Ivorian footballer Malick Yalcouyé falsely accused of lying about his age

Malick Yalcouyé scored his first goal for Brighton on August 30, one of the first games that the 20-year-old Ivorian footballer has played for the team. Shortly thereafter, he became the target of baseless rumours that he is lying about his age.  

During the match, social media users started posting comments on football pages, claiming that Yalcouyé is older than 20, based on his appearance alone. 

Photos from the archive posted by his junior club 

So what is going on with these accusations? People suspicious about the real age of African footballers playing in Europe isn’t new. In French, there is even a pejorative term: a "présus" is a player who is allegedly being passed off as younger than he is. 

Even though there is a history of this happening in a number of African countries, there are also lots of players who are falsely accused. 

In Yalcouyé’s case, his youth club ASEC Mimosas in Abidjan came up with an innovative plan to combat the rumours. They dug into the archives to find photos documenting Yalcouyé’s physical evolution from the age of 12 (in 2018) to 2023. 

"Let’s move away from useless controversies and mean-spirited debates. The photos, the archives and Malick’s journey speak volumes more than all the speculations,” the youth club wrote on its Facebook account on Sunday.

Dobe Aboubacar, a journalist specialised in Ivorian football, also posted that Yalcouyé suffers from alopecia, which resulted in him losing hair in recent years. You can see this starting in 2024.

A Real Madrid player also targeted 

In recent weeks, another young, Ivorian professional footballer player, 19-year-old Yan Diomandé, recently recruited by Real Madrid, has also faced accusations of lying about his age. Social media posted on football pages on X and Facebook that a photo showing Diomandé as a teenager was taken in 2013, when, according to his official age, he would have only been 6 years old. 

However, we were able to prove that the photo in question was taken much more recently, when Diomandé really was a teen. In the photo, he is wearing a Chelsea football jersey from the 2021-2022 season, when Diomandé was at least 14 years old. You can see the jersey in the archives of the site Casual Football Shirts. The jersey has the name of one of their sponsors, the telephone company “Three” on it. Three only started appearing on jerseys in 2020. 

Another image has also been circulating showing Diomandé with lots of wrinkles. This image is a case of AI being used to modify a real photo posted by Yan Diomandé. To figure this out, we ran the image through a tool developed by OpenAI that identifies images generated using its tools (like ChatGPT). It detected that the image was modified using AI. 

Several recent scandals involving fake ages

"We often see these kind of suspicions about Black athletes,” said historian Yvan Gastaut on French radio RFI in mid-August, when he was asked about these rumours targeting Ivorian athletes. Gastaut studies at migration and sports.  

"I’d say that there isn’t any proof that he isn’t 19, but unfortunately there isn’t any proof that he is 19 either,” said journalist and sports sociologist Hervé Kouamouo on RFI. “That means that we can make up lots of situations, lots of stories and feed them with fake news.”

As far back as the Eighties, there have been cases of players whose ages were falsified. The goal was to allow older athletes to outperform in a younger age group. 

"Since the Youth World cups were created and especially in the 1980s and 90s, it was common to pass off older African players in younger categories,” Kouamouo said, adding that this often happens in countries “where the governments were not very reliable”. 

In recent years, there have been a number of controversies about players lying about their ages within African sports. In 2024, French newspaper Le Monde revealed that Cameroonian player Nathan Douala, who was presented as a 17-year-old prodigy during the 2024 African Cup of Nations, was actually at least 23 years old.

The controversy pushed the president of the Cameroonian Football Federation to announce a "vast clean-up operation in terms of the personal details of Cameroonian footballers”, including requiring all footballers over the age of eight to have a digital national identity card.  

Leaders within the football world hope that their clean up operations combined with a better structuring of the football training system in the country, especially in terms of the academies that work with players from a young age, will limit these situations. 

"I think there will be fewer and fewer of these controversies (...) about players playing in the top leagues in Europe,” Kouamouo said.