Do we like Samuel Eto'o?
Our score: 4 out of 10. No harmful words found, but an admitted tax fraud, a FIFA ban and unresolved money allegations, with little confirmed good on the page to balance them.
Eto'o is the striker turned football boss: these days he runs the Cameroon Football Federation, and he has been in the headlines more for off-field stoushes than goals. He is 45 now, and the story around him is less about what he scored than about how he runs things.
The oldest stain is a court one. In Spain he admitted a tax fraud of about 3.8 million euros over image-rights income from his Barcelona years and got a 22-month suspended sentence. He said he would pay what he owed, and the court also fined him 1.8 million euros.
Then there's the temper. In December 2022 he apologised for losing his cool after a man, who said he had asked about a refereeing row, ended up on the ground outside a World Cup match in Doha. In 2024 FIFA banned him for six months from attending Cameroon games after the angry reaction to a penalty at the Under-20 Women's World Cup.
The most recent discipline saga ended in his favour. CAF hit him with a four-match stadium ban and a $20,000 fine in January over his AFCON conduct, but its Appeals Jury annulled the lot on 5 August. So that one is a draw, not a conviction.
On the harm check, we found no words or acts from him against LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet in what we could open. The one political act on the record is that he said in 2018 he would vote for President Paul Biya, which is a vote, not harm. That is a thin search, not a clean bill of health.
The big open question is the money. Former federation officials allege that appearance fees from a 2023 friendly were paid into his personal account. He rejects it as a smear campaign, FIFA's ethics body has reportedly given no update, and no charge or finding has been reported. We couldn't open a source on his charity work, so we won't credit what we couldn't check.