Fake Age - Ali's Words

Recently one of my old players contacted me and asked if he could join our team in Dubai. When we started figuring out a way to help him, we discovered that he had been playing around with his age on his documents. It beggars the belief that someone who is aspiring to be a professional footballer can think that he can lie about his age and get away with it.

This player had actually come to us back in 2019. He was a very talented young player; we trained him as a defender and he performed really well during the season. But just before the onset of the pandemic, we found out that he had changed his age from 17 to 18 on his passport just so he could get a visa to travel. Anyway, when Covid happened, he went back home. Now when we spoke about him coming to Dubai, he told me that he had once again changed his age from 22 back to 17 on his documents, this time to get into a club in Europe.?

Unfortunately, lying about your age to become a part of a club, to travel, or to prolong your career duration is quite common nowadays, especially in Africa. It is for this reason that people around the world are becoming quite cynical about the morality of football players.

I fail to understand how these players can expect to play on a professional level on the basis of lies and fake documents. They simply increase their age when they need visas to travel and then decrease it so that clubs and agents can take them on board. It seems that the clubs would now have to do a bone marrow test to determine the actual age of a player.?

You may think you’re smart to fake your age and get away with it, but the reality is that it’s a foolish way to get or achieve anything. By faking your ID, you may get the opportunity to participate in a trial, but eventually, you’ll lose it because of your dishonesty.