By Omar Jarju
Age cheating in African Football is becoming a huge effect on football clubs and National teams across the continent that many at times lead to unrolling performances.
The major and latest setback is suffered by Nigeria U17 Golden Eaglets with 15 of the 40 players listed for the final team selection all failed the mandatory MRI age-test ahead of their zonal qualifiers in Niger next month.
The development is a recollect of that of two years ago when as many as 23 players failed the age test so much so that the five-time world champions Ghana equally failed to qualify for the U17 AFCON in Rwanda.
In 2009 when as newly-crowned African champions for the second time, more than half of the Gambian team were found to be overage and therefore disqualified when the Fifa Under-17 World Cup used the MRI technology for the first time to prove the age of players.
The cause of this has now send shockwaves as to what the future now holds for the growth of African football.
Meanwhile, here are the taught of some African sports Journalists on the causes of age cheating and possible solutions to this problem.
Abdoulie Bah: a multiple award winning Gambian sports journalist host, now based in the US. I think we can deal with the problem of age cheating in African football to some extend by using modern technology like the MRI test. But while that will reduce the opportunity of age cheating, I have to say that it wouldn’t eliminate it at all. I think we should stop making excuses for intentional cheating in football. We have to try to improve the financial status of clubs, I think this is the root cause of everything because clubs are so poor in African football that they try to rush the development of their players. We also have to improve the data saving methods of our league organizers, be it the football federation and the continental bodies should be able to have ways of detecting people who enter double age in difference competitions. Finally, we have to expose and ban football officials who are corrupt because some of these things are caused by football officials. Go everywhere around Africa, technical Directors, coaches and other officials who have connections to national teams try to accept bribes from especially young talents that are coming from Europe of African descent. Some of them don’t have any opportunity to represent their adopted countries, so of some officials take bribes to accept these people to that national teams.
EMEKA, a Nigerian Journalist- Age cheating in African football in a big program and it doesn’t allow our footballers get to their great potentials. For the case of Nigeria, they’ve won the U17 world cup for five times, more than any other country in the world. But unfortunately, the same Nigeria had failed to win the U20 world cup let alone getting into the quarter final of the FIFA world cup at senior level. What this means is that, in Nigeria they use a lot over age players to player under age competitions. At the end of the day, you see a 27 year old playing as an U17 and by the time he is 20 years old, he already passed his time and at the end of the day, he doesn’t get to realize his full potential. So, it’s a general process in Africa and we have to look at ways to fix it.
MICHAEL OTI ADJEI, BBC Sports Reporter in Ghana- Well, I think is pretty obvious that when players cheat at the very early stage, shows a case of dishonesty in them. From that moment, there is nothing right about them because they know that they can’t fix a passport, you can cheat your way into the highest level. If I look at the way African players have raised into the top level in Europe, I’m not sure that age cheating is impacting on their long term careers. This is a serious thing in African football, and we can fix by exposing those involved in it.
