The Football Association will give specific birth years for each age categories. Only players born in the given years can play in that category. This will decide which players are eligible to play in which age category.

Therefore the player must be born during a specific given birth year(s) for any player of the same age category to take part in the specific age category tournament. 
This new standard policy by FAM avoids the previous methods that has been practiced by the schools in the past inter school football tournaments regarding selecting the players who fit to a certain age group.

It has been a regular practice in Inter-School tournaments for younger players playing in categories that are meant for older boys. With the change of rules, this practice will not be allowed from now on.

For example in the under 15 tournament, only those players born in the years specified by the FAM can participate. Players born before the specified year will not be allowed to take part in under 15’s even though he is under the age of 15. These players will have to play for their respective age categories.

This previous age requirement rule for inter school football has being showing numerous negative effect to the inter school level football. Other than lower level school teams getting defeated by big margin of score lines, in the past times it has badly effect the players interest to go further in inter school football. Getting defeated on huge score lines, the same players have gone through psychological rough times and being badly criticized on different occasions. Sometimes it happens in school or in a friendly zone. Even sometimes in the most loveable within family. Due to this they feel to blame their selves and feels ashamed to their own self. More over players interest for the game drops.

The another point which is also negatively affected by the previous rule is that players development. When the previous rules makes the underage players eligible to play in the higher age level tournaments, in which he has to compete with physically stronger, senior in age, and more matured players. Where he face the difficulties to show the best out of him. When an underage player competes in a situation like this, his development progression curve either drops or in some cases climbs high slower.

These kind of practices were mostly seen from the school football teams comes from atolls. And there is a believable reason for this approach by them. They do not have the same number of students who plays football or has the interest to take part in inter school football. When comes to this situation, it also applies to few schools based in capital Male’ City also, where they comes into inter school football tournaments with mixed age players. Like some of their under 16 or under 15 teams includes players age of 12 or 13 also.

We have seen very young players playing in the Under 18 and Under 16 categories which is not advisable under the AFC/ FIFA recommendations. Though this may come as good news and relief for a lot of players and their guardians, it will be a challenge for some schools as they have to mix categories to form one team

Under the project of #towardsfuture , with this newly set rule by FAM, there we may see few digits drops from the numbers for participating school in the inter school football tournaments. But in the future, this new standard in the player eligibility to certain age group football tournaments will only help players to grow.