“The Magic Trap”… Scammers who earn huge sums of money to win in football
“It was like a whirlpool,” says former Ivorian international footballer Gilles Yaby Yabou, after being defrauded and losing 200,000 euros at the hands of a witch doctor.
The forty-one-year-old spoke of two years he spent under the spell of a traditional healer or marabout: “You become like a slave, and things can become very harmful.”
The former midfielder, who currently supervises a second-tier Swiss team, went through “difficult times” on the sporting level, while playing for the French club Nantes at the age of twenty-three, so his uncle advised him to see a therapist in Paris.
“I was not attracted to magic,” Yabi Yabou told Agence France-Presse. “But growing up in Ivory Coast made it normal to go to a marabout and it was not considered bad as long as you were not trying to harm anyone.”
The healer told him that his family was “cursed” and prevented him from achieving “success and happiness,” so he prescribed sacrifices for him to repel the curses.
Sacrifice a rooster, a goat, or a sheep. It started with 500 euros and reached “imaginary numbers,” he said.
Yabi Yabu, who wants to speak to raise awareness among young athletes, adds that things got dark after that: “Something like black magic.”
He continued: “Al-Murabit made me believe that the spirits he worked for loved me and wanted me to become rich… This was the bait.”
The sacrifices necessary to make these fortunes cost 40,000, 50,000, then 60,000 euros.
Yabi Yabo said that his upbringing in Ivory Coast made going to magic a natural matter (AFP)
When the football player was financially exhausted, the witch doctor told him: “If he has no more money, he must sacrifice his son. I had the strength to say stop and I never visited him again.”
He said that he was deceived within two years after paying 200,000 euros ($213,000) and did not get “anything positive” in return.
He explained: “He knew how to put me in a vortex and I lost the ability to think clearly…”
The player said that his Christian faith gave him the strength to put an end to Almourabit’s control over him.
Some witch doctors threatened “revenge… for fear of separation from them.”
Joel Thibault, an evangelical pastor to many athletes in France, has had to deal with the “catastrophic results” of football and basketball players caught in similar circumstances.
He said: “I know that clubs allow their players to go to Senegal after they are injured, because doctors cannot treat them. “They come back and play with amulets and protective belts.”
Those who visited therapists in France told him that “when things got bad they were asked to make extra sacrifices, pay them more money, and then they would go into a spiral.”
He added: “I see the damage… depressed players who had suicidal thoughts.”
Another Ivory Coast player, Cisse Barate, told Agence France-Presse how he experienced the same hell.
When he started representing a major team in Abidjan at the age of 16, he was told that therapists helped him perform better and protected him from “envy.”
Players who fell into the trap of magic and used it in their sports activities (AFP)
“I fell into the trap,” Baraté, now 55 years old, admitted, adding that he began “bathing with potions” prescribed to him by a witch doctor, who made sacrifices and wore a protective leather belt with verses from the Qur’an sewn on it.
He continued: “As soon as I was injured and things were not going well, I was visiting him. He became like a god to me. “You become dependent on him, and he took advantage of that.”
He turned to the magicians again when he moved to play in Europe: “I was always injured. Al-Murabit told me that this was because I did not take a shower at the right time or because of the cold weather…”
In the locker rooms, he noticed that his colleagues from Senegal or Cameroon were wearing “protection” and “perfumes” or belts under their shirts.
Thibault says that the blackmail case of French midfielder Paul Pogba last year highlighted the seriousness of the problem “with more and more money in the world of football.”
Pogba filed a complaint with prosecutors, saying he was the target of a €13 million blackmail plot.
The world champion with his country in the 2018 World Cup in Russia told investigators that his blackmailers, including his older brother Mathias and one of his childhood friends, wanted to tarnish his reputation by claiming that he had asked one of the stationed players to cast a spell on his teammate, Paris Saint-Germain star striker Kylian Mbappé. An order he denied.
Thibault insists: “Players told me that when they were undergoing drug tests, the doctors could not inject them with a needle until their trainers were called.”
Several marabouts said they felt “stigmatized” because of the headlines raised by Pogba’s case.
“This controversy has damaged our profession,” Mr. Fakoli, a Guinean-born therapist who works out of Paris, told the French press. “This is really the dark side.”
He added that a distinction must really be made between witch doctors “who cast spells” and healers “who help.”
But as long as there are players looking for “shortcuts to success, unfortunately” the influence of witch doctors will not stop, according to Yapi Yabu.
2023-11-14 16:34:51
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