Stuttgart, June 8: Stuttgart’s Congolese forward Silas Wamangituka has been playing under a false name and is a year older than previously thought.
The player, whose real name is Silas Katompa Mvumpa, informed the club recently he had been the victim of “machinations of his former agent” and that he was really 22 years old, Stuttgart said in a statement on Tuesday. “I have lived in constant fear over the past few years and have also been very worried about my family in the Congo,” Katompa Mvumpa said.
The discrepancy occurred when the Kinshasa-born Katompa Mvumpa was invited to a trial at age 18 by Belgian club Anderlecht in 2017. The club was interested in contracting him but advised him to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo before his visa expired and return after applying for a new one.
Stuttgart said that an agent in Belgium told the player he would not be able to return to Europe if he left Belgium and returned to Congo.
“He lived in Paris with the agent who largely cut him off from the outside. Silas had neither access to his account nor his papers at this time,” Stuttgart said in a statement.
The club said the agent changed the player’s identity and provided him with papers that identified him as Silas Wamangituka (one of his father’s names) with a date of birth, Oct. 6, 1999, changed by exactly one year. (AP)
