Revealed: 4 Black Meteors players falsified passports

Four Ghana Under-23 male team players falsified their passports to get into the team, a management committee member, Nana Oduro Sarfo has sensationally revealed.

The four players travelled with the team to Mozambique for the first leg tie of the qualifiers for the 2015 All Africa Games last weekend.

Luckily, officials of the Olympic team detected the anomaly in their passports early and stopped them from featuring in the game to avoid any potential embarrassment.

The four players, whose identifies GHANAsoccernet.com is withholding, have more than one passport with different birthdays.

The Black Meteors lost 1-0 against their host and an outspoken member of the management team, Oduro Sarfo, revealed the players falsified their passports to be in the team.

“We have a situation where about four of the players changed their names and ages to get into the Black Meteors for the trip to Maputo. One player called Goza changed his name to Kudjo Mensah and also changed his name to get into the team,” he told Accra-based Happy FM

“I realized this development immediately the first squad was called so I reported my observation to the chairman of the U-23 team and he has begun investigations into this development so as to deal with it.

Oduro Sarfo is unhappy with the selection criteria for the team during their recent international friendly against Egypt, insisting the call-up of Hearts goalkeeper Mutawakilu Seidu was suspect.

“I just couldn’t imagine how a goalkeeper like Eric Ofori Antwi who has graduated from the under-20 team, would be left out and Mutawakilu Seidu would rather be called.”

The fabrication of players’ age continues to be a problem for football in Africa and South America especially.

Suspicions about true ages of some Ghanaian footballers date back many years with Ghana being banned at the Under-17 level in a recent example.

Ghana has a rich tradition of seemingly promising youngsters who mysteriously fail to fulfill their potential due to age-cheating and falsified documents.

The growing phenomenon of age cheating forced world governing body, FIFA, to introduce the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which subjects young players to determine their true ages.