A Journalist traveled to Algeria to Uncover the Truth. Now He Faces Seven Years in Prison

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Dispatch: a series dedicated to immersive storytelling, where our photographers and writers journey to chosen places, combining evocative imagery with long-form editorials to uncover and share unique football cultures.

A Football Journalist traveled to Algeria to Uncover the Truth. Now He Faces Seven Years in Prison

Words by Christian Letourneau
Photography by Christian Letourneau and Reporters Without Borders

January 27 2025

On 20 December, on a wet night in Nantes, Vendée Fontenay Foot hosted Paris St Germain in the early rounds of the Coupe de France. In the 7th minute of play, the voices of BEIN Sports broadcasters Christophe Josse and Daniel Bravo went quiet. Over the sound of the crowd, a woman’s voice took their place.

“Hello, my name is Sylvie. I’m the mother of Christophe Gleizes, a sports journalist condemned to seven years of prison in Algeria. Christophe, it’s mom. I know you have BEIN in your cell and you’re watching all the football matches. I want you to know that we’re doing everything possible to get you out of there. You are not alone. We are with you, and we love you.”

***

Those of us who love football hold dear the idea that we can understand something of the world through it. That football touches politics and culture, and power, and that a careful, empathetic study of the sport can tell us something about the current stakes of living anywhere it is played.

It takes the work of journalists like Christophe Gleizes to prove it.

In May 2024 that work brought him to the gates of the Hocine Ait Achmed Stadium, in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, to write about the mighty Jeunesse Sportive Kabylie. Then, it landed him in jail. After 11 months in detention, he was tried and condemned in a Tizi Ouzou court on charges of “apology for terrorism” and “possessing and disseminating propaganda detrimental to the national interest,” His sentence of seven years of prison was upheld on appeal on December 4th last year.

I felt particularly motivated to write about Christophe’s case because recently I found myself at the gates of the Hocine Ait Achmed stadium, driven by the notion that I could learn something about the world through football. Our stories are not the same. He came to conduct his profession. I came as a slightly naive groundhopper. I spent a long night splashing along the surface of the security apparatus that pulled him under.

Gleizes’ reporting focuses on football across the African continent. In 2018 he published Magic System, a book-length inquest into exploitation and abuse of young African players along talent pathways to Europe. According to his colleagues at So Foot magazine, his reporting trip to Algeria was slated to cover a variety of topics. Among them was a profile of French coach Patrice Amir Beaumelle and a retrospective on the life of Algerian international and prominent academic Saleh Djebaili. Gleizes had travelled to Tizi Ouzou to write about the glory years of Jeunesse Sportive Kabylie, one of the nation’s winningest clubs and an important conduit for Kabyle identity, a Berber ethnic group with a language, culture, and politics distinct from the rest of the country. In a country where football’s proximity to national identity, political history, and revolution is ever- present, very few football stories are just football stories.

Gleizes held a longstanding interest in the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of JSK striker Albert Ebossé. Ebossé was killed while leaving the field after playing 90 minutes for JSK against USM Alger in 2014. The official government report stated he was hit in the head by a rock thrown by JSK supporters. Witness accounts and an independent autopsy ordered by Ebossé’s family have cast doubt on that conclusion.

We find some seats in time for the second half. The match is drab, the home team dominating possession, visitors reduced to ten men, hunkered in their half. JSK gets a player sent off, too. It grinds on, ten against ten, nil-nil, until the sweet relief of the full-time whistle.

The atmosphere, though. The Kabylie Boys writhe and howl through it all, like a nest of hornets kicked loose from the dry hills looming over the stadium. On the terrace below, the Samba Boys ripple under hundreds of white flares, a mediterranean mirror-reflection of the scene back home in Marseille, in the Virages of the Velodrome– where yellow-green JSK kits are not unknown. The banners that hang from individual sections broadcast the names of cities outside of greater Kabylie– Tlemcen, Alger, Oran– calling on the breadth of the Kabylie diaspora across this vast country. JSK’s kits, as drenched with sweat on the terraces as they are on the players, are covered in the intricate geometric designs of traditional berber tattoos, prominent symbols of Kabyle identity.

***

The loudest doubts about the Ebossé case are cast by members of MAK, the Mouvement de l’Autodetermination de Kabylie, a Kabyle separatist group operating in exile from Paris. They contend the Algerian government killed Ebosse in a false flag operation designed to defame the club and its supporters.

The charges against Gleizes center on interviews he conducted in Paris with Ferhat Mehenni, an ex-associate of JSK who is now a prominent leader of MAK. MAK was declared a terrorist organisation by the Algerian government in 2021. It’s worth noting that Gleizes’ conversations with Mehenni occurred years before his current work in Algeria, and preceded the group’s terrorist designation.

“How else can we say it? Journalism is not a crime,” said Thibaut Bruttin, Director of Reporters Without Borders, in a recent press conference. “To collect sources, to speak with people, that is fundamentally the work of a journalist.” Reporters without Borders, along with the Gleizes family, is leading a petition and campaign to advocate for Christophe’s release. The campaign seeks to put pressure on French authorities to seek a diplomatic solution, while simultaneously appealing for a pardon by Algerian president Abdelmajid Tebboune.

***

As we walk out of the stadium, bantering with our new friends from Algiers, we are intercepted by two plainclothes detectives. They approach our local friend first. They ask after his father and chat to him about his work, to indicate they have pulled a file on him in the intervening 45 minutes. Unbothered, he waves us over. “These guys are detectives. They have questions for you.” They take our passports. They proffer no badges.

The night gets long. We are taken in unmarked cars and held for a length of time in the brightly lit lobby of a luxury hotel. Soon, the entire JSK squad limps in. They are huge, and young, and smell of cologne and sweat and grass. I feel embarrassed being in their presence. Our handler insists, rather forcefully, that we should take pictures with the team. “No, it’s really no trouble. I will call them over, they will be happy to. You are big football fans, after all?”

***

The night gets longer. Football becomes politics becomes football again. A man named Nourredine Ould Ali, head coach of the Yemen men’s national team, plops down in a lobby chair beside us. He was at the match too, scouting a player. He regales us with stories of away days across the Asian continent; the cold, dry altitude of Bhutan and the sniper turrets around the national stadium in Kabul. It’s true that our game is global, but the stakes of playing it are not the same everywhere. Eventually he dismisses himself for the drive back to Algiers. “I’d be happy to take you back with me,” he says. Never have I wanted to get in a stranger’s car so badly. Then he smiles and nods in deference at the detective. “But I know that is not possible.”
Sometime in the wee hours one of the detectives reappears. He tells us has personally offered to drive us to a town nearby where another car allegedly awaits to take us on to Algiers. Despite the late hour, he has his two kids with him, a girl of six and a boy around ten. They are unconcerned and a little sleepy. He plops his six year old in my friend’s lap in the front seat and his 10 year old snug between us in the back.
He is gregarious and warm despite the late hour. He asks about our families, and how we found the game. He chips in some unsolicited marital advice. He gives us his personal phone number and tells us to call him the next time we travel to Algeria. Suddenly, the car stops along an abandoned, dimly lit commercial corridor along a highway off ramp. A blacked-out sedan idles in the shadows. As we pile out of the car, I realise we lost our ball.

You can sign the Reporters without Borders petition .
For press or campaign inquiries, contact egarcia@rsf.org.

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