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Côte d’Ivoire is a favoured Who Should I Cheer For? underdog. A quarter of the population lives below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. Water and electricity are scarce. Life expectancy is 47 years.

At the same time Portugal is objectionable in a number of ledgers: ungenerous aid; few women in government; Cristiano Ronaldo.

But, as they say, the game isn’t played on paper. World Cup success for the Côte d’Ivoire could have a perversely unjust impact on poor West Africans by stimulating the growth of so-called ‘football trafficking’.

When Ivorians watch their captain, Chelsea’s Didier Drogba, lead out the Elephants on Tuesday they will see a role model in the fullest sense. Despite prohibitive odds, many young men consider their best chance of escaping poverty as following in Drogba’s footsteps.

So it is that thousands of unlicensed football academies have been set up in the Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana over the last decade.

Those in charge promise expert coaching, transport to Europe and arranged trials with elite professional clubs; local parents often reason that the fees are worth the sacrifice and take their sons out of school. In reality few ‘academy’ players will ever leave Africa and those that do will be travelling illegally with negligible prospect of professional football.

An overwhelming majority of academy operatives have no serious credentials. They cannot prepare their apprentices adequately or fulfil promises of trials with AC Milan and Paris St Germain. The crisis is compounded by unscrupulous agents and clubs, who take promising youngsters to Europe with no serious safety net in the (highly likely) event of their not making the grade.

The effects of the trafficking are evident to charities across West Africa and Europe. Foot Solidaire, a small Paris-based NGO, sees hundreds of abandoned would-be footballers in the French capital alone. In 2008 a BBC special report highlighted a typical trafficking story: the family of a 13-year-old Cameroonian paid €750 to an agent, travelled to Lyon and were abandoned on arrival. The previous year a leaking fishing trawler was beached in Tenerife containing 130 young African men suffering hypothermia and dehydration, among them footballers trying to reach Real Madrid.

FIFA promises it is “working hard” to address the issue. President Sepp Blatter has decried the trade in African teen footballers as “social and economic rape” and action has been promised under their ‘Win in Africa with Africa’ initiative, which aims to position the World Cup as a force for good on the continent.

Unfortunately FIFA’s corporate responsibility record is dismal with football trafficking no exception. Charities lobby in hope rather than expectation and counter-measures are few.

Foot Solidaire recently lamented in an open letter “ten years of hypocrisy, immobility and what may seem to be discrimination towards us”. They want to disseminate information across West Africa on the dangers of illegal academies but cannot get FIFA support for an annual €200,000 budget. They believe that the governing body discriminates against African groups in its funding, making a mockery of ‘Win in Africa with Africa’.

Certainly FIFA is not short of money for its preferred projects and partners. On Friday they opened the tournament with an announcement of US$196million annual profit and $1billion equity. Yet one month ago a report by South Africa’s Institute of Security Studies showed that the nation’s poorest may end up worse off (PDF) as a result of the World Cup.

This ongoing crisis gives pause for thought ahead of Tuesday’s game. The limitations of our rankings are clear. Ivorian success would doubtless feed the cycle of exploitation that blights football in West Africa. Foot Solidaire fears an increase in trafficking after the tournament.

The match itself threatens to be what some English Premier League mangers call ‘a damp squid’. At the draw in December this looked the tie of the first round – arguably the strongest two unseeded teams pitted against one another and in the same group as Brazil.

But both are on a downward trajectory. This Côte d’Ivoire team has been called (albeit wrongly) the greatest Africa has produced but they are ageing and blighted by internal conflict. Drogba enjoys an unhealthy cult of personality in the squad and new coach Sven-Göran Eriksson is an odd choice on a HPI-busting daily wage of £22,000.

Portugal meanwhile boast an unlikely double: both a weaker coach and a more narcissistic and irritating captain than their rivals. Carlos Queiroz and Ronaldo (named after President Reagan, of all people) scarcely deserved their qualification and hardly merit the favouritism afforded by the bookmakers for this game.

It is difficult to get away from supporting the Côte d’Ivoire against Portugal and World Cup success would doubtless be great for national morale. But it may be a Pyrrhic victory for a majority of young Ivorian footballers until information about illegal academies and their consequences improves.

Posted in: Cote d'Ivoire, Cote d'Ivoire-Portugal, Portugal

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.