Fighting for Hakeem

Football is the world game. It unites. At a grassroots level it creates communities and, in 2019, those communities helped save the life of one of its own.

In 2012, Hakeem al-Araibi was a promising young player on Bahrain's national football team when he was arrested for attacking a police station during the Arab Spring, despite television footage showing him playing soccer at the time of the alleged attack. After three months of torture and wrongful imprisonment, Hakeem was released. He fle...