Ged Naughton has had an extremely varied career which spans charity work, PR and journalism, and seen him travel the globe. He has now turned his attention to telling the story of a small Liberian football team which has been through ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, and emerged on the other side.
Liberia has been at the centre of a media storm in recent weeks. The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has thrown the country into turmoil and the population is full of anger and confusion. It is not the first time Liberia has been splashed across the world’s press for the wrong reasons.
Until recently the country was defined by division, as two civil wars left Liberia on its knees. The enduring image of a child soldier clutching a rifle still lingers to this day. The people needed common ground, and this came in the form of football.
George Weah is the figurehead of Liberian football. He was named the African, European and FIFA world player of the year in 1995, while the first Liberian civil war raged until 1996. In 1997 he was named as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and helped educate the population on HIV/Aids, as well as aiding the rehabilitation of child soldiers.
Weah has invested heavily in the national football team over the years and even had a spell managing the side. He has also been involved within the political system of Liberia, and served as envoys for FIFA funded projects. But Weah doesn’t feature in this story or Ged’s, his is a story about the Millennium Stars.
“By about October they had started shelling the city and I was non-essential personnel so I had to go.”
Ged began his affiliation with Liberia back in 1992 after he had finished university. The civil war had begun on Christmas Eve 1989, and was one of the first conflicts of the post-cold war era. Charles Taylor had crossed the border with a small army and was gaining support. By 1990 he had a large army and was attacking the capital Monrovia.
Ged said: “I ended up there in 1992 and was told that the war was over and they would be rebuilding, but it wasn’t. Charles Taylor was in control of most of the country but he wasn’t in control of the capital.
“There were soldiers there from the surrounding countries as some kind of West African peace-keeping force. There was a tense six months and by about August it began to get bad. Taylor was putting a lot of pressure on the city, a bit like a siege. He was cutting off resources, making it very difficult for them, there were a few riots, and it got gradually worse and worse.
“By about October they had started shelling the city and I was non-essential personnel so I had to go.”
Before he was forced to leave the country Ged did become involved in youth work. Even then he could see the draw of sport, as kids from a poor area were drawn to the place he worked:
“A lot of it was sport. We had a place where you could play football with two goals, which was quite rare, and a basketball court. It only had one basket but they were half way there – 50 per cent better than anything else!
“When I look back at it there was a real power of sport; young people in Liberia had nothing going for them at the time and if you could be a sportsman rather than a child soldier, or a street kid, then that was good.”
After returning to England Ged enrolled on a NCTJ journalism course at Darlington. He worked for the North East based newspaper the Shields Gazette, but saw his future in aid work, where he could use his new journalism skills:
“I didn’t really have engineering skills, I couldn’t build latrines, I couldn’t go and vaccinate people or anything like that, but I thought I could tell people’s stories.”
He applied for a job with CAFOD, a Catholic aid agency based in London, as part of their press office. In Ged’s first year he travelled to Rwanda in 1996 and covered the return of refugees. In 1997 he managed to return to Liberia, where it was again believed that the war had finished. Charles Taylor was now democratically elected, but it was a vote cast under the threat of further trouble.
“You would be fighting each other, shelling each other, shooting each other, and then there would be a football match, and once it was over they would get back to the fighting.”
Ged returned to the missionaries he had worked with the last time he had been out there. Over the years they had developed a good system for homing and feeding street kids and child soldiers. The priest in charge of the project told Ged about a football team that had started:
“He wasn’t a football fan but he had seen the value of what football could do. Weah’s career was at its peak at that point, because at the end of 1995 and January he was holding those three titles – world, European and African football of the year. He was the example to young people and it becomes a catchphrase, but when football took place the guns fell silent.
“It became almost a cliché but it was a fact. When Liberia was playing their home games everybody would go to the stadium to watch them. The war came back again and right through to 2003 that was the case.
“You would be fighting each other, shelling each other, shooting each other, and then there would be a football match, and once it was over they would get back to the fighting.”
The team were looking for a sponsor, and an idea formed to relate them to the upcoming millennium. At this point Ged admits that apart from a vague idea around sport creating a new identity for people, he had not linked football to peace building in any way.
He put an idea forward to CAFOD and didn’t get knocked back. After an informal meeting a plan was formed to bring the kids who had used football to stay off the streets, and to become part of the community, over to England.
“Up to then nobody had heard of Liberia, they thought you meant Libya or Siberia. It suddenly got this reputation for two things; George Weah and football, and child soldiers. We knew these lads had used football as a way of avoiding the war. The team reintegrated them into the community and they became championed by it.
“So we asked them at CAFOD whether they thought it was a good idea. It was quite radical for them at the time. Nobody was doing sport and development in those days. The UN launched their sport and development programme in 2005, and we were underway by the end of 1997.
“For the same reason it was a bit threatening. It wasn’t seen as a recognised way of doing things, development was done by raising money here, and supporting projects there, but the two were never brought together. So to bring a football team over to play was quite a big thing, and everyone we mentioned it to around the country was absolutely bowled over by the idea.”
Ged and CAFOD worked on the idea for around two years, and it was decided the first opportunity was in 1999. They spent 18 months organising and liaising with schools and football clubs before the team travelled over.
The Millennium Stars visit to England caused a stir in the media. The side visited training with Arsenal, and met Arsene Wenger, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Davor Sukur and Lee Dixon. It was an appropriate visit as manager Wenger was responsible for bringing George Weah over to Europe.
The team also visited Newcastle, mainly due to the persistence of fan Ged, although for a while it wasn’t looking like it was going to happen.
“I tried for months to get something to happen with Newcastle. But then Bobby Robson came in, and it was his first week and everything just moved really quickly into place, and he became keen on it. We brought our team to meet him on his first training session, Alan Shearer was on England duty but all of the others were around.
“Wenger had said you can watch the training and meet the players afterward, but Bobby Robson said come and meet the players first then we will get on with our training session, it was much better. Warren Barton was great, and Gary Speed, God rest his soul, was also excellent. Bobby asked the team who was their best player, so they pushed a lad forward, and he got Duncan Ferguson out and threw them a ball, and said ‘let’s see how many you can keep up with your head.’
“So they started playing head tennis and the lad from the Millennium Stars just wasn’t going to let it drop. It went on and on and on. Ferguson at first thought it was going to be a laugh, but he realised he was in a bit of a competition.”
After Newcastle the side went to Scotland and visited Celtic. The team played games against several Scottish youth teams, and Ged remembers the Liberian goalkeeper suffering a broken finger after being kicked in the hand by a Celtic player.
“The doctors said don’t play with that for a month and then see a doctor when you get home. They were only in the UK for three weeks, so he had the plaster on for a couple of days and pulled it off. They treated it in the Liberian way which is to haul it – they got his hand and they pulled it. He was in absolute agony – and I have seen it since and he has this huge lump around his knuckle – but within a couple of days he was back in goal.”
The tour went on with visits to Manchester Utd, Liverpool and Everton, as well as several matches in the south of England, before the team returned to Liberia. The trip proved to be the biggest media success CAFOD had ever had at the time. The side featured on television five times in the three weeks, including News Round and Sky Sports, as well as on the radio and in national and local newspapers.
“They played a game in Liverpool against one of the secondary schools there, and there were four camera crews filming. The lads just took it in their stride and were so impressive in that. I have never been involved in something quite like that, and I probably never will again.
“It turned a few heads within CAFOD and people began to realise that there was more to development work, particularly work with young people, than just the traditional way of funding church organisations. It did change things within the organisation, and started much closer work with youth and projects for civil engagement of young people.”
Ged returned to Liberia a year later in 2000 and found that everything had gone to pieces. The hope was that the team would create a football academy and continue the good work they had done previously, but it was all beginning to fade away.
He believes there was confusion in what the player’s wanted to come out of the trip to England. They had said they wanted to make friends, but Ged now believes that the problem was that our understanding of friends was different to theirs. Their understanding was that being a friend meant they could call on you whenever they needed something.
“That’s what we didn’t understand, and I’m only really coming to understand over the last few years, they wanted support for their endeavours. They were very frustrated. They were angry with CAFOD, they were angry with the people that worked with them in Liberia, and they couldn’t really direct that anger because they couldn’t hold anyone to account for it because none of it had been explicit. It was quite depressing to go back to that.”
CAFOD began building a youth network, and the players were side-lined as they had already had this brilliant experience. The organisation also decided they were not explicitly going to work with football either. Ged believes once politics came into it there was a snobbery about the game of football, and people ignored the positive things it could achieve.
“The team split up then, and they were forced to go back home. They had been living in a house that had been donated to them by the church, and they wanted it back. Then the war started getting bad again, it was mayhem and everybody had to take cover or leave. One of them went to Nigeria; one of them went to Ghana – as refugees.”
Ged remembers a story he was told by one player. He spoke about getting on a boat with hundreds of Liberian refugees which would take him to safety. The boat took three days to get to Ghana, during which time they received no food or water, and then they weren’t allowed to disembark. Eventually they were allowed into a refugee camp, and even then football came to the rescue.
“He met up with a couple of their Millennium Stars friends, and people said there is another two of them here, so they reformed the team in the refugee camp. They started using it again as a way of gathering new people together and giving them a good message about life, it was quite remarkable.”
Ged never lost touch with the team members and sometime later, when he had begun doing freelance work, he decided to get back in touch with the players, who were now all back in Liberia. He did a masters degree on International Politics in 2009 at Newcastle University, and wrote his dissertation on football and peace building, using the Millennium Stars as a case study. This is when the idea for the book came around.
“If we wanted child soldiers they would give us it”
“My supervisor was saying ‘when are you going to write the book?’ Everyone I knew, colleagues and friends, were saying the same. It seemed to be the right thing to do this last year. I went to Liberia in December (2013) and filmed interviews with nine of the lads in the team out of the 15 or so that came over.”
Ged made a short film out of the interviews and is keen to convey the truth of the story as he puts together his book: “I think the thing more than anything is to do it justice. They have told me their stories and their lives.
“We brought them over as a team with the idea that they would tell a story that football was what kept them from becoming child soldiers. At some point we sent a camera man over to film them and take some photos, and he came back with some of them admitting they had been child soldiers. One of them in particular went into heavy detail.
“The same lad, when I went back over, came up to me out of the blue and said it wasn’t true. I didn’t get a full explanation, so I interviewed him later and I asked him. It was really that they wanted to give us whatever we wanted. If we wanted child soldiers they would give us it. They assumed we wanted child soldiers and they did it.
“Having said that we lapped it up; I got results in the media on the back of the fact that they were telling stories about seeing their families murdered and doing things themselves. All of that became very hard for them because they weren’t really, they were acting that role. The line between truth and reality became very blurred.”
Ged suggests it was a case of changing perception. When once you would admit to being a soldier, now it is more beneficial to say you were not. Although he is not sure about the truth, he is pretty sure none of them were actually child soldiers.
“That’s understandable because in both cases it’s to your advantage. Certainly during the war, if you were a child soldier then you got a lot of resources directed your way. In 2013/14 it’s the opposite. The last thing you want to admit to is having that kind of past. Apart from the possibility of being a victim of reprisals, it doesn’t do you any good in society or in the eye’s of the community.
“That’s what I mean about doing them justice. I think what they have been through and the courage they have shown, the strength of personality, it’s got stronger if anything over the years in spite of the consistent knockbacks they have had. They should just be telling their story all the time, but it’s left to me.”
There is an undirected frustration now amongst some of the team. While some have come to terms with it and are happy to coach the next generation, some still remember how tantalisingly close their opportunity was.
Ged now believes it is time for the Liberian FA to help the Millennium Stars. The national team is predominantly filled with players that play outside of the country, and he believes the association aim to profit from home-grown talent by selling at abroad.
“It’s completely the reverse of what should be happening, which would be finding resources abroad and feeding them into the local clubs. The Millennium Stars have been going since 1997 and they have never once had any coaching or an official meeting with the FA. There is a guy in the FA at the moment that has shown a bit of favouritism towards them and he has given them some footballs now and again, but he should be going to them and saying ‘what can I do to help? How can we set up your academy and make this work?’
“If this book gets out and it causes a few waves or something, it might create a discussion. It might cause the Liberian FA to absolutely hate my guts, but it would be worse for them to hate Millennium Stars’ guts, that would be dreadful, but sooner or later something has to change.”
I tried to contact the Liberian FA for a response to the questions Ged was posing, but did not get a response.
On his last visited Ged asked the team if it would have been better for them if they hadn’t come on the UK tour, but they all said no. Even Ged admits he would do it again even if he knew what the outcome was. The team now have a strength which centres on their core principles.
“Football is a good thing because it brings people together, it bonds you. To be part of the team you have to have discipline, you can’t be a drug taker, you have got to be serious about your training, and you can’t be undisciplined on the pitch. You have got to do your homework; you have got to do your chores. They have got a good relationship with the local community.”
Ged believes the global game is setting the worst example, and uses Luis Suarez’s recent transfer as an example.
“You can go and bite somebody and what you get as a result is a £75 million pound transfer to Barcelona. In the Millennium Stars if you bit someone you would be thrown out. There’s a fundamental core to what they believe. At some point somebody will make the breakthrough. There are football academies in all of West Africa, but there’s not one in Liberia.”
So we return to the beginning and the emergence of football as a development tool. Without fully realising it Ged was at the forefront of the idea, but does he now believe it can be a positive idea?
“I think there is a tendency to see it as a cure all. On one hand you can have the ex-pat staff completely unaware of football in the country. On the other, you suddenly think you have got the answer to everything, and you set-up your football project that captures the community’s imagination, but inevitably within a couple of years funding is finished and everything goes back to how it was.
“What they need is two things, funding and contacts with the outside world. They realise that people gather because of football. But they don’t realise that that’s all it is. People who go and organise a football project – with the idea of solving some other problem, like homelessness, HIV or child rights – they go with the best of intentions and they can have some success. But there’s a conflict with the basic activity of football that was going on in the first place. It will continue afterwards and – for the vast majority of the participants – was the purpose of the project anyway.
“I could go to a place I don’t know at all and I could put my seal of approval on some guy who I happen to like, but he might not be the right person in the community. The community knows that already, and so if it’s come out of the community it’s much better than being started by one of us.
“If you can gather young people together you can inform them of what their rights are and you can adopt some kind of code of conduct. A lot of research needs to be done on the long-term value of it.”
I finished talking with Ged and we mused about the chances of the Liberia national side in the future. The reality is that whether it is a manmade or natural disaster, there always seems to be something holding the country back.
Realistically, this self-described football nation is performing as well as they could hope. With a population of fewer than four million people, the side are minnows compared to Ivory Coast (24 million) South Africa (53 million) and Nigeria (177 million).
The world cup may be the ultimate goal, but if morals, discipline and togetherness emerge as winners, it doesn’t quite seem as important.
Ged’s book, It’s Not Easy, is aimed to be finished by the New Year. More information can be found at www.naughtonmedia.co.uk