It’s not hyperbole to suggest that if Fabrice Muamba had not discovered football, he would be dead.
Twelve years ago, White Hart Lane fell horribly silent when, while playing for Bolton Wanderers, his heart stopped for 78 minutes. He was only 23.
There is no good place to suffer cardiac arrest, but a football match in London might be one of the better ones: among the 29,000 watching on was a consultant cardiologist, who rushed from his seat in the stands to help, and the pitchside defibrillator was by his side in seconds, deployed multiple times keep the stricken midfielder alive.
Muamba was then transferred to a specialist coronary care unit at the London Chest Hospital and spent several days in intensive care before returning home a month later.
He was forced to retire from football but at least he was alive.
The game had been a lifeline years before. Muamba’s father had fled to Britain from Zaire – now Democratic Republic of Congo, seeking political asylum.
Five years later, he was granted indefinite leave to remain and Fabrice was reunited with him, but found himself in a foreign country without a word of common language with his new classmates.
“I remember how it was very very cold,” Muamba tells i.
“Being able to come in England to 1999, it was just a great opportunity for me to start my life after what I’d been through in the Congo.”
Te weather wasn’t the only challenge for the 11-year-old, who found that football fast-tracked his English learning. He ended up with 10 GCSEs and A-levels in English, French and maths.
He adds: “Congo was colonised by Belgium so we speak French. To come to a country and start from scratch was very difficult but through football, I was able to make friends and learn and be able to speak decent English in about two years.”
The football was different too.
“In England, the games more structured, whereas in the Congo we just play and run around,” he says. “And when you were told to be a certain position and do certain things certain ways, it was like, ‘Oh, I thought we were just playing free flowing.’”
Muamba had started playing “at lunchtime and breaktime” in school but was picked up by the Arsenal academy just three years after arriving in the UK.
He went on to play for Birmingham City and Bolton Wanderers before having to give the game up at just 24 years of age.
But Muamba, now 36, has never forgotten the opportunities football gave him and wants to make sure that other refugee children who come to the UK have the same chance.
“I was one of them,” he says. “The most important thing for them is to enjoy themselves, being able to make friends, being able to appreciate everybody’s background and religion and races, and make the most of the chance that you have here.”
Bloomsbury Football gives children who have arrived in this country exactly that: a chance. The London-based grassroots charity runs “Everyone Gets a Shot”, a programme that exists to ensure every young Londoner can access football.
But organisers soon realised that some of those coming to sessions needed more than just coaching, even if it was something as simple as coaches coming to pick them up from their temporary accommodation.
“We work with about 5,000 children a week across central London using the power of football to improve their lives, improve their school performance, and hopefully go on to have a successful career,” Bloomsbury Football founder Charlie Hyman tells i.
“We’ve always had children who have recently arrived in London in our programmes. But we were seeing that there were children that wanted to come but couldn’t for various reasons, where we needed to make a programme where we walked to the hotel that they’re living in and pick them up and walk them to the training session and back.
“Often the children who have recently arrived are in terrible, terrible situations. They don’t speak any English. They’re living in a hotel room which might be made for two people, but there’s a five-person family living in them. The food’s not very nice. They haven’t found a school yet. They’re not sure if they’re going to be moved to another hotel next week.
“And so that football programme where they get to come out, to meet other young people, to enjoy exercising, we provide them with a nice meal, and an adult who really cares for them.
“Our coaches are amazing role models and hopefully give them that sense of belonging and trust that they haven’t gotten anywhere else.”
He adds: “Most children don’t speak English. So that’s about helping them to improve. And part of that is getting involved with the training sessions where they have to interact with other people in English.
“Behaviour is often difficult. These children have experienced a lot of very difficult things at young age, they have a lot of trauma. There’s often tension between children from different backgrounds.
“So we make sure that we instil the sense of respect, the rules around the session, using football as a way of making sure they value their teammates, making sure they work together, they communicate, they’re polite.
“All of these issues can be solved with the football being delivered in the right way. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool, because they all know how to play it.
“Some of the only words they know in English are the names of football players. So they’re running around shouting the names of Premier League players. And you just realise that football is the thing, which provides them that bit of light, in what’s been really difficult time for them.”
What is different about Bloomsbury’s Refugee and Asylum Seeker Programme – where coaching, meals and mentorship are all free to participants – is that it doesn’t necessarily aspire to produce elite-level players.
“Yes, some of the children might go off and become a professional footballers, and that’s amazing. But really the goal isn’t that,” Hyman says.
“It’s about the skills that come from football and how that transfers into wider life, whatever that career or job might look like. Because as you know, most children won’t go on and have a professional career like Fabrice did.”
Muamba knows that as well as anyone, having had his career cut perhaps 10 or 15 years short. He has since worked as a pundit, completed a journalism qualification, and is a Uefa A-licence football coach. He also works in a more pastoral player support role at Burnley’s academy.
His passion for helping young people, particularly those who have come through the kind of struggles he experienced as a child, is clear.
“I always make sure to let them know that you have to be your own person,” Muamba says.
“If football is what you want to do, then do all the things you need to do.
“But not everybody wants to be [a footballer]. Some people want to become a lawyer, a doctor. There are so many avenues rather than just playing football you can be, but only if you apply yourself properly.”
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