From The Times:
'This is, above all, the story of A boy. A boy who, at 16, saw his father grant an "irrevocable power of attorney" to a football agency on another continent, thousands of miles away. A boy who, eight months later, was signed away by his father to another agent, one whom he had never even met.
He was shipped to Norway, a month after his father signed him away (along with 30 per cent of his earnings for the next two years). Two days after his 18th birthday, on April 24, he made his debut for Lyn Oslo, the club his agents transferred him to. Six days later, after only 90 minutes of competitive football, Lyn announced that they had sold him to Manchester United for a sum rumoured to be £4 million, a Norwegian record.
And then things got scary. Men he had never met began to threaten him and his family. He secretly fled the country and was spirited to London and hidden away, not knowing what future, if any, he would have.
And this boy, who wanted only to play football, sits there terrified, caught in a legal/criminal/political thriller that would make Michael Crichton proud. This is the compelling story of John Obi Mikel.
The midfield player was born on April 22, 1987, in Jos, Nigeria. His childhood was relatively normal. He would disappear to play football when there were chores to be done and he was headstrong, preferring the dusty pitches near his home to the classroom. "Everything depends on God. You can’t predict life," Michael Obi, his father, told The Times. "But we always knew he had something in him when he was a kid."
In 2003 Mikel spent time at Carrington, United’s training ground, with the Nigeria Under-17 team. There he caught the eye of John Shittu, a Nigerian emigré who works for The Sport Entertainment & Media Group (SEM), an agency based in North London and run by Jerome Anderson, an agent who was once the stadium announcer at Highbury.
Shittu travelled to Nigeria and persuaded Michael Obi to grant SEM "power of attorney" over his son, so that they might arrange a transfer to a big European club. But then Shittu disappeared. In the meantime, Mikel’s reputation kept growing and the family were besieged by middlemen promising great riches. One summer’s day, Obi relented and agreed to grant a mandate to another agency, Excel International Management, represented by a Fifa agent named Daniel Fletcher. The family never met Fletcher, so they did not get the chance to assess whether he could be trusted with their child. "I never saw him. I saw many different people who claim to represent him," Obi said. "But we signed the agreement because, at the time, we had not heard or seen Shittu and Fletcher’s people said they would get my son a move to Manchester United. So we decided to give him a chance."
Enter Rune Hauge and the Norwegian FA approved his transfer to Lyn, who are managed by Henning Berg, Berg, like many top Norwegian players, is a former client of Hauge, who remains one of the most powerful figures in the Norwegian game.
At that stage, Mikel’s future remained unclear, but it was obvious that Lyn was merely a stepping stone, a way to get around work-permit requirements that prevented him from moving directly to the Barclays Premiership. Naturally, SEM wanted him to obtain the best deal, as did Fletcher, so both agents touted him around to a number of Premiership clubs.
But then, according to Fletcher, Morgan Andersen, the Lyn general manager, stopped returning his phone calls. Then United, with whom Fletcher had been speaking on Mikel’s behalf, also cut off contact, telling him that Mikel did not want him involved.
In the meantime, SEM offered Mikel to Chelsea. In August they arranged a meeting in Oslo between Andersen and Chelsea, but Andersen was left feeling snubbed. "If they had respected us then, things may have gone differently," Andersen told VG, the Norwegian daily. "But [Chelsea’s representative] was so occupied with his mobile phone and everything else that I walked out on the meeting. We were miles apart. They tried to use a small club."
So Lyn decided to sell him to United. On April 30, at a hastily-arranged press conference in Oslo, Mikel posed with a United jersey and announced: "It’s totally fantastic to come to a club like Manchester United." United confirmed the deal to the Stock Exchange.
But then, ten days later, Mikel disappeared. And everything stopped making sense. He turned up in London, squirrelled away in a secret location by Shittu, who insisted that Mikel wanted to join Chelsea, not United, and claimed that the player had been receiving threats. That is the one thing that Shittu, Fletcher and Andersen seem to agree on. Where they disagree is who was doing the threatening.
Andersen has claimed that Shittu has been intimidating Mikel, effectively holding him hostage, saying that "the situation is more dangerous than anyone realises". Fletcher, in a statement released last week, insisted that Mikel is being "intimidated and coerced into acting against his wishes" and that his wish is to join United.'