Argentina youth soccer pipeline rife with abuse: ESPN
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- ESPN's multi-year investigation found that Argentina's youth soccer system, the same pipeline that produced the defending World Cup champions, is rife with child exploitation and neglect.
- Independiente disclosed in 2018 that half a dozen men had sexually assaulted children living in the club's pensión, the disclosure that prompted ESPN's reporting.
- ESPN reviewed thousands of pages of documents, conducted more than 100 interviews, and personally visited dormitories known as pensiones where young prospects live.
- Thousands of children migrate hundreds of miles from home to Buenos Aires to train unpaid with professional clubs, living either in club-run or external boardinghouses.
- Greater Buenos Aires contains an unknown number of external pensiones — boardinghouses not overseen by clubs, any local or national government, or the Argentine Football Association (AFA).
- The AFA did not respond to ESPN's repeated requests for comment, despite being the governing body over Argentina's hundreds of professional clubs.
- Children in the system face, at one extreme, sexual predation, but also extortion, hunger and squalid living conditions, per ESPN's findings.
Why it matters: The Argentine Football Association governs the nation's professional clubs yet refused to comment while thousands of unpaid child migrants live in completely unregulated boardinghouses — a regulatory vacuum that ESPN directly tied to documented sexual assault, extortion, and hunger.
