The footballer who knows no barriers | LALIGA VS

Aboubacar Bassinga is an exceptional case in Spanish professional football. In 2020, the Ivorian, aged just 14 and with no other company than his distant dream of being a footballer, embarked on an uncertain journey across the ocean that ended in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This season he fulfilled his dream by making his professional debut with UD Las Palmas. But in this second adventure he was no longer alone. Behind that dream were people such as the Las Palmas Juvenile Court judge, Reyes Martel, or the coach of the Canarian team’s Social Projects team, Juan Manuel Rodríguez. Martel later managed to fight for a long time to change the legislation that prevented foreign minors like him from competing in federated clubs. His particular story is the focus of chapter nine of the LALIGA VS video podcast, a project to eradicate hatred inside and outside stadiums, in which the player reviews his journey with Rodríguez, and Cadena SER journalist Nico Castellano.

Castellano, one of the leading experts in migration journalism in Spain, is well aware of the reality that Bassinga had to face. When he arrived in Spain as a foreign minor, he was taken to a reception centre. There, he quickly stood out in the games organised between the kids, showing unusual quality with his left foot. A taxi driver who knew Rodríguez and other coaches from the Canary Islands youth team warned them of the Ivorian’s abilities. He had seen him playing in a park and he caught his attention. “He was different from the rest,” says the coach, who signed him for the Proyectos Sociales team, a team that UD Las Palmas created to welcome children in vulnerable situations.

In this team, the player stood out again to the point that the Canarian club incorporated him into its youth team. Thanks to the work of judge Reyes Martel, who in 2019 managed to change the legislation that prevented foreign minors from competing in federated teams, Bassinga was able to play, becoming the first player from the Proyectos Sociales team to obtain a federation license. Martel was also the woman who, with her Up to you foundation, focused on minors at risk of social exclusion, motivated the creation of Proyectos Sociales. “It helped me when I needed it most,” says the Ivorian in the talk.

Bassinga, who does not understand barriers, also talks about how he faces one of the most difficult barriers that racialized people have to face: racism. Despite acknowledging having experienced episodes both inside and outside the stadium, the player, now 18 years old and turned professional, believes that, thanks to the integrative power of football, hatred can be ended. “Racism has no place in football,” he asserts.

The Hate in Sport Monitoring Monitor

LALIGA has developed a tool that independently monitors conversations on social media and audits the level of hate and racism expressed around Spanish professional football: a further step in its efforts to detect and eradicate violence and hate speech in football and society. Every day and using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and artificial intelligence algorithms, MOOD tracks up to 800,000 messages, calculating metrics that allow fans to evaluate the progress of our football in this fight week by week.