Sporting Afrique FC
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| Sporting Afrique FC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Full name | Sporting Afrique Football Club | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Founded | 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Ground | Yishun Stadium Yishun, Singapore |
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| Capacity | 3,700 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Sporting Afrique Football Club is a professional soccer 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 2006. They were involved in a number of off-field controversies, and were not invited to participate in the S.League again in 2007.
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 had done).
Sporting Afrique played their home games at the Yishun Stadium.
In June 2006, it was reported that, while the players had been promised monthly salaries of S$1600 (~US$1000), 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$3000. 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. [1]
At the conclusion of 2006 season, the team finished in a lowly at 9th place out of 11 teams in the S.League – well below the target of a top-3 finish they had set at the start of the campaign.
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.
