"These players are poor. It was their first time flying." That line, from a source close to the Eritrean national team, tells you everything you need to know about what happened after their AFCON qualifying win over Eswatini on March 31.
Seven players — most of them substitutes — vanished after the match. Coach Hesham Yakan confirmed it to Reuters. He doesn't expect to see them on a football pitch again.
"I do not think they will continue playing football," Yakan said. He believes they've gone looking for economic opportunities in wealthier countries. Given where they came from, that's not a surprise.
A country that barely lets its team travel
Eritrea only returned to AFCON qualifying this year for the first time since 2008. The country had previously banned its national teams from travelling abroad entirely — a direct response to several under-20 players fleeing to Uganda in 2019. The same thing has now happened again, on a larger scale, at the senior level.
The squad already had players based in Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden — diaspora internationals who came back to represent a country most of them had already left. Their first leg was played in Morocco because Eritrea doesn't have a stadium that meets CAF requirements for international fixtures. The team won 4-1 on aggregate. Then seven of them disappeared into the night.
George Ghebreslassie, an Eritrean exile who runs a support organisation for Eritrean refugees, wasn't shocked. "It happens quite a lot," he said. "It shows the kind of situation we have in Eritrea. We thought things would change, but nothing has changed. People have become hopeless in their own country."
What this means for Eritrea's campaign
Eritrea's Minister of Information declined to comment. The football federation didn't respond. Yakan — a former Egypt international who played at the 1990 World Cup — is left managing a squad that just got smaller without warning.
The country has been under President Isaias Afwerki's rule since independence in 1993. Human rights organisations have consistently described his government as one of the most repressive on the continent. That context doesn't make the disappearances surprising. It makes them inevitable.
Eritrea qualified from their group. Whether they can hold a squad together long enough to matter in the next round is a question nobody inside the federation seems willing to answer publicly.
