French Con Man Nearly Snuck Onto Professional Bulgarian Pro Soccer Team
French con artist Greg Akcelrod almost parlayed a crudely assembled Web site filled with forged press clipping and video clips into a job on CSKA Sofia, one of the most storied professional soccer clubs in Bulgaria. Of course, he didn’t count on them actually wanting to see him perform his daring feats of athletic prowess before officially granting him a spot on the roster. Though he was exposed when coaches were astounded at how poor his play was during practice. Nevertheless, Akcelrod was still able to finagle a stint with a top Parisian team, and train with another one in Argentina.↵↵When finally caught out on his shenanigans, Akcelrod offered a astoundingly glib defense of his actions.↵
↵↵⇥“If I lied a little bit on my CV, I am sorry—but I never took one euro from anybody,” says Mr. Akcelrod. “My only concern was to have a chance to show I can play at the top level.” He adds: “I am just like 99% of my friends in France, who say on their résumé they can speak fluent English,” he says. “In reality, they can’t even count up to three.”↵↵↵Yes, everybody has embellished a resume from time to time (if anyone asks, I’m a Rhodes Scholar), though constructing a somewhat elaborate fiction on the Internet to support that lie is going beyond what most people consider an innocuous fudging of talent. ↵
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↵It certainly helped, for his purposes, that soccer in Europe is much more loosely structured than professional sports in America, where minor leagues and colleges make identifying rising athletes much easier. With European soccer, there's no central governing authority, only a catalog of 10,000 players from more than 450 clubs hosted by Switzerland's Professional Football Players' Observatory, a catalog which only the wealthiest clubs have access to. Coupled with a rampant desire across soccer culture to find the next great undiscovered talent, Akcelrod was able to convince scouts he had been a significant contributor to well-known clubs when often he had only trained with their junior team.↵And it almost worked until he was forced to show off his skills at the highest level.↵
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