The strange case of the disappearing football team

By Jacob Judah

It had been a long journey from Ivory Coast to eastern Europe, but exhaustion did not diminish their excitement. The nine men had been plucked from obscurity to win the chance of playing for Dinamo-Auto, a football club in Transnistria. None of the men had heard of Dinamo-Auto (or Transnistria for that matter, an unrecognised republic that broke away from the state of Moldova in the early 1990s). But they didn’t care. They had been told they would be professional footballers in Europe. The players, most of whom were in their late teens or early 20s, believed they would be following in the footsteps of Ivorian football stars such as Yaya Touré and Didier Drogba.