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.
One X user asked the AI Grok to determine Malick Yalcouyé’s age based on this photo taken during the match between Chelsea and Brighton on August 30, 2026. © X.com © X.com 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. At left is the Facebook post by Malick Yalcouyé’s youth club, ASEC Mimosas, which shared photos of Yalcouyé being trained from 2018 onwards.
At right are two photos of Yalcouyé taken in 2021 and 2022 when he was a teen. © ASEC Mimosas / Facebook © ASEC Mimosas / Facebook 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. 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.
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