Footballers who fell under the spell of witch doctors

Protestant chaplain of high-level athletes in France Joel Thibault poses during a photo session on August 29, 2023 in Paris. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

“It was like a spiral,” said Gilles Yapi Yapo, a former Ivory Coast international football star who said he was cheated out of 200,000 euros ($213,000) by a witch doctor.

“You are like a slave and it can be really damaging,” the 41-year-old said of the two years he spent under the spell of a traditional healer, or marabout.

The midfielder, who now manages a team in the Swiss second division, was “going through a difficult period” playing for the French Ligue 1 side Nantes when his uncle recommended he see a healer in Paris.

“I wasn’t really attracted by the occult,” Yapi Yapo told AFP, “but growing up in the Ivory Coast going to a marabout was normal, and it isn’t seen as bad as long as you are not looking to harm anyone.”

The healer said his family had been “cursed”, which was stopping him “succeeding and being happy” and prescribed making “sacrifices to counteract the curses”.

Sacrificing a cock, goat or ram started at 500 euros and began to climb to “colossal sums”, he said.

Then one day it became darker, “something like black magic”, Yapi Yapo said.

“The marabout made me believe that the spirits he worked for liked me and wanted to make me rich.

“That was the bait,” he said.

– ‘Sacrifice his son’ –
The sacrifices needed to attain these riches cost “40,000, 50,000, then 60,000 euros”.

When the footballer got financially stretched, the witch doctor said that “‘if he has no more money he’ll have to sacrifice his son’. I had the strength to say ‘stop’ and I never went back to him,” Yapi Yapo said.

In two years, he said he was conned into paying 200,000 euros, and got “nothing