False Glory, a true-crime documentary series recently announced by Showmax is all set to delve into three shocking stories that rocked the sports world, from cheating at the Comrades to rigging South Africa’s 2010 FIFA World Cup warm-up games to an illegal immigration case linked to a Serie-A football star.
The first episode, The Marathon Bros, is slated for Monday, 19 August. In 1999, on Youth Day, as Nelson Mandela stepped down and Thabo Mbeki was named President, relatively unknown 21-year-old Sergio Motsoeneng came ninth – because he’d swapped during the race with his 19-year-old brother Fika!
“I’m never going to condone cheating in any way in our sport – but it is quite ingenious,” says Bruce Fordyce, who won the Comrades a record nine times – eight of which were consecutive. “It is also fraud, and fraud is criminal… They’re lucky they didn’t do jail time.”
“They had really, really great talent,” says Botha. “They came ninth – but they could have won it.”
The second episode, Match Fixing, premieres on Monday, 26 August. In 2010, Togo’s national soccer team traveled 3 500 miles to play in an exhibition game against Bahrain – but the Togolese authorities knew nothing of the match…
The bogus game had been set up by Wilson Raj Perumal of Football 4 U International, who, after his arrest, claimed to have rigged South Africa’s friendlies before the 2010 FIFA World Cup – and more than 80 other matches around the world. He claimed to have a 70-80% success rate.
The third and final episode, The Baby Footballers, premieres on Monday, 2 September. Many children in Cote d’Ivoire grow up wanting to be the next Didier Drogba. The Baby Footballers is the story of four such Ivorian boys, aged between 12 and 17, whose parents agree to sign over guardianship so their children can move to Italy on the promise of footballing glory.
One of them, Christian Kouamé, is now playing for Fiorentina and the Cote d’Ivoire national team. But he’s the exception to the rule. Another, Samuel ‘Ndri Kouassi, allegedly found himself adopted by a man he’d never met and then, after an injury, asked to sleep in the stands, then released by his club, and was left homeless and to fend for himself as an illegal immigrant.
This led to a groundbreaking illegal immigration case against the likes of Paolo Toccafondi, the then president of AC Prato, for importing the minors – one of the first cases like this to make it to trial in Europe.
False Glory is directed by Arianna Perretta and produced by CMG Productions, who won Best Documentary at the 2023 Broadcast Digital Awards for The Footballer, His Wife and the Crash and were nominated for a 2024 True Crime Award for Football Fraudster.
Arianna and CMG are also behind the recent Showmax true-crime sports series Dark Side of Glory, which investigated a Blue Bulls rugby player who became an axe murderer, as well as the murder of Kenyan runner Agnes Tirop, who’d just set a 10 000m world record.
