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Age can be a sensitive issue. Just ask Lazio, the Roman soccer club, which on Thursday announced it would sue anyone who suggested that one of its youth players was old enough to be the father of his 17-year-old teammates.
The Serie A club was reacting to an internet and Twitter frenzy surrounding Joseph Marie Minala, an attacking midfielder from Cameroon.Tweeters have pointed out that in photographs he looks much older. His agent said Minala has led a hard life.
A French-language Senegalese website first published a report quoting Minala as saying he would be 42 at his next birthday in August, and then another saying it had found childhood friends of Minala who say he is at least 36.
Lazio responded by saying they were satisfied that Minala’s birth certificate was genuine and that the documents the club filed with the soccer authorities were accurate.
Minala said, "I have read the alleged statements posted on the website senego.net in which it says I confessed my real age which was different to what was stated in my documents."
"They are false statements that have been attributed to me by people who do not know."
His agent, Diego Tavano, told Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: “He had a difficult time growing up. If you talk to him you’ll realise he is in every way a 17-year-old lad."
Minala shut down his social media accounts as they filled with insulting messages questioning his age.
“Football’s Benjamin Button“
On Twitter, NotMatchoftheDay called him “football’s Benjamin Button". Bootifulgame pointed out that whether he was 17 or 41, “he’s a pretty good player for his age". And that’s the nub.
As a teenager, Minala is an impressive talent. Lazio beat off competition from several other Italian clubs to sign him. If he’s 17, the club has made a potentially lucrative investment in a player who could have a long career ahead. If, on the other hand, Minala is 41, then he has little future and Lazio is being conned.
As the club’s website says in its biography of the player, Minala “is now living his dream at Lazio. Minala, like most of his compatriots in Africa, dreamt of becoming a football player and living a better life".
The Lazio website goes on to tell what, depending on your point of view, is either a heart warming story of triumph over adversity, or a typical tale of the callous way agents and European clubs treat young African desperate to “live the dream".
"At the age of 15 he decided to leave his home town Yaoundé so that he can go to Rome, Italy where there is something waiting for him," says Lazio’s English-language site. "Little did he know that nobody will be waiting for him when he arrives at Rome. A football agent should’ve been at the [airport] to wait for him and try to help him find a club where he can become a professional football player. Nobody was at the airport and he had no choice but go to the police station."
Minala, says Lazio, found himself in foster care but was spotted playing the game he loved for a local amateur team. Soon he was at Lazio.
It is an adventure that could make anyone look wizened before their time. The problem is that age is an old question for African footballers.
Western suspicions
Western Europeans have long viewed the documents carried by African footballers with suspicion. Nigerian fans, bloggers and even club officials suggest that their country’s failure to turn success in under-17 competitions into triumph at the World Cup is because the stars of their youth teams, Taribo West, Nwankwo Kanu, Obafemi Martins, Jay-Jay Okocha and so on, were all grown-ups when they played in youth competitions and, therefore, too old when they played as grown-ups.
Guy Roux, for more than 40 years the manager at Auxerre in the French league, once told Le Parisien newspaper that when a young African "gave his age I would ask him if he was merely calculating the sales tax on the real total. In youth matches, I often had the impression that fathers and sons were playing on the same team".
It is a history of suspicion that now haunts Minala.
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