Futty Danso

The reason Mamadou “Futty” Danso wore the rather odd number 98 for the Portland Timbers this year says a lot about globalization and soccer.  The story starts in his native Gambia, where he grew up carefully watching African players who found success on the international scene.  Among his favorites was the Cameroonian Marc-Vivien Foé , a classy midfielder for Lens, West Ham, Lyon, Man City, and the Indomitable Lions.  The day of Foé’s tragic death during Cameroon’s 2003 Confederations Cup match in France against Columbia Foé was wearing the number 17.  From that day forward. Futty, at the time playing with top Gambian club Ports Authority and on his way to stops with the Gambian U-23 national team, a club team in Senegal, a college team in Georgia, and a PDL team in North Carolina, always wore 17.

When he arrived in Portland this year, however, 17 was on the back of Timbers stalwart Scot Thompson and as an unproven rookie Futty knew he had no chance at the number.  But he remembered a trick from another of his childhood heroes— when Chilean legend Iván Zamorano had been unable to get his favored number 9 at Inter Milan, Zamorano took 18 with a plus sign in between.  Though Futty’s jersey doesn’t have a plus sign, 9 + 8 does equal 17 and it all adds up to a subtle nod to his African roots, his appreciation for Latin American creativity, his European fandom, and his current reality in the second tier of soccer in the United States.  Number 98 is essentially an inter-continental soccer mash-up.

Futty—whose nickname derives from a Fula honorific that translates approximately to “sir” and has served him in place of Mamadou his enitre life—doesn’t have any definitive explanations for The Gambia’s success, but he was kind enough to sit down with me last week and share his soccer stories.  Though the specifics of his experiences are unique, the patterns offer some rich examples of how the game plays from Africa.

As the 2009 USL season culminates this month, Futty has not necessarily been among the most prominent players on the field (particularly considering that the Timbers, despite having the best record over the course of the league season, were just eliminated from the play-offs by the Vancouver Whitecaps).  He’s an imposing figure, a fast and agile 6’3” 185 pounder with broad shoulders and a sculpted visage, but he’s still learning the professional game and has only figured in slightly more than half of the Timbers games during this rookie season.  So what’s interesting about Futty is his story as a Gambian in America in this year of African soccer.

The Gambia

From an outsider’s perspective, The Gambia offers one of the great mysteries of African soccer.  How is it possible that this former British colony, a nation of 1.7 million people (significantly fewer than the Portland metropolitan area) with the smallest landmass of any country in Africa, has produced teams of “Baby Scorpions” (the nickname for Gambia’s senior team is “The Scorpions”) that are among the most successful sides in world youth soccer?

Gambia announced itself by beating Brazil during the group stage of the 2005 U-17 World Cup in Peru, advanced to the knockout stage of the 2007 U-20 World Cup in Canada, won the African U-17 Championship in both 2005 and 2009, and will be an intriguing presence at the upcoming U-17 World Cup in Nigeria.  Gambia also has the surprising distinction of being home to more MLS players than any other country outside the Americas (there are currently 5 Gambian players in MLS—not including Mac Kandji whose mother is Gambian and father Senegalese—which by my tentative count is only bettered by Argentina with 11, Brazil with 10, Columbia with 9, and Costa Rica with 9).

Growing up with the game

Like most Gambian boys, Futty grew up playing the game informally with friends in streets, vacant lots, and anywhere else that could serve as an improvised field.  But in Futty’s family, education always came first: “when I was going to school, my dad wouldn’t let me play soccer.  I had to hide, tell him that I would have to stay at school for extra help so I could slip in time to play.”

His father was a headmaster at a local secondary school, and took it upon himself to ensure the whole extended family prioritized developing the mind over the body.  Mamadou Danso senior had been a distance runner in his day, and did not tend to think much of soccer.  During adolescence, when most talented Gambians joined organized teams either through their schools or through youth clubs, Futty played on the sly—locking himself in his room to “study” and climbing out his second story window to escape for a day with the game.

According to Futty, high school soccer in Gambia is kind of a big deal—and when good players in “the cities” (Banjul and Serrekunda are neighboring cities that comprise the primary urban area in The Gambia) make their decisions about where to attend 10^th grade for the start of senior secondary, they are often the subject of intense recruiting battles: “the coaches will call you all night; it’s like here [in America] for high school basketball players going to college.”

Partially to make things competitive, and partly to be a little further away from his father’s cautious eye, Futty and some friends went to “Gambia High” in Banjul—some 15 miles from his home in Serrekunda and right down the street from the other main option for talented youth: “Saints” (St. Augustine’s Senior Secondary School).  According to Futty, games between Gambia High and Saints were among the biggest events in the Gambian soccer scene.  When they played in big tournaments “almost everyone in Banjul that’s interested in soccer will come out—we play in the national stadium, and 15,000 to 20,000 people will be there.”  The games are such events that the crowds can get aggressive: “It’s a good thing people don’t drink that much…[being a 90% Muslim country] I never saw many people getting drunk…yeah, maybe some of the British tourists coming for a beach holiday, but with them most Gambians don’t actually know if they are drunk or just acting strange.”

In contrast, the biggest derby between the top local club teams might draw 8000 to smaller venues in town.  According to Futty, “even for track and field, everyone wants to see the inter-schools competitions—that will draw much more than a game like Wallidan v Real De Banjul.”  The top Gambian league is technically still an amateur affair where players get a few perks from team sponsors but not enough to make a living.  Unlike other leagues in west Africa such as those in Senegal or Nigeria, the Gambian league necessarily depends on youth.

Emphasizing youth

In thinking about the success of Gambian youth international teams, it seems significant that Gambians love their school sports.  In places like the Gambia, with an absence of extensive professional systems, schools offer a convenient opportunity to organize players and competitions that matter.  They also provide easy opportunities for coaches to scout young talent, and with such a small population there is a good chance that the best players will be seen.

In Futty’s case, top local club “Ports” (representing the Gambian Ports Authority) trained just behind Gambia High, saw him playing for his school, and invited him to join them.  Though this required a bit more subterfuge with his father, he signed on for a small monthly student allowance and expected to play with the rest of the youth players for Ports reserve team.  Early in his tenure with the club, however, one of the team’s main center backs took a knock and Futty’s size and speed made him the choice as a replacement.  The coach talked to him on a Tuesday, and on Saturday Ports took on their main rival Hawks.

Such opportunities for youth players to feature in senior games is, according to Futty, another key to the success of Gambian youth players.  Because the Gambian league is an amateur affair with only modest allowances or part-time jobs on offer, older players unable to go abroad often give up on soccer and move on to “real” jobs which they perceive as more likely to provide a living.  So the league itself, unlike more professional leagues in neighboring countries such as Senegal, includes mostly youth players trying to break-through.

Futty himself, after some success with Ports, had the opportunity to go on loan to a Senegalese team in Kaolack—just north of the Gambian border.  But he found the players there to be much more mature, and the game much more physical: “I was 18 and I think I only ended up playing the second half of one game, but that felt like I had played for 10 days non-stop; I mean after that I just went home and slept I was so tired.”  According to Futty, in Senegal the standard of the training facilities, the  stadiums, and the money was all higher than in Gambia—but that meant it was much more difficult for youth players to break in because in Senegal older players stick around.

Back in Gambia, Futty’s success with Ports and Gambia High led to some opportunities with the U-23 national youth team, including a nationally televised game against the senior team—a game organized in celebration of the Scorpions having tied Senegal in Banjul and barely lost on a late penalty kick in Dakar.  There is nothing Gambians enjoy more than competing with Senegal—their much bigger neighbor that literally encompasses The Gambia like a smothering glove.  Though Futty considers himself a fan of most African teams and hopes one might contend for the World Cup title in 2010, he emphasizes “as long as it’s not Senegal—if Senegal ever won the World Cup I’d have to commit suicide.”  I think he was kidding.

But that celebratory game between the U-23’s and the senior team finally blew Futty’s cover with his father: “I guess other people told my dad I was going to play; I mean I didn’t tell him.  I guess he was happy but he didn’t want to show me he was happy—he was like ‘I know you’ve been doing it for a long time’—and I said no, they just saw me playing outside.  But he said ‘the newspaper says you played for Ports Authority,’ so I said yeah I kind of played maybe a couple of games.  So he said ‘well, whatever you do be careful and don’t let soccer get in the way of school.”

Coming to America

Relatively soon thereafter Futty had a serendipitous encounter with an American college soccer coach travelling through Gambia looking for players with some academic credentials.  Like most young players in the Gambia, Futty had been thinking about trying to get overseas.  Because his father was worried about him neglecting academics, American college soccer seemed like the perfect compromise.  So he shipped off to a place I imagine to be about as far from Serrekunda as is humanly possible: Rocky Mount North Carolina, North Carolina Wesleyan College, and the less than elite world of NCAA Division III.

North Carolina Wesleyan College campus

He arrived a week after school started and had to sit out most of the North Carolina Wesleyan games because of complications with his NCAA paperwork.  He did enjoy his classes, earn some credits, and meet some good people in Rocky Mount—but financial aid got complicated and an opportunity arose to get an athletic scholarship with a brand new men’s soccer program at Southern Polytechnic in Atlanta.  After a year at Southern Poly he spent part of the summer back in North Carolina with Cary in the USL’s summer developmental league and ended up having a strong match against Burnley as they traveled through North Carolina during their 2008 pre-season.

In another of Futty’s happenstance experiences with random soccer outposts, he ended up being invited to join Burnley for the part of their training camp that took place in North Carolina: “It was good, it gave me some knowledge of how professionals go day by day.  I mean I thought I was in shape when I went to play with them, but man—I told my friend, these people earn their money; everything they do is 100 miles an hour.  It’s like they want to kill you.  You train twice a day, you don’t go anywhere, you don’t leave the stadium.”

There was some talk of him signing with Burnley and being loaned out for seasoning with a club team in a European country with less restrictive immigration requirements.  But it didn’t seem likely, and Futty went back for one more year at Southern Poly before finally committing to the professional game—first during a brief spell with DC United that was foiled by more administrative issues, a trial with the Minnesota Thunder that wasn’t too pleasing to either side, and finally signing with the Timbers for at least one season in Portland.

By the time he signed with Portland, Futty had been in the US for almost four years but he had never heard of Portland.  When he looked it up on the map and found a version near Boston he thought that would work fine; imagine his surprise when he got a plane ticket taking him to Oregon.

It’s worked out reasonably well; the Timbers have had a good season, Futty feels like he’s learned from the experience, and he appreciates the atmosphere both within and around the team.  But the outlines of what he describes as his life as a pro are less than glorious; he shares a team-provided apartment near the train station, plays soccer, and watches a lot of Fox Soccer Channel (though he may have been being a bit modest in talking with me considering he was recently named the Timbers “Community Player of the Year“).  He doesn’t have many impressions of Portland as a town—going out primarily for team functions or the occasional meet-up with a Gambian friend living in town with an American wife.

It turns out that particular Gambian was once a crafty left-back for the senior Gambian national team—but he left home to go to school “in Alabama or somewhere,” dropped out, married an American women, moved to Portland, and now “does some kind of work around town—I don’t even know what…It’s a good example actually of what used to happen to the best Gambian players—once they get to a certain age, they just stop playing.”  Some of the best Gambian players just sort of disappear.

Futty notes that many such players are on display every year in a 4^th of July tournament held as a sort of Gambian reunion in Atlanta.  One year he thought he recognized one of the heroes of his youth playing for the Gambian team from Washington DC, but couldn’t be sure because “I mean the guy is bigger now—he put on a lot of weight.”  But that was just because a player once considered among the best midfielders in all of West Africa no longer has anything to do with the game—Futty notes with a friendly laugh, “he just working in DC, living his American dream.”

The best place?

Futty himself is somewhat ambivalent about his American experience: “Most people in Gambia, they don’t know much about America.  They think what you see in movies, you’re going to live like that…but I mean it’s very different, people don’t know that but you try to tell them.  They say I want to come to America—but for myself if I had the option, like I had before, I don’t know if I would come to America.  I might try somewhere else.  And people are like ‘yeah, now that you’re in America you’re tired of that,’ but it’s not that.  I mean, it’s not that I don’t like America—it’s nice.  But you have to work really hard for anything.  It’s not like Gambia where you just sit down all day, food is not a problem, everything is cheap.  I mean here you have to work so hard for everything…I had an American friend that was travelling in Africa and first went to South Africa where everything is moving 1000 miles an hour.  Then he went to Gambia and everyone was just going at their own pace.  No one is in a rush, even the way they walk…if you have money, then Gambia is the best place…”

Such ambivalence is a familiar part of the American immigrant experience, and is probably enhanced by coming to play soccer.  The game itself is basically the same, but the world around the game is strange.  Futty knows most of the other Gambian players in MLS, having played with the Nyassi brothers at Ports back in Banjul, and while Kenny Mansally and Sainey Nyassi have now been around long enough to enjoy New England, Futty notes that for Sanna Nyassi coming to Seattle “I think it was a little tough for him—at first he was like ‘everything in America is just big;’ in Gambia its extra-small, but in America it’s just so big…”

In talking with Futty it struck me that Gambia’s “extra-smallness” may in fact be part of the secret to their success in world youth football.  Futty claims that it all started in The Gambia after watching France win the 1998 World Cup.  Perhaps due to the success of so many African immigrants, Gambians started to take soccer more seriously.  Then, a few years later, new leadership in the Gambian FA started to realize that “if you just focus on the senior players we will never get there—we didn’t have the quality, and we didn’t have enough players going abroad…so they said why don’t we start on the grass-roots level.  Since with the senior team it’s 90% that we’re not going to make any tournament, let’s start sending coaches out around the country looking for the youths.”

They didn’t have far to go—most of the successful players in Gambia come from the more urban areas around Banjul, Serrekunda, and Brikama.  Futty refers to the rest of the country as “the provinces” and notes that to play seriously you have to get to “the cities.”  Combining that with the prominence of inter-school competitions, and what seems to be a reasonably well organized system of “Nawettan” youth tournaments, and finding the best youth players would seem to be a relatively easy task.

In addition, as in many African countries the number of semi-formal “youth academies” has exploded—including one funded by Gambian born former England youth international Cherno Samba: Samger FC or “the academy boys.” Despite its focus on youth, Samger has been competitive in the top Gambian league and already counts an MLS player as an alum—Emmanuel Gomez at Toronto FC (even informal “training matches” for TFC have thus become news in the Gambia).

Yahya Jammeh

Youth sports in the Gambia also benefit from the patronage of the Gambian president Yahya Jammeh.  Jammeh seems to fit the mold of the stereotypical African autocrat, known internationally for his seeming obsession with witchcraft and fear of a free press.  But, Futty notes, the President really likes sports and has spent money on tournaments, competitions, and rewards—including plots of land for senior players involved in noble performances against Senegal, and a prize of 1,000,000 Dalasis (about $30,000) to each of the U-17 players from their last championship.

The future

Futty’s younger cousin Saihou Gassama is one of those U-17’s, and is a player Futty thinks has a chance “to be one of the best Gambian players ever.”  Whether or not that comes to fruition will likely depend greatly on how he and the Baby Scorpions perform in the upcoming U-17 World Cup in Nigeria.  As a child Gassama would tag along with Futty to trainings for Ports, and now features for the first team himself, but being almost 10 years younger he will likely have more lucrative options for the future than a liberal arts education in Rocky Mount North Carolina.

As for Futty, he’s not sure where his own journey will end.  He loves the game, and is sure that he wants to see how far he can go.  But he also recognizes that he’s not quite there yet.  When he talks about his various experiences with the Timbers, with Burnley, in Senegal, the consistent theme is a recognition that professional soccer involves an intensity and on-field savvy that he has yet to fully develop.  He’s big, fast, coachable, and improving—certainly worthy of a chance.  But he also plans to finish the 20 credits he needs for his computer science degree from Southern Poly, and hopes to go on for a Masters before too long.

Likewise, it will be interesting to watch what happens over time with the story of soccer in The Gambia.  Being “extra-small” combined with an intense emphasis on youth soccer seems to have helped The Gambia at the youth level, but those same qualities may prohibit senior success.  It may be, however, that for a place such as The Gambia the successful niche they’ve found is enough: despite valid fears that African soccer players are at risk of exploitation in our unequal world system, Gambians such as Futty seem to be leveraging the game towards what end up being worthwhile opportunities and pretty interesting stories.  Whatever happens with the Timbers, whether or not the Baby Scorpions challenge for the U-17 World Cup next month in Nigeria, such stories will go on—just as Futty will continue his own journey through the inter-continental mash-up that is the global game.

Andrew Guest writes weekly for Pitch Invasion. He is an academic social scientist and soccer addict living in Portland, Oregon. Having worked (and played) in Malawi and Angola, he has a particular interest in Africa. He can be contacted at drewguest (at) hotmail.com.

A gnawing and suspicious paradox lies at the heart of African national team experiences in world competition: African teams tend to do much better at the youth level than they do at the senior level.  Take the fact, for example, that African teams have won 5 of the 12 FIFA U17 World Cups (with the 2009 version scheduled to be hosted by Nigeria in October and November), but not a single African team has ever made it as far as the semi-finals of a full World Cup.  There are many possible explanations for this seeming paradox, including the unfortunately reality that player development in many African nations is hindered by weak national leagues and the poaching of players by wealthy European clubs.  Among the most common explanations, however, is simple: cheating.

The claim is that many African youth players are not really youth players at all because African nations freely send overage players to age-group competitions and are rewarded by the benefits of additional physical maturity and experience.  This claim is so pervasive that Nigerian blogger George Onmonya calls the use of a false age in African soccer “overage syndrome,” claiming (along with other African bloggers) that it is widely accepted among African players to have two ages: a “football age” and a “real age.”   Onmonya writes it is not uncommon in Nigeria for players to have as many as ten years difference between their football age and their real age: “A friend of mine who once played in the Nigerian league with Jigawa Stars told me his real age was thirty four two years ago but his football age was twenty one. He is still actively playing. He should be thirty six now and his football age twenty three.”

As such, Nigeria’s decision this summer “to eliminate age cheats” by using MRI scanning to test the age of their under-17 players was celebrated by a Reuters blogger as “the first step in ridding African soccer of a long-standing blight.” While it may be fair to describe speculation about the age of African soccer players as “blight,” the story of age in Africa is more interesting than a simple matter of cheating.  Though it may well be the case that “football age” is not the same as “real age,” both types of age are actually problematic in the soccer world.  While one might assume that science such as MRI scans could eliminate those problems, such an assumption fails when considering carefully the complicated meanings of age.

Football Age

The idea that African players and administrators manipulate age, valid or not, is a nearly constant presence in African soccer.  This summer, for example, a Zimbabwean news source announced that the reason their under 17 team had been selected for the 2010 youth Olympics in Singapore was because “Zimbabwe made history as the only country which was represented by players with the correct age group at the African Junior Championships held in March this year.” Though that particular claim may be an exaggeration (despite much speculation, Niger seems to have been the only team officially disqualified from the 2009 African under 17 championships), there is no question that many successful African youth teams have been accused of cheating by using over-age players.

Recent Gambian success in youth internationals (a phenomenon that has helped stock MLS with Gambian players such as the Nyassi brothers, Amadou Sanyang, Emmanuel Gomez, and Abdoulie Mansally), for example, has led to much speculation about the age of their players. The thinking boils down to the admittedly perplexing question of how The Gambia, a desperately poor country of 1.7 million people with a senior team currently ranked 99th in the world (having never qualified for the World Cup), could be the African under 17 champion in both 2005 and 2009?

Even beyond the circumstantial evidence, in my own experiences with African soccer age claims proved dubious at best.  When my Malawian team would travel to week-end road games a favorite pastime involved evaluating the age claims made by the national newspaper’s weekly player profile.  Each week the sports section interviewed one of the Super League’s star players, and each week that player’s listed “age” provoked laughter and incredulity amongst my Malawian teammates: “Ok, this guy claims he’s 20 years old—but I watched him play for the national team when I was in primary school.  So that would mean he started making national team appearances at 12!?!?  Not possible.”  But everyone understood what they were doing.  For Malawian players youth meant opportunity—the ultimate dream of getting picked up by a European club, or if not that, maybe a contract for real money with  South African club or at the least an extended life span in the Malawian national player pool.

In responding to a similar problem in South African soccer, University of Johannesburg sport sociologist Cora Burnett argues that the fundamental issue here is poverty: “Given the [nature] of poverty in a society where dishonesty often pays — high criminality, dubious ethical standards and ‘contaminated’ values — and a sports fraternity with pressures to succeed, overage participation needs to be unpacked.”  Though I agree poverty may play some role, this assessment to me sounds unnecessarily harsh.  While it is hard to argue that creating a football age is not a significant issue in African soccer, I would suggest that “unpacking” the issue also requires some critical inquiry about the meaning of “real” age.

“Real” Age

Establishing a “real” age for purposes of age grading youth sports is necessary as part of efforts to promote reasonable competition, but in many ways it is as problematic as creating a football age.  The first problem should be familiar to anyone who has ever been involved with youth soccer, or anyone who has been to a junior high school dance: kids mature at different rates.  Remember the dance in seventh grade where a fully mature 5’8” girl was dancing with your squeaky voiced 4’10” guy friend, while the early maturing tough guy in the class was biding his time in the corner stroking his goatee?  They were all the same chronological age, but very different biologically and, partially as a consequence, often very different socially.

Freddy Adu

Likewise, regardless of various speculations about Freddy Adu’s “real” age there is no question that when he joined DC United he was more physically mature than most 14 year olds.  That may well have been a simple matter of random biological chance, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is now clear he was well past his growth spurt.  It’s not Freddy’s fault, but it does raise perennial questions about whether it is prudent to invest millions in very young athletes who may well have peaked when other young athletes at the same “real” age have years of growth to come.  And when you go to Africa the questions start to get even more complicated.

One of the historical challenges of documenting age in Africa is that in many communities across the continent exact chronological age is not all that important.  This is not just a problem for soccer tournaments, but also for demographers and those interested in population trends.  According to one scholarly analysis by David Cleveland “Africa is probably the most difficult region of the world for which to obtain good estimates of numerical age” for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it is often more functional to sort people by biological and social maturity rather than by the exact date of their birth.

Though this is changing some with the expansion of Western health care systems and their dependence on chronological age, historically many African societies thought of people in “age sets” defined by their abilities, capacities, and social roles rather than by their exact birth date.  An 18 year old who is married with children would be treated as of a different age than an 18 year old finishing school and playing soccer.  In other words, the fact that Freddy Adu identified as a full professional at 14 would have more significance than the fact that he was born in 1989.  Cleveland notes “in terms of reflecting biological and social reality they may, in fact, be more meaningful than Westerner’s numerical ages.”

The fact that many African societies are more interested in biological and social reality than chronological reality is compounded by the fact that many African children are born without official birth certificates.  Again, this is changing with the spread of modern health care systems and literacy (most urban, and even many rural, Africans today would be born with some documentation), but the fact that not having a birth certificate is relatively common does create some space for negotiation.  I know when I was in Malawi the rumors were that the European coach running one of the national youth teams (working through the German national aid agency, which had a whole program devoted to sending soccer coaches to developing nations—a story for another day) was sending the players he wanted to take for a summer European tournament to the passport agency with ages he assigned them for his own convenience.

This trick is also much rumored across Africa, a rumor encouraged by claims of corruption in some of the African bureaucracies assigned to issue official papers.  George Onmonya, the Nigerian blogger, explains that “You can walk into any immigration office in Nigeria today, forge documents at the nearby business centre, change your name, place of birth, date of birth, pay seven to ten thousand naira instead of the official price of about five thousand five hundred naira for international passport and within hours you have completed the whole process.”  The bottom line in all this is that although numerical age might initially seem to be a straightforward matter, for reasons both natural and nefarious “real” age is a questionable concept.

Is Science the Answer?

Based on my questions about the nature of “real” age, it should come as no surprise that I am skeptical of claims that science such as MRI bone scanning is “the first step in ridding African soccer of a long-standing blight.”  In fact, with a little research it becomes clear that MRI bone scanning also raises as many questions as it answers.

The basics of the bone scanning technique proposed for use on Nigerian U17 players involves creating a Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) of player wrists to be evaluated by radiologists who would ostensibly determine “skeletal age.”  One problem here is that “skeletal age” is really just a measure of biological maturity, and people mature at different rates (think again about that junior high dance).  Another problem is that the scanning techniques require approximate interpretations that are inevitably imprecise.

One group of scientists from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, for example, specifically investigated the applications of the tests to sport and found that when nine radiologists evaluated the wrist scans of males between 14 and 18 years of age (chronologically) they could not accurately establish age: “In 1 subject the difference between the chronological age was underestimated by 2.4 years.  Clearly the method lacks the level of precision required for the purpose of screening players at age-group tournaments where a player 1 day older than the defined age is regarded as ‘too old’ for the competition.”  In fact, while the Nigerian source claims that the tests are accurate 90% of the time, other sources say the scanning has an error margin of plus or minus one year—which would make them functionally useless for FIFA competitions.

The South African scientists also note that the standardized measures used for the most common wrist scanning technique are based on samples of white English children and may not be directly comparable for children of other ethnicities.  In less scientific terms, the point is that such tests quickly trigger delicate questions about race, ethnicity, and bias.  As one Ghanaian-American commentator noted in 2005:

The intention of FIFA to using such imperfect technology points to the fact that nineteenth-century, Western scientific-thinking may still be right here with the rest of us in the twenty-first century. And this pretty much, unfortunately, reminds those of us avid students of Western scientific history of the racist science of Craniometry, or Craniology, which invidiously sought to “objectively” establish the relative intellectual inferiority of the non-white or non-European species of humanity – particularly continental Africans and their direct descendants around the globe – vis-à-vis the purported super-intellectual Aryan species of Western Europe and the European diaspora.

It is also quite striking to observe that the threatened use of MRI technology comes at a time that non-European nations appear to dominate the championship echelons of the Under-17 World Cup soccer tournaments. And so it may not be entirely gratuitous to factor in the question of race as a significant motivating element in FIFA’s intention of using MRIs to ascertaining the exact biological ages of players.

My own humble opinion is that this is less an issue of race than of the convenient delusion that age is a simple matter of science and birthdays.  I understand that youth international tournaments need to establish cut-off points and try to enforce them, but it is also important to recognize that those cut-offs are really just arbitrary markers based on our own cultural ways of thinking about age.  As such, while acknowledging that using “over-age” players can be problematic for player development within a country, it is also worth thinking carefully about whether African youth teams that “cheat” by using players of uncertain chronological ages are really doing anything worse than making up for having to play by someone else’s definition of “real” age.