Sporting Afrique FC

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Sporting Afrique FC

Full name

Sporting Afrique Football Club

Founded

2006

Ground

Yishun Stadium
Yishun, Singapore

Capacity

3,700

League

S.League





Home colours





Away colours

Sporting Afrique Football Club is a professional soccer club which was formed to play in Singapore's S.League in 2006. The team is not made up of Singaporeans, but of players of African descent. Its squad for the 2006 season consists of players from Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Ghana. The team plays its home games at the Yishun Stadium.

In allowing Sporting Afrique to join the league, the S.League hoped that their involvement would make the competition more exciting, and possibly unearth some good players who might be able to change the nationality to Singaporean and thus play for the Singapore national football team (as Nigerian-born Agu Casmir and Itimi Dickson have done).

With the conclusion of 2006 season, the team finished lowly at 9th place, well short of the top-3 target set at the beginning of the campaign. The club is likely to undergo major overhaul, which includes replacing all the African players with other development teams from Asia. [1]

[edit] Controversy

The club was at the centre of a minor controversy in June 2006 when it was revealed that, while the players had been promised monthly salaries of S$1600 (~US$1000), they only received S$100 (~US$60) as S$700 was deducted for food, reportedly a monotonous diet of rice and chicken, and S$800 for accommodation, despite all 22 team members living 5 or 6 per room in the same house in an area where a typical house rental is around S$3000. Their contract also forbade talking to the media, but team members contacted the BBC anonymously, drawing international attention. Club president Collin Chee, who had initially claimed to "not [be] short-changing any of them", eventually backed down and agreed to raise their salaries to S$600, with performance bonuses and better housing. [2]

As at November 2006, the club's web site has not been updated for 3 months, since August, reflecting another operational deficiencies of the club.