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Maybe it was because I was worried about how I was going to follow playing for Liverpool. Maybe it was because I felt the need to do something completely different to put some distance between me and the crushing disappointment of the Champions League final. Whatever the reasons, I did something random that summer, something that changed my life. I went to Sierra Leone.
Why? Well, I had a mate who was working out there and he invited me to come and visit. I could have said ‘yeah, thanks, but the hotels are a bit nicer in Puerto Banus this time of year’ but I didn’t. I wanted to see what it was like. I’d always been intrigued by Africa. So I got on a plane and flew to Freetown. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
When I say I’d been intrigued by Africa, I suppose I mean I’d been gripped by the stories they told on Comic Relief. I wondered what it was really like. I didn’t want to go to somewhere like South Africa or Kenya where there is great poverty but there is great wealth as well. I didn’t want to go somewhere where you could take refuge in a rich man’s lifestyle.
I knew that in parts of West Africa, there was no rich man’s lifestyle. Not really. There was poor and there was poor. I wasn’t intimidated about going out there. It didn’t cross my mind at all. I was fascinated by the idea of what I would find. I wanted to see how people lived.
It was a culture shock. It was bound to be. I landed at Freetown and found out that the airport is on the other side of the Sierra Leone River from the city. So I either had to get a ferry that took a couple of hours, a taxi that took about four hours on a roundabout route or an old Russian helicopter. They have got a habit of ditching in the river, I found out later, but it seemed like the safest option at the time. I took the helicopter.
Freetown was great. It was chaotic but it was great. An 11-year civil war had only just ended so a lot of the city was a ruin. But the people were wonderful and life was vibrant and vital. I’d been worrying about the Champions League final and what was going to happen to me, whether I’d join this club or that club for £40,000 a week or £50,000 a week. Seeing Freetown woke me up. I thought ‘you ain’t got no problems’.
The poverty I saw made a huge impact on me. But not the poverty in isolation. It was more the fact that the people who were living in all that poverty were so positive. It amazed me. Maybe I’d become accustomed to moaning about inconsequential things. Maybe I’d lost sight of what mattered. But I looked around there and I saw people who had very, very little and still had such a good outlook on life. For them, being alive is the biggest achievement of all. What they have to go through just to have life is more important than any material things.
Yeah, I was worried about diseases and snakes and all the things Europeans worry about when we think of Africa but when you are there, you just get on with it. There was no electricity in a lot of places. For somebody who’s grown used to the comforts of western civilisation, it felt quite challenging. But, of course, there was one thing that linked me with the people I saw: football.
I was shocked by how many people knew me. The day after I arrived, I woke up and thought I’d go into the centre of Freetown. I was interested in the history of the place. I wanted to see the effects of the civil war. I wanted to get a better idea of how people lived. I got a taxi into town and climbed out to have a walk. Within a few minutes, I had to get back into the car. I was mobbed.
I was still technically a Liverpool player then and I wasn’t really aware quite how popular the leading Premier League teams were. I soon realised. Armed police had to come and get me out and take me back to my hotel because the roads became blocked with crowds. It took me aback. It wasn’t like Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard was in town. I’m only Craig Bellamy. But it was probably the first time a Premier League player had ever visited the city.
Soon, it became evident it was going to be impossible for me even to remain at the hotel I’d booked myself into. The lobby was packed with people wanting photos and autographs. There were too many people for the hotel to cope with. So I had to move out. I didn’t want to leave but I could tell I was making life difficult for the hotel. The hotel put me in touch with a British security company that had houses for ex-pats out there and they took me to one of those.
A couple of days later, I travelled east. I wanted to see the diamond mines in that part of the country. It was a seven-hour journey by car, although in the UK it would take about half that. I’d brought a load of footballs with me so we stopped off now and again on the way up whenever we saw a group of kids and had a kickabout.
It was funny: when the kids saw four or five white men getting out of a car, they just scarpered. You go back in the history of the place, there’s probably a very good reason for that. But eventually, they’d come back in their droves. To see their pleasure in a simple football was enough for me. They were used to playing with a bundle of rolled up newspaper bound with sticky tape.
Again, a lot of them seemed to know me. I thought there was no way that some of the villages we stopped in would have any access to television but the power of the Premier League is far-reaching. One of the main teams in Freetown is even called Mighty Blackpool.
When we arrived in the Kono district where a lot of the diamond mining goes on, I found out the local chief wanted to meet me. Word had spread that I was visiting and when we got close, the crowds got out of control again. There were people as far as I could see who had come to greet me. It was absolutely surreal.
I wanted to see the diamond mines because I wanted to see another side of Sierra Leone. It made me sad, seeing the poor panning in the water. They would get a couple of dollars for what we would pay thousands for. I wasn’t averse to a bit of bling in those days but seeing the conditions those people worked in – and a lot of them were kids – put me off. I would never buy a diamond now. I certainly wouldn’t wear one.
I can see how some people can come away from a country like that, drained and never wanting to go back. But it had the exact opposite effect on me. I felt inspired and energised by what I saw. I wanted to do something positive. What’s the difference between me and them? I was born where I was born and they were born where they were born. None of us are given a choice where we are born in this world or which parents we are born to. That’s the only difference.
I made up my mind straight away that I wanted to give something back. I knew by then that West Ham were trying to sign me and they were offering me a lot of money, more money than I had ever earned before. Reports said later that I would be earning around £80,000 a week. They weren’t far wrong. However much it was, I felt it was the right thing to give some of it away. I didn’t need it all. I don’t need that much to live. Lifestyle isn’t hugely important to me. As long as my kids are comfortable, that’s really all I care about.
I wanted to give something to these people in Sierra Leone. I thought about building a school but it would have to be free education and so you’d have to turn people away because there would be too many. So I thought about building an orphanage but then you are fighting with Christian groups and Muslim groups and things can get very complicated.
So then I thought about a football academy, a place where people could come and live and play for free. It would have to be selective. It would be for kids who were talented footballers but I wanted to make sure that they were also academically up to a level where we could teach them and educate them.
I wanted to give them an opportunity in life, not just in football. I wanted to do something for the country and the society, not just for the game. So if they didn’t make it as a footballer, I wanted them to be able to go back into Sierra Leone society very well educated. I wanted them to become the next minister of health, the next president, a doctor or a lawyer. Or go to America on a college scheme.
My dream was that one day, one of the kids who goes to the academy would be able to become a top player and look after his family. And then when that happened, he remembered the opportunity he was given and was able to do the same for other kids in his country. I wanted the academy to start what people call a virtuous circle.
That was in the summer of 2007. We started work in earnest the following year. Building the academy took a while. No one works during rainy season, for a start. It just isn’t practical. The government gave me land in a nice village outside Freetown called Tombo. It’s a fishing and farming village and the 15-acre site where the academy is based overlooks the Atlantic.
There were teething troubles. There were bound to be. Everyone had told me to be prepared for that. But the local people grasped the idea that this was something that would give kids an opportunity. With the help of Unicef, we set up a youth league, too, because nothing like that existed at the time. It was a pre-requisite that the kids who played in the league had to be going to school. If they weren’t at school, they couldn’t play in the league, no matter how good they were.
The first group of 15 boys arrived at the academy in August 2010. We gave five-year scholarships to children aged 11-13 who live, study and train at the academy. I was ambitious. I wanted the facilities to be good. The playing surface we have now is generally recognised as the best grass pitch in Sierra Leone.
The league has been a success, too. There are more than 40 teams across the country and Unicef loved it. Teams earn league points not only for match results, but also for school attendance, good behaviour and fair-play, and leading development projects in their communities. One of the teams was even called Young Cambridge because of the kids’ commitment to the academic side of things.
There’s another called Central Professionals, which has attained brilliant school attendance rates and another called Welding United, which is run by a committed lady called Edna Sowa. I read on our website recently that Edna had named her new son Bellamy.
We have a special group of 12-year-olds at the academy now – our second intake – who have blossomed due to the establishment of the league. The quality is improving all the time. Unicef aren’t involved any more because their policy, which I agree with, is to work with a project for a couple of years and then move on.
Finding funding is hard. In some people’s eyes, I am the Premier League footballer who has endless amounts of money. Why should anyone give me money when I should be paying it all myself? But realistically, my money won’t last forever. I set an initial period of five years which was my West Ham contract to get it up and running.
I want the academy to be self-sufficient. I want it to be run by people in Sierra Leone. I want to see kids from it playing in Belgium or in Norway or in the Premier League because that fits the romantic idea of football for me. I would love to be able to see them playing the greatest game in the world and be able to think that I had played a part in enabling them to do that. But like I say, I would get as much satisfaction if one of my students became a doctor in Sierra Leone, saving people’s lives.
In October 2012, one of the lads from the academy, Sahid Conteh, was awarded a scholarship to study at the Dunn School in California, a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. He is playing a lot of football but he is also studying English, Algebra, Conceptual Physics and Ancient World History. Even if it all collapsed tomorrow, I have made a difference to his life.
That’s what I wanted to do – give kids an opportunity that we all take for granted but which they have never been able to have because of the poverty and the wars that have gone on. I am hoping that it carries on for years to come and gets bigger and bigger.
I have put about £1.4m of my own money into it. It is not an investment. It is not about making money. Say my academy discovered the next Didier Drogba, if a club wanted him, they would have to cover the academy’s costs for the education he had received. But that would be it. It’s not about making profit. I hope that one day the national team of Sierra Leone will be drawn from players that grew up in my academy, much like the national team of Ivory Coast is largely populated by players that came up through the famous Académie MimoSifcom.
We have about 30 boys at the Craig Bellamy Foundation Academy now. They wake up at 6am and do their chores. Train at 7am. Finish at 8am. Have breakfast. School at 9am. Finish at 12pm. An hour break. School again at 1pm. Finish at 4pm and then training again at 5pm for an hour. Shower. Homework, reading and bed early. They will do two to three hours a day training. It’s a long day but they are progressing well.
There have been difficulties along the way but we have got there in the end. I’m pleased I’ve done it but I wouldn’t necessarily call it unselfish because it’s been a huge benefit to me as a human being. I hope my own children will feel proud of it, too. I hope one day they’ll be able to go to a place in Sierra Leone to see a school that has provided a lot of young kids with a better start in life than they might otherwise have had. And I hope they will feel proud that their dad has been able to do that.
As far as I’m concerned, what I’m doing in Sierra Leone will be my legacy. Not how many goals I scored or how many medals I won or how many Premier League appearances I made. I’m proud of those things, too, but they don’t really matter. I hope I’m remembered more for the work of my foundation than for anything I ever did on the football pitch.