Dissolved 2007 | Ground Capacity 3,700 Founded 2006 | |
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Full name Sporting Afrique Football Club | ||
Sporting afrique fc top 8 facts
Sporting Afrique Football Club is a defunct professional football club which played in Singapore's S.League in 2006. The team was made up not of Singaporeans, but of players of African descent. Its squad consisted of players from Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Ghana. The club finished in 9th place out of 11 teams in the S.League in the 2006 season. They were involved in a number of off-field controversies, and were not invited by the FAS to participate in the S.League again in 2007. The club played its home games at the Yishun Stadium.
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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 their nationality to Singaporean and thus play for the Singapore national football team (as Nigerian-born Agu Casmir and Itimi Dickson had done).
In June 2006, it was reported that, while the players had been promised monthly salaries of S$1,600 (~US$1,000), they only received S$100 a month (~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 was around S$3,000. Their contracts 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 be "not short-changing any of them", eventually backed down and agreed to raise their salaries to S$600, with performance bonuses and better housing.
At the conclusion of 2006 season, the team finished in 9th place out of 11 teams in the S.League – well below the initial target of a top three finish.
The club applied to play in the S.League again in 2007, and submitted plans to the Football Association of Singapore (FAS) for a significant overhaul of their management. However, in December 2006, the FAS announced that the club's application to participate in the league in 2007 had been rejected.