Are you worried that your football career might be thrown into a ditch or your son or daughter’s career might be jeopardized due to age cheating?
Young football players, their parents and their coaches must be wary of recent negative reports about few Gambian players found wanting for allegedly falsifying their ages. The most recent of all is Yusupha Yaffa and Ousman Manneh.
Last week, it emerged that Yaffa gave his youth club, AC Milan a false age that allowed him to train with the youth team of the Milan based club. Italian authorities who granted the young man citizenship two years ago said that they have realized that Yaffa has lied about his age claiming he is 19 when he is actually 28.
Foroyaa Sports further reported that, Italian authorities were said to have been monitoring Yaffa and found out that he wrote 1987 on his official social media page, Facebook. He wrote 1987 on Facebook, is a complete contrary to 1993 that he gave the Italian authorities.
Recently, another Gambian player, Ousman Manneh aka Mamanding, was also on the limelight for allegedly falsifying of his age with reference made to an age on the official CAF website.
Manneh stole the limelight during the summer with German side, Verder Bremen when he scored four goals in a pre-season friendly. He has since impressed the first team coach but since his purported age falsification case, nothing much has been heard about him.
With these developments, one would assume that every stakeholder in football; players, coaches, parents and journalist will keep an eagle eye and be very cautious.
Sometimes you are left startled and confused as to who is responsible for falsifying a player’s age. Some people clearly blame the players’ parents and coaches for accepting to butcher the ages of their sons and daughters while others squarely blame the players.
Football players must be aware that reducing their age doesn’t guarantee their chances of being signed by a top club in Europe hence European clubs are now wary of signing teenage players from Africa due to age falsification.
In case they sign you, it might take you ages to break into the first team while you aging. Mostly by the time you reach the peak of your career, your actual age becomes 30, an age nearing the end of your football career.
One area players must pay attention to is the social media. Imagine a player posting pictures of him/herself on Facebook, Instagram, twitter and other social sites in 2010 only to say that they are 14, 15 or 16 years in 2016. Does that mean that the said player was playing in the Gambian league at age 13 and 14? Is the GFF allowing juveniles to play in league? Is it even advisable to use a 15 year old players in the top flight of Gambian football? This is where most clubs are found culpable, because no matter how much you blame the player and their parent, some clubs are notorious of tapping young players and carving ages for them simply because they want to keep them longer in their clubs.
Google will provide any information published about any players so players who are once profiled by a newspaper, or an online publication or whose data has once been entered on a CAF website must know that the age they cannot be any different.
Apart from the social media, players who graduate from school in 2012-14 go on claiming that they are 14, 15, 16 and 17 years old as a football player. This is all too confusing and completely wrong. The graduating age for any school going chap in The Gambia is mostly 18, 19 or 20 so how comes players who completed senior secondary school five, four or three years ago go by 14, 15, 16 or 17 years in the football cycle. To know the actual age of a Gambian, just ask when did you graduate from school?
The Gambia have been kept under surveillance since its U-17 won the African U-17 championship where the South African coach accused the Gambia of using overage players. Seven years on, when the Seedy Kinteh led executive were been dissolved, one of the reason was that his executive has overseen a period were The Gambia celebrated winning with overage players thus raising an alarm. In 2013, The Gambia used five overage players in a CAF U-20 qualifier against Liberia, an act that saw the country banned from all CAF and FIFA sanctioned competitions.