By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 1 1999 (IPS)

Four young athletes risk permanent exclusion from Brazilian professional football because they lied about their ages in an attempt to improve their chances at a sports career, an increasingly common occurrence in this football fanatic country.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) suspended the memberships of three players after they were found to have lied about their ages. They now face proceedings in a court for sports- related issues.

The real ages of the three men ranged from 19 to 23, but they registered with the CBF as being one to three years younger, using false birth certificates. A fourth player is expected to face the same fate after authorities review his documents.

The fraud would have passed undetected if the three had not achieved a level of fame as promising football players. They had even become champions in world and South American tournaments for players younger than age 17 when they were all in fact older.

Age falsification is a known practice in the world of Brazilian football. Those who take the relatively easy step of obtaining a birth certificate with an altered birthday are known as “gatos” (cats).

The “gatos” hope that the false document will win them access to a career that millions of children – and their parents – dream about. They long for the international fame and wealth of Brazilian greats like Ronaldo and Rivaldo, or other football stars, many now playing for Spanish or Italian football teams.

Professional football clubs, which receive countless applications every day, use age as an exclusion criteria. Rarely do they accept adolescents older than 14 or 15 for their junior squads.

To get past this obstacle and open the doors to a magical world where fame and fortune can be built in a few years, lowering one’s age has become common.

Football may owe much of its global popularity to the fact that it is a more democratic sport than others – a player does not need specific physical traits, like height or strength, in order to be successful.

Shorter players, such as the stars Maradona or Romario, never would have had a chance at successful career playing basketball or volleyball.

But proving the skills of a future champion at the youngest age possible has become a requirement for acceptance into the schools and clubs that are the antechamber to professional football. The natural consequence is that candidates try to dodge the dictates of age.

Adolescents, too young to weigh the risks, are encouraged to lie by their coaches, “talent scouts” or their own parents, lamented Paulo Cesar Carpegiani, head coach for the Sao Paulo club, the team of two of the suspended players.

One of them, Sandro Hiroshi, was the flashpoint for the current scandal. He was transferred under questionable circumstances from the small, unknown Tocantinópolis club in northern Brazil, to a club in Sao Paulo state, Rio Branco, where he stood out as an aggressive goal scorer.

The Sao Paulo club, one of Brazil’s principal teams, then acquired the player for some 1.3 million dollars. The CBF penalised the club for the player’s illegal status, and threatens to demote the team to a lower division in the national league.

Hiroshi confessed that he had altered his birth certificate – changing the year of his birth from 1979 to 1980 – when he was 14 years old, and assumed full responsibility for the act. Football authorities suspect he is trying to protect an adult from blame.

In the sports world, many fear that the world football oversight board, the ‘Fédération Internationale de Football’ Association (FIFA), may bar Brazil from next year’s Olympic Games and the 2002 World Cup due to the illegal status of some of its players.

Mexico endured a two-year suspension from international football tournaments when it was discovered that four older players with falsified documents participated in a 1988 junior tournament.

The Brazilian case is different and the nation’s football league does not risk international sanctions, assured CBF president, Ricarto Teixeira, arguing that it was the players themselves who cheated, not the principal national football institution, as was the case in Mexico.

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