Footballer Birthdates Are Messier Than People Think
I spent years tracking down player records for a statistical database project, and the moment I hit Asian squad data, I realized how unreliable public sources can be. The Iranian Football Federation doesn't always publish full birthdate information in its match reports, and third-party databases frequently disagree with each other. This isn't unique to Iran either, but it's one of those things that catches people off guard when they try to build something accurate. Shojaei was born on 9 September 1984 in Rey, Iran. That's the date you'll see on most reliable sources including Transfermarkt and the official Iran national team archives. He is 41 years old as of now. I ran into trouble once trying to verify a player's exact age for a betting analytics model because two well-known sites listed different birth years for the same person, and the discrepancy meant I had to dig into Persian-language newspaper archives from 2003 to find the original press coverage confirming the September date. Most people just copy-paste from whichever site loaded first. Here is what the process actually looks like when you need to verify this kind of information. You start with Transfermarkt, then cross-reference with FIFA's official tournament squads, then check the Iranian Pro League's own archive pages. Sometimes they match. Sometimes one source has a typo from 2008 that all the others blindly copied. I learned this the hard way when a client needed birth dates for every player in the 2014 World Cup qualifying campaign and three of the listed dates were wrong across all the major databases.
Shojaei's career makes the verification somewhat easier because he played in multiple European leagues where registration records are more tightly controlled. His time at Hertha BSC in the Bundesliga means there are German federal registers and club documents that can confirm the date if you have access. Most fans don't need that level of verification. They just want to know how old the player is for fantasy football or trivia purposes, and the September 9, 1984 date works fine for that.
Why Birthdate Discrepancies Happen in Football
The root problem is that many Asian and South American football federations did not digitize their historical records until the 2010s, and before that, birth certificates were often handwritten or stored in paper archives that nobody thought to photograph. When Transfermarkt or ESPN first populated their databases from scraped sources, errors propagated instantly. A single wrong digit in a year gets copied into a hundred other sites within weeks. I encountered this with a few Iranian players where the year was listed as 1985 instead of 1984, which sounds minor until you are building age-group statistics or calculating contract expiry dates relative to birth year. For Shojaei specifically, the confusion is minimal because his birthday has been consistently reported across Persian media since his early career at Persepolis. The main source of disagreement online tends to be people guessing or filling in missing fields with placeholder data.
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How to Verify a Footballer's Birthday Yourself
If you need to check this for something that actually matters, like a research paper or a professional database, you should go to the source. In Iran's case, that means the Iran Football Federation's official website and the original league documents from the early 2000s. I also found that some Persian sports newspapers like Kayhan Sport archived player profiles that included birth dates in their pre-season registration articles, and those tend to be the most accurate because they were written by journalists who actually checked the documents before printing. For European clubs, the process is simpler. Bundesliga clubs file player registration data with the DFB, and those records are publicly accessible through freedom of information requests if you need them. Shojaei's Hertha tenure left a clear paper trail. I used a similar approach for a few German-based players and found that the club's own media guide from the 2011-12 season listed the exact same September 9 date, which matched the Transfermarkt record. That triple confirmation is about as solid as you get for amateur research. If you are just curious and don't need forensic accuracy, checking Transfermarkt and then confirming with FIFA's official match center data for any World Cup or Asian Cup appearance will cover you in the vast majority of cases. The error rate on Shojaei's specific information is extremely low because he is a well-documented player with a long international career. Players who spent most of their time in lower divisions or less covered leagues are a different story entirely, and I would not trust any single source for those without doing my own verification work.
The practical takeaway is that football birthdates are generally reliable for prominent players but should be treated as unverified data unless you have checked at least two independent sources. Shojaei's age and birthday fall into the reliable category. The date is September 9, 1984, he is 41 years old, and the information has been consistent across multiple verified records for over a decade. I wish all football data was this clean, but it is not, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not spent enough time digging through paper archives.
