Youth Teams At The Centre

The desire to play football is growing high among Cameroonian. Most people begin developing interest in the sport late. As a result catching up in the youth category becomes difficult. This is one of the reason why some children get their ages slashed to fish into the youth categories. This now spurs up the current problem of age fraud especially at the youth level. Cameroonian teams have been victims of age fraud in one way or the other. The most recent is the case of the U17 national men’s football whereby 32 players were disqualified from the UNIFFAC Tournament that took place in Limbe in January. The players were disqualified not because of performance-enhancing chemicals or hormonal supplements but because of age fraud. Clinical tests suggested that the players were older than 17 years. Team officials had to go hunting for other players to make up another team. 
The decision to bar players from the competition was based on a procedure that FIFA put in place in the 2009 U17 World Cup that took place in Nigeria. It urged youth players to submit to Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans of their wrists in an attempt to determine their age eligibility. The aim is to prevent older, stronger players from entering youth tournaments in settings where birth certificates or other ways of verifying age maybe absent. During the U20 AFCON in Mali in 2022 the Cameroon U20 team that went to the competition was accused by the Mauritanian team for having falsified the ages of several players who played at the Nouakchott Stadium. What has raised eyebrows is the fact that among the players that played the U17 World Cup only one player, ...