The Argentine soccer system that produced the defending World Cup champions is also rife with child exploitation and neglect, according to an ESPN investigation released Friday.
ESPN spent years investigating the pipeline that feeds professional soccer in Argentina, reviewing thousands of pages of documents, conducting more than 100 interviews and visiting the dormitories -- known as pensiónes -- where young prospects live. ESPN began its investigation in 2018 after Independiente, one of the nation's premier clubs, disclosed that a half-dozen men had sexually assaulted some of the children living in its pensión.
ESPN's findings include:
Thousands of children migrate hundreds of miles from home to Buenos Aires to train with professional clubs, with the hope of one day signing a professional contract. As prospects, they are unpaid by their teams and either live in so-called internal pensiónes (run by the club) or are left to find housing on their own.
Greater Buenos Aires contains an unknown number of external pensiónes -- boardinghouses not overseen by clubs -- that are unregulated by any local or national government or by the Argentine Football Association, the governing body that oversees the nation's hundreds of professional clubs. The AFA did not respond to ESPN's repeated requests for comment.
Children in this system face, at one extreme, sexual predation, but also extortion, hunger and squalid living conditions.
Read ESPN's full investigation. Leer en español
And watch "The Dream Factory," a film about the findings, on ESPN.