YOU have to imagine that several soccer bosses across the continent wet themselves senseless after football governing body Fifa announced this week that new technological advancements would make it possible to determine the ages of players who will be taking part at the Under-17 Soccer World Cup in Nigeria next month.
Tests will be conducted on players from the 24 competing nations with a new bone magnetic resonance imaging scanner that will accurately determine their ages. This bit of news should have been enough to make many stomachs turn, and several teams will no doubt suddenly undergo major personnel changes in the weeks before the start of the October 24-November 15 junior tournament.
Several African countries in particular must be frantically searching for real under-17 players at this eleventh hour after initially thinking they would be allowed to continue to pass off balding “ou toppies” as 15-year-olds, as they’ve always done over the years.
You see, dear readers, these junior events are so riddled with age-cheating that we had grown accustomed to the curse of 20- something teenagers.
We had come to expect that allegations of age-falsifying would inevitably rear their ugly heads at junior tournaments — in all age groups for that matter — just as we had come to accept that little would be done about the claims. You only had to take one look at the team line-ups before matches and you would know there was no way in hell some of the colossal hulks prancing among the real “laaities” could ever be teenagers.
At previous tournaments, some of the under-17s looked as if they’d been shaving for more than a decade, while some were so big it was not hard to imagine they were actually teachers at the very high schools they claimed they were studying at.
Incredibly, the organisers of these tournaments have always been well aware of the cheating, but very little has ever been done to combat this major problem.
Closer to home, there are a lot of players running around this country claiming to be in their early 20s when we all know that most of them are on the wrong side of 30.
In fact, a lot of them were already around when South Africans saw television for the first time in May 1977, even though their soccer passports and IDs suggest they were born in the late 1980s. One high-profile soccer player, who shall remain nameless, claimed he was 20 years old when he first came into prominence about five years ago.
News that our man was actually the father of a seven-year-old and had been married for about eight years did not even make the guy blink an eyelid when confronted with the story. He must have been one hell of a productive 12-year-old if he was able to handle lobola negotiations and also father a son at such a young age. Gripping stuff!
Anyway, this new Fifa technology could not have come at a better time since continental football has never been able to reach the next level because of age cheating.
Think about it. Why is it that no African country has been able to reach the semifinals of the World Cup, yet Africa is so dominant at junior level? How is it possible for this continent to have so many world titles at junior level, yet no country has been able to reproduce these feats on the senior stage?
And pray tell, what has happened to the numerous “teenage” stars who displayed so much potential and promise during the junior championships?
The fact that most of the teams, and the so-called teenagers who dominated those events, disappeared into oblivion after winning only served to add further credence to the suspicion that most former champions had overage players with falsified documents.
And the biggest losers of this sorry mess? Africa, of course.
Hopefully the days of watching shameless old-timers masquerading as teenagers are now finally over. Bring on that technology, Fifa, and end this charade.
- Ntloko is sports editor.