THIS IS, ABOVE ALL, THE STORY OF A boy. A boy who, at 16, saw his father grant an “irrevocable power of attorney” to a football agency on another continent, thousands of miles away. A boy who, eight months later, was signed away by his father to another agent, one whom he had never even met.
He was shipped to Norway, a month after his father signed him away (along with 30 per cent of his earnings for the next two years). Two days after his 18th birthday, on April 24, he made his debut for Lyn Oslo, the club his agents transferred him to. Six days later, after only 90 minutes of competitive football, Lyn announced that they had sold him to Manchester United for a sum rumoured to be £4 million, a Norwegian record.
And then things got scary. Men he had never met began to threaten him and his family. He secretly fled the country and was spirited to London and hidden away, not knowing what future, if any, he would have.
Outside the locked doors, older men in suits armed with mobile phones, legal documents and goodness knows what else fight over this teenager. The battleground stretches from West London to Manchester and from Nigeria to Norway to Switzerland. No resolution is in sight. The threats keep coming, and while he has said that he trusts the people he is with, he does not really know them, not like he knows his father, who was a footballer but in a different era, when things such as this did not happen. He has been told that everything will be OK, but people are angry, the voices on the phone are threatening and his family is far, far away.
And this boy, who wanted only to play football, sits there terrified, caught in a legal/criminal/political thriller that would make Michael Crichton proud. This is the compelling story of John Obi Mikel.
The midfield player was born on April 22, 1987, in Jos, Nigeria. His childhood was relatively normal. He would disappear to play football when there were chores to be done and he was headstrong, preferring the dusty pitches near his home to the classroom. “Everything depends on God. You can’t predict life,” Michael Obi, his father, told The Times. “But we always knew he had something in him when he was a kid.”
In 2003 Mikel spent time at Carrington, United’s training ground, with the Nigeria Under-17 team. There he caught the eye of John Shittu, a Nigerian emigré who works for The Sport Entertainment & Media Group (SEM), an agency based in North London and run by Jerome Anderson, an agent who was once the stadium announcer at Highbury.
Shittu travelled to Nigeria and persuaded Michael Obi to grant SEM “power of attorney” over his son, so that they might arrange a transfer to a big European club. But then Shittu disappeared. In the meantime, Mikel’s reputation kept growing and the family were besieged by middlemen promising great riches. One summer’s day, Obi relented and agreed to grant a mandate to another agency, Excel International Management, represented by a Fifa agent named Daniel Fletcher. The family never met Fletcher, so they did not get the chance to assess whether he could be trusted with their child. “I never saw him. I saw many different people who claim to represent him,” Obi said. “But we signed the agreement because, at the time, we had not heard or seen Shittu and Fletcher’s people said they would get my son a move to Manchester United. So we decided to give him a chance.”
Enter Rune Hauge, the controversial Norwegian agent who was once given a lifetime ban, later reduced to two years, by Fifa, the world governing body, for his involvement in the Arsenal “bung” scandal of the 1990s that ended George Graham’s managerial reign at Highbury. Chapter VI, Article 12 of Fifa’s transfer regulations prohibit a minor from moving from one country to another unless his family move, too, and “for non-footballing reasons”. Although Mikel was the only one to go to Norway, where there is a will (and clout), there is a way. The Norwegian FA approved his transfer to Lyn, who are managed by Henning Berg, the former Manchester United defender. Berg, like many top Norwegian players, is a former client of Hauge, who remains one of the most powerful figures in the Norwegian game.
At that stage, Mikel’s future remained unclear, but it was obvious that Lyn was merely a stepping stone, a way to get around work-permit requirements that prevented him from moving directly to the Barclays Premiership. Naturally, SEM wanted him to obtain the best deal, as did Fletcher, so both agents touted him around to a number of Premiership clubs.
But then, according to Fletcher, Morgan Andersen, the Lyn general manager, stopped returning his phone calls. Then United, with whom Fletcher had been speaking on Mikel’s behalf, also cut off contact, telling him thatMikel did not want him involved.
In the meantime, SEM offered Mikel to Chelsea. In August they arranged a meeting in Oslo between Andersen and Chelsea, but Andersen was left feeling snubbed. “If they had respected us then, things may have gone differently,” Andersen told VG, the Norwegian daily. “But [Chelsea’s representative] was so occupied with his mobile phone and everything else that I walked out on the meeting. We were miles apart. They tried to use a small club.”
So Lyn decided to sell him to United. On April 30, at a hastily-arranged press conference in Oslo, Mikel posed with a United jersey and announced: “It’s totally fantastic to come to a club like Manchester United.” United confirmed the deal to the Stock Exchange.
