Horatiu;2863253 said:
How am I late on the news? I simply wanted to start a thread on a player and talk to SG about him.
fair enough ... it sounded like you had just discovered the guy ... anyway, he's going to be ridic, given what he's shown already ...
mrromaniac;2863263 said:
Another promising one with strange age:
Emmanuel Mbola of Tottenham (i didn't know he was at Tottenham until I read the WP article; I still believed he was at Pyunik)
He has 20 caps for Zambia at 16 years old. He is 3 days older than Lukaku.
I'm from Zambia, and know of Mbola well ... he's not at Spurs, though there was a possibility of that happening ... he's in DR Congo, playing for TP Mazembe now ... I was and still am very skeptical about Mbola's age, especially because dodgy things happening with birth certificates is not unheard of in that part of the world ...
another example: at the last World Cup in 2006, I was shocked to hear that Ghanaian Haminu Draman was eligibile for the Young Player Award, because he looked at least 30 at the time ...
I was skeptical about Freddy Adu too (coz he was born in Ghana, not the USA), and didn't look 14 when Nike and the MLS had a big party to announce his professional contract ... but he doesn't seem to have encountered any problems with any authorities regarding his age and/or birth certificate ...
Nonelito;2863250 said:
So you still believe that he's only 16?
Common...he's at least 25...unless he's Hulk's cousin...and I don't mean Porto's star player
mrromaniac;2863263 said:
Ahem... He totally doesn't look like 16, but note that his father (apparently) is born in 1966. Pretty plausible.
the point about his father is a valid one ... and unlike Mbola (and Adu and Draman), Lukaku was born in Europe ... I don't know if it is easy or not to forge papers such as birth certificates in Belgium, but I would expect that it would be rather more difficult to get away with it than in Africa ... I'm still skeptical, but will have to go with what has been declared at the moment ...
in the last couple of years, FIFA has engaged age testing through MRI scans for youth tournaments ... but with both Lukaku and Mbola already playing for their senior national teams, there could be no mandatory age test administered for them ... hopefully the truth -- whatever it may be -- comes out soon enough ...
. 
