No bonus deal between Safa and Bafana players with just over a month to Afcon

With just over a month before the start of the 2024 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in the Ivory Coast, there is no bonus deal between the South African Football Association (Safa) and Bafana Bafana players. 

Bafana are expected to go into camp in Stellenbosch on January 4 to start their Afcon preparations and Safa CEO Lydia Monyepao is hoping a deal will be struck before then. 

Monyepao said Safa has been negotiating bonuses with the players since mid-October.

“We have been engaging the players since September in terms of the various bonuses for international competitions before we got to the Fifa World Cup qualifiers,” she said.

“We agreed on that and we started engaging them when we went to the Ivory Coast [for a 0-0 friendly draw in Abidjan on October 17] around Afcon bonuses. We tabled an offer and they came back to us with a counter-offer.

“We went back to them with another counter-offer and we are still in negotiations. I am hoping that through my discussions with senior players, we will have an agreement on the table before they get into camp at the end of the year so they can focus on the task at hand.” 

Monyepao said negotiations are taking tine because players are asking for more money than Safa has offered so far. 

“We are adopting a similar structure to 2019 [the last Nations Cup Bafana qualified for in Egypt] — that’s our basis to say what it is you are going to get if you go into the round of 16, the quarterfinals and so on. It is a performance bonus more than anything. 

“The talks are taking longer because everyone is going to ask for more money but as an association, we have to see what we can afford and what we can’t afford to give to the players. 

“We want them to be happy but at the same time we can’t run ourselves into bankruptcy by offering amounts we cannot afford. Hence the negotiations are taking long, because they want this and we can only afford that.

“We have to find a way in which we can meet each other halfway.” 

Safa will be eager to avoid a repeat of the embarrassing standoff that developed with Banyana Banyana ahead of the 2023 Women's World Cup where the women's national team went as far as boycotting their send-off match against Botswana over several contractual and treatment issues.