'We don’t care where the money comes from': Jordaan on meeting with Kodwa to discuss TV broadcast deal

South African Football Association (Safa) president Danny Jordaan says just like other sporting federations, they are planning to get the best broadcast deal and he will make that clear in his meeting with sport minister Zizi Kodwa today on Thursday.  

Federations such as SA Rugby, Cricket SA (CSA), Athletics SA (ASA) and Netball SA (NSA) are believed to be raking it in from their broadcast deals with pay TV channel Supersport, while Safa have had to settle for pittance from the public broadcaster, the SABC, for years.  

That is because the government has been insisting that coverage of national teams, especially football, needs to be televised on free-to-air channels.  

Safa has been paid R25m a year by the SABC since October 2019 in terms of its four-year broadcast deal for national teams and junior competitions which ends in September.  

Jordaan, who is meeting Kodwa on Thursday, also revealed the SABC is paying nothing for the Safa-run top-tier women’s league, the Hollywoodbets Super League.  

Jordaan finds the deal unfair compared to what other associations are getting elsewhere and made it difficult to implement pay parity between Bafana and Banyana players, which the government has been advocating for.  

“After the World Cup in Paris in 2019, Fifa made an announcement that in the future they will be paid the same prize money,” Jordaan said.  

“At that stage France won the men’s World Cup in 2018 in Russia and they were paid $40m and the United States in 2019 won the women’s World Cup and they were paid $4m.  

“In 2010 in South Africa, Spain won the World Cup, and their prize money was $30m and in 2011 the United States won in Germany and their prize money was $1m. You can see the gap between the prize money of winning the men’s World Cup and winning a women’s World Cup.  

“The reason for that, Fifa argued, was the revenue while in South Africa generated $4,5bn for the men’s World Cup, the women’s World Cup in 2019 was $750m. You can see the gap between the revenue of men and women.”  

Fifa president Gianni Infantino recently threatened a 2023 Women’s World Cup blackout for top European football nations such as England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France, describing their offers as unacceptable to football’s world governing body and a slap in the face of the players and all women worldwide.  

“The big difference is paid by the broadcasters. The Fifa president is very frustrated about this, and he had a big conference, and you will see what he said about it,” Jordaan said.  

“In order to pay the men and women the same prize money you must get revenue from women’s football up.  

“Our country is the same, there’s no revenue from broadcasting of women’s football and we have to address these issues,” he said.  

“In order to sustain it, you have to increase revenue and get greater revenue from broadcasters. So we are going to meet with the sports minister (on Thursday) to discuss the very same issues, to say the president announced that there must be pay parity, where must the money come from?  

“If it’s government policy that there must be pay parity, the government must tell the broadcaster to make sure that while you pay rugby R758m, you pay Banyana nothing. But you want Banyana and the rugby players to receive the same money, how is that going to work?” Jordaan said.  

“It’s good that these issues are raised so that the nation can see where the problem is because very often Safa is to blame, but Safa has taken its own money, R9,8m, and paid Banyana bonuses.  

“We don’t mind where the money comes from, as long as the money is there to pay the players.  

“As Mandela would say ‘I don’t care whether the cat is white or black, as long as the cat catches the mice.’ So we don’t care as long as we get the money to pay the players.” 

For their women’s division, Safa only has two sponsors, with Sasol backing Banyana and the lower league while Hollywoodbets helps to run the Super League.

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