A fine of $102,000 (£77,700/€86,000) has also been imposed on the Equatoguinean Football Federation.

It comes after the African nation recruited 10 Brazilian-born players to compete in qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

They had already been barred from participating at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

A statement today issued by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee explained that the latest ruling follows "further investigations" conducted after the initial sanctions imposed in April 2016.

It concluded that the 10 players were "not eligible to play for the representative team of Equatorial Guinea".

Two further players - Cameroon-born Muriel Linda Mendoua Abessolo and Nigeria-born Francisca Angue Ondo Asangono - were found to have violated Article 61 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code in relation to forgery and falsification.

They have each been sanctioned with a 10-match suspension.

Article 61 rules that "anyone who, in football-related activities, forges a document, falsifies an authentic document or uses a forged or falsified document to deceive in legal relations will be sanctioned with a fine".

It adds that, if the perpetrator is a player, a suspension of "at least six matches" will be pronounced.

In April 2016, FIFA had already banned the team after Camila Maria do Carmo Nobre de Oliveira, who played for the African nation in their unsuccessful qualification campaign for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, had used “two passports with different dates of birth”.

The oil-rich west country has frequently been in trouble for attempting to recruit ineligible football players.

A separate decision by the Confederation of African Football to ban the country from two editions of the Women's African Cup of Nations has been appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Equatorial Guinea's women were also disqualified from the London 2012 Olympics for fielding an ineligible player.

The men's national team, meanwhile, were stripped of a World Cup qualifying win over Cape Verde in 2013 after they also fielded ineligible players.

Under FIFA rules, players are only able to represent a new team if they or their parents or grandparents were born there, or if they have lived there for at least five years after reaching the age of 18.