FIFA uses MRI to prevent age cheating at U-17 World Cup

To prevent age cheating, the International Association of Federation Football (FIFA) will use MRI on soccer players at the FIFA U-17 World Cup, which starts Saturday in Nigeria.

"In order to protect the integrity of the tournament and in the spirit of fair play, FIFA has decided to conduct MRI of the wrist at the FIFA U-17 World Cup Nigeria 2009,” said FIFA in a statement. “Randomly selected players will be tested in Nigeria under the supervision of FIFA's medical experts.”

The Zurich, Switzerland-based FIFA said it believes, based on studies performed by the association’s Medical Assessment and Research Center, that an MRI of the wrist can accurately and reliably—and with no risk to the player—determine whether or not a player is above the age of 17. Players over the age of 17 are ineligible to play in the tournament.

In a study that looked at how MRI of the wrist could determine age in adolescent male soccer players (Dvorak et al; Br J Sports Med 2007; 41:45–52), researchers looked at wrist scans that had been performed on more than 500 soccer players with confirmed birth certificates between 14 and 19 years of age, and of different ethnic origins (Switzerland, Malaysia, Algeria, Argentina and Senegal).

For purposes of the study, a six-point grading system for fusion of the distal radius was developed, and according to the authors, the “correlation between age and grade of fusion was highly significant.”

Jiri Dvorak, MD, one of the study's authors and FIFA's chief medical officer said, “[b]ased upon the normal population it was established that complete fusion is very unlikely to occur prior to 17 years of age, with the probability in fact being below 1 percent.”

Which means, Dvorak said, that if the MRI shows complete fusion of a player's wrist, there is more than a 99 percent certainty that the player is older than 17 years.

Further studies by FIFA’s Medical Assessment and Research Center (Dvorak et al; Br J Sports Med 2007; 41(8):497-500) involved wrist scans of 189 players from four FIFA U-17 competitions (the FIFA U-17 World Cups 2003 and 2005, and the Asian U-17 championships in 2004 and 2006). Those MRI exams showed that a higher degree of distal radius fusion was found among these players than a normative population of soccer players. For example, the scans taken during the FIFA U-17 World Cup 2003 showed that 35 percent of the players had complete fusion of the distal radius.

“This mismatch between the age stated in the official documents and biological maturity assessed from fusion of the distal radius in some U-17 players cannot be clearly explained,” said the authors, “but it supports the suspicion that some U-17 players are older than stated in their official documents.”

Age cheating has long plagued international soccer. Earlier this year, the U-17 team from Niger was disqualified from the African U-17 championships in Algeria (after reaching the semi-finals) when an investigation revealed that one of the players on the team was 22 years old.

According to reports in Sports Illustrated and other media outlets, the Nigerian U-17 team dropped 15 players from its team after wrist MRIs determined they were older than the allowed age for the upcoming U-17 World Cup.

Michael Bassett,

Contributor

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