” ■

Jacob Judah is a journalist based in London