UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 30 OCTOBER 2015
Yemisi Akinbobola, a visiting lecturer in media theory, has won a journalism working grant called Connecting Continents, a programme organised by JournalismFund.eu.
The aim of Connecting Continents is to bring together a team of investigative journalists from Europe and Africa to work on a story or series that investigates financial governance that connects the two continents.
The grant was awarded for their planned investigative series ‘Follow the money: who extracts the value of Nigerian footballers’, which will be published on IQ4News. It will look at the extent tax evasion is used by European football agents, who represent Nigerian football players.
"The series investigates the extent to which European football agents that represent players from Nigeria, use tax havens to save their agent and transfer fees. This would mean that taxes are not paid and neither Nigeria nor the European country profit from the large amount of money that agents get from representing these players. We have also found that only 10 agents represents over 1 in 5 Nigerian players," Yemisi explained.
"We will be using a variety of data journalism techniques to investigate the series, and to map the corporate structures of major agents and clubs and their connections to tax havens, and work out how much of the value of Nigerian footballers playing in Europe, is being kept out of the global tax system."
"Professional intermediaries are concerned this will leave young football hopefuls in Africa, further vulnerable to exploitation by rogue and fake agents. With this backdrop, the series highlights flaws in the governance (or absence) of this financial flow of wealth gained from Nigerian footballers and their agents."
The team consists of Yemisi, Paul Bradshaw, MA Online Journalism course leader at the University, and a Nigeria-based journalist called Ogechi Ekeanyawu. Ogechi will be getting human angle stories from aspiring footballers in Nigeria who have been duped by European agents with the promise of a successful career only to be asked for money by the agent, with the agents disappearing after usually collecting the players and their family's life savings.
The series will be published in both the UK and Nigeria. The jury that judged the application said:
Yemisi added: "I am happy to be working on such a timely investigative piece and saw the potential in our application. To be working with a such a talented team is a great privilege. By doing this story through such a high profile fund, we raise our profiles in the industry and which also contributes to our academic profiles and thus benefits Birmingham City University's research strategy aims."
Look out for updates on Follow the money: who extracts the value of Nigerian footballers at IQ4News.