Their first challenge was to escape the grinding poverty of Africa, trek north for months or years and scale razor-wire fences to gain a toehold in Europe.
Now they are trying to win a soccer game. This is proving tougher.
Meet the CETI Club de Futbol, a motley but eager assortment of 22 undocumented immigrants who have their own team in a semiprofessional league in this Spanish enclave on Morocco's coast. CETI is the Spanish acronym for the crowded, dusty holding facility that the team members and about 700 other foreigners call home.
In a soccer-crazed country bristling with multimillionaire stars like Ronaldo and David Beckham, these guys live at the other end of the spectrum. They own little more than the clothes on their back, including the donated, emerald green uniforms they wear at games.
Soccer is a way to have fun and kill time as they try to obtain work and residency papers, which for many is probably a hopeless mission. They lost their first game 6-0 to a local team called Basto. Last Friday, they fell to another Melilla squad but scored on a penalty kick. Final score: 4-1.
"Although they don't have the discipline and professionalism needed to play soccer today, they have more than enough fight and commitment," CETI coach Juan Carlos Redondo said.
The immigrants are part of a 10-team, city league in which most players are university students or men with full-time jobs. A few players in the league get a token salary from their teams. But most, including the immigrants, compete for free.
They play only in Melilla in what is hardly a glamorous life. But it beats flagging down drivers seeking parking places or washing cars for a pittance -- the daily grind of many CETI residents.
At each of the first two games, attendance was about 500-600, mostly camp residents who screamed and chanted in support of the African underdogs. The games are a welcome break from the squat, brick buildings and prefab housing of the immigrant camp on the outskirts of town.
Melilla, a city of 70,000, has been in Spanish hands for more than 500 years. It is a lure for destitute Africans because it is the only piece of Europe that has a land border with their continent. It is flanked by Morocco to the west and the Mediterranean to the east.
Melilla-bound men and women from Africa's poorest countries spend months or years traveling north after paying what is for them a fortune to traffickers who arrange trips to Morocco. After that, they live in the rough, eating from garbage cans and spending frigid nights as they wait to cross two heavily guarded razor-wire fences separating Morocco from Melilla. The idea is to make it to mainland Spain or elsewhere in Europe and find work.
The idea for the team came from the Melilla soccer federation, which put up an ad at the holding camp and got so many applicants it had to have tryouts. Besides Guinea Bissau and Cameroon, the players come from Algeria, Ghana, Mali and Nigeria.
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