It started with an informal pick-up game. Now, this organized soccer club is a lifeline for many asylum-seekers

Brooklyn, New York (CNN) — When Boubacar Lukaku is on the soccer field, it’s like nothing else matters.

His concerns disappear, leaving just him and his laser focus on the ball, the net and his teammates.

Lukaku has a lot to worry about. The 22-year-old asylum-seeker emigrated to the United States in 2023, fleeing political violence in his native Guinea, an African country ensconced between Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Coast. Since arriving in Brooklyn, he’s struggled to find a lawyer for his asylum case and to secure work to help support himself and his family, living in crowded and chaotic shelters.

But the Newcomers Football Club, an impromptu team made up of asylum-seekers, has helped provide him with a joy that erases his stress. And it’s helped connect him with a supportive community as he navigates the challenges of a new country, with its new language and a confounding immigration system.

“We’re like a family,” he said of his teammates. “There is respect, love and understanding between us.”

The team is the accidental brainchild of Mars Leonard, a commercial videographer based in Brooklyn. Leonard was volunteering for a mutual aid group in Bushwick when he first learned that hundreds of asylum-seekers had arrived at Stockton House across the street. The city has since closed the shelter, citing decreasing arrivals, creating chaos for its residents. And they were looking for a place to play soccer – an almost universal cornerstone of their daily routines back home.

Leonard had never worked with refugees or asylum-seekers before, and he had never played soccer. But he spoke French, like many of the asylum-seekers from West African countries like Mauritania, Senegal and Morocco, so he volunteered to help find a space.

In the months since, the ad-hoc project has ballooned from an informal pick-up game to an organized club that competes with other New York teams, joining forces with another similar project started by co-organizer Avram Kline.

Dozens of athletes, most of them young men from West Africa and Latin America seeking asylum, gather on Wednesday and Sunday evenings in Bushwick and Williamsburg (there are over 300 members in the club’s WhatsApp group). They blast music and joke with each other on the field, shouting and wrestling before resolving arguments over a meal after practice.

Leonard’s dreams for the project range from the practical to the ambitious.

In the short-term, they need cleats and equipment for every player, something he’s fundraising for with a verified GoFundMe. Entering local tournaments also requires fundraising. Other expenses, like soccer balls and pizza and soda after every practice, have come out of the pockets of Leonard and other organizers.

The players also need a dedicated field and storage space. Their practices have been so popular they’ve had to turn away players for lack of space.

“The first step is to have an inter-shelter room that is well equipped,” Leonard said. With more resources, “the men can be fed when they play, and we have enough room for anybody who wants to play.”

The long-term dream? To establish a nonprofit that can employ asylum-seekers as referees or soccer coaches for kids, something that would help the players make ends meet while leveraging their skills and interests. In the future, he sees the soccer club taking on its own space, a kind of all-inclusive community center where asylum-seekers could come to play soccer, take English classes, eat food and access other resources for free.

“My ambition for this program is kinda limitless,” Leonard said.

A love of soccer, from Guinea to Bushwick

For Lukaku and many other young men in western Africa, soccer is a cultural touchstone, a throughline that cuts across social barriers and permeates all parts of social life.

“I always dreamed of being a professional footballer since I was a child,” he said. “Football is my passion. When I play football, it’s like everything is going well for me.”

His favorite memories of life back home in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, are playing soccer alongside his friends. One of six siblings, he grew up in a very poor family, he said. Poverty in the country is widespread: Over 65% of the country’s population is considered “multidimensionally poor” by the United Nations Development Programme.

His family, he said, is part of the “very marginalized” Fulani community. Fulani people, also called Fula or Fulɓe, are a largely Muslim ethnic group dispersed across western Africa. The Fulani have faced targeted killings in nearby Mali and Burkina Faso.

Lukaku had been arrested in Conakry and “treated terribly” for his participation in protests in 2022 calling for Fulani rights and decrying widespread poverty across the country.

Several of his friends were killed in protests, he added. More than a hundred people have been killed and hundreds more seriously injured during the government’s crackdown on demonstrations since 2019, according to Amnesty International.

Living in Guinea was no longer safe. So along with a group of 12 friends, he embarked on an odyssean quest across the Atlantic, taking out loans to help pay for the flights. The journey lasted 28 days and took him through eight countries before he finally arrived in Arizona in December. The most difficult part, he said, was in Mexico, where police “hit us if we don’t do what they ask” and took money from him and his travel companions.

Lukaku was part of a wave of migrants who have sought asylum in the US in the past few years. Like many others sent from southern border states to the north, he was put on a flight from Arizona to New York.

Close to 200,000 people passed through New York’s system for asylum-seekers between spring 2022 and May 2024. New York City has responded by opening over 200 emergency shelters, and the city is “poised to spend more than $12 billion through Fiscal Year 2025” on caring for asylum-seekers, says Mayor Eric Adams’ office.

The influx has prompted the city to shift some of its policies surrounding migrants, including a new rule forcing migrant adults to leave the shelter system after 30 days. The new policy has created stress and disruption for players, according to Leonard. Asylum-seekers could be sent from Brooklyn across the city with little notice, separating them from the friends and local community groups they’d come to rely on, like Newcomers FC.

New York, to Lukaku, symbolized “freedom, my safety, and a better life.” But life in the city has been difficult at times. At both shelters where he’s lived in Brooklyn, 9 Hall Street and Jefferson, he’s faced similar conditions: cramped living quarters, with hundreds of men sleeping next to each other on cots, and meager meals.

For Lukaku, discovering Newcomers FC in May marked a turning point in his life in New York. The team has helped him meet new people and carve out a space for joy amid the daily stress of searching for work and a lawyer for his asylum case.

And the close-knit relationships he’s formed with his teammates remind him of the social web he left behind in Guinea, he said.

“In Africa, we are used to living together in community,” he said. “And sometimes when I am in the field with my Guinean, Senegalese, Mauritanian, American, Venezuelan or other friends, it reminds me of memories in Africa.”

He described Leonard as “like a brother” to him.

Leonard echoed Lukaku’s sentiment: The team has become a community for asylum-seekers.

Leonard said that at the beginning of his work organizing matches, tensions were rife, particularly between Spanish-speaking migrants from South and Central America and French-speaking migrants from west Africa. But playing soccer together “breaks down the language barrier.”

“Soccer is literally the language,” he said. “And they can bond, and they get closer in a way that is not possible, it seems, or is harder otherwise.”

‘Soccer as a tool to help the vulnerable’

For Leonard and the other organizers who make Newcomers FC happen, the soccer team is an intuitive launching pad for helping asylum-seekers in need.

In the winter, for instance, he noticed that many members of the team didn’t have warm clothes appropriate for the brutal New York temperatures. So when he found out another neighborhood mutual aid group, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, had extra funds, he convinced them to use the money to buy coats and boots at a discount store.

“We use soccer as a tool to help the vulnerable,” he said.

There are three main areas of need for the asylum-seekers, Leonard says: “They need to know English, they need jobs, and they need apartments.”

Organizers try to alleviate those needs, partially through the team WhatsApp group, where they share information about free English classes, legal clinics that can help with their asylum cases and food pantries. Leonard says it helps soften the blunt edges of life in New York. They also share “ridiculous memes” and joke together, he added.

And the club has taken steps to its ultimate vision of a business employing asylum-seekers by hosting small-scale soccer clinics for children, paying team members to be their coaches.

On Sundays, they play in mixed teams with other members of the Autonomous Football League, a group of six teams in Brooklyn and Queens with deep ties to community organizing. The mixed practices help Newcomers FC members meet new people and practice their English, Leonard says.

Like Leonard, organizers in the Autonomous Football League also see soccer as a natural jumping off point for support.

“Because of the community-building that the sport helps foster, both in how it is played and in how we organize the games themselves, it has been a no-brainer to use our matches as vehicles for helping folks who need it,” said Andreas, an organizer with Stop Cop City United, one of the clubs that helps organize the Autonomous Football League. He asked to be identified only by his first name, citing privacy concerns.

The league has helped organize food distribution, clothing drives, and a free store for the Newcomers FC players.

The support they provide helps balance out an “environment made very hostile because of ineffective and draconian laws and the destructive actions of the Eric Adams administration,” Andreas added.

Andreas, meanwhile, cited the difficulty of getting work permits for asylum-seekers, the city’s 30-day shelter stay policy, and the lack of interpreters and translation. When residents of the Stockton shelter were told to leave, for instance, they were only given instructions in English, Andreas said.

Still, their efforts can only do so much: “There is no amount of food served or socks collected that can compensate for everything the city is grossly failing to provide for our friends,” said Helen, another Stop Cop City United organizer who wished to only be identified by her middle name due to privacy concerns.

Adams’ office has not responded to CNN’s repeated requests for comment on the criticisms. The mayor previously said in a news release that the city has “put care and compassion first throughout our response” to the influx of asylum-seekers.

For Lukaku, the multifaceted challenges of building a new life for himself in New York are ongoing. He still can’t work legally in the city, making it impossible to afford rent and move out of the shelter. And he’s still looking for a lawyer.

But Newcomers has done something important, he said.

It “gave me back the smile I had in Africa when I played football,” he said.

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