How I wish we can just get back to being excited about what we see on the football pitch. That’s the reason I chose my profession. I wanted to write about football stars, coaches and how the game is being developed, especially in my country, SA.
I never imagined myself following the politics of football administrators, whose main interest is keeping their positions so that they continue to enjoy the perks that come with being a football official at the highest level.
As with everything, football needs a governing structure to function properly. But for me the problem starts when those we’ve entrusted to look after the game want to hog the limelight for reasons that do nothing to grow the game.
That’s where we are in SA at the moment, with the current jostling for positions at SA Football Association (Safa), where presidential elections may be held on June 25, if those looking to halt them in court are not successful.
I won’t bore you with the politics of the Safa elections. They are nowhere near as exciting as watching a good game of football, no matter the level.
I would care about the winner of the Safa election if I had confidence that the one who wins will have our football at heart and do what many Safa presidents have failed to do in the past 30 years, develop our football from grassroots level upwards.
What I know is that the 40 members of the Safa executive committee care more about keeping their seats, so that they continue to travel the country and the world at our expense. So greedy are the suits at Safa that they’ve now passed a resolution which will ensure that they’ll be joined by seven new members, perhaps because those who are already in think they’re so good they don’t have to relinquish their positions.
These are the same members who don’t have the conscience to call each other out when one of them suggests they pay each other bonuses when there’s no money being directed at developing football players.
Football is not about how good the coach is. You must have good players. That’s the way it is.
— Pitso Mosimane
It is because of these nauseating acts by those who are supposed to be caring for and improving our game that you feel no interest in hearing why they want to be elected again.
Like the true politicians they are, football administrators will try to fool us by claiming their aim is not to put money into their pockets, when children in KwaMalamulele, Tzaneen, KwaMashu, Inanda and elsewhere don’t have any form of equipment to play the game.
Only a fool who has not been privy to what has been happening in our country in the past 30 years would believe those running our football.
The headlines around the Safa elections have overshadowed what everyone should be focusing on, which is Bafana Bafana’s opening 2023 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) qualifier against Morocco in Rabat on Thursday at 9pm SA time.
That Hugo Broos, the Bafana coach, appears to be going to this match resigned to losing if his charges don’t pull an unexpected draw, is down to how we’ve allowed the standard of our football to deteriorate.
We’ve forgotten to take care of football’s most important aspects — players, coaches and football pitches. When you’ve cut corners the way we have, you resort to hoping that appointing an experienced coach like Broos will somehow give you results.
This is the same as expecting to reap rewards while you’re fully aware that you’ve never ploughed a single seed, let alone taken care of it while it was rising up from the ground.
“Football is not about how good the coach is. You must have good players. That’s the way it is,” former Bafana Bafana coach Pitso Mosimane reminded us when he was in the country last week.
There’s certainly no doubt that in Broos we have a good coach. That he doubts that we have a Bafana that’s good enough to beat Morocco means we don’t have good players. The irony is that if Bafana depended on winning this game to qualify for the next year’s Afcon, Safa would fire Broos if he failed to win the match.
We always seem to forget that as country we’ve let our footballers down by not developing them properly when they were young. If we did, we wouldn’t have a Bafana that doesn’t have a single player in one of the top leagues in the world.
The Moroccan team that Bafana are facing is not only ranked second in Africa, but boasts stars that include Achraf Hakimi of Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich’s Noussair Mazraoui.
We’d have stars of Hakimi and Mazraoui’s calibre if those in charge of our game didn’t prioritise themselves over investing in player development.
SA were once in Morocco’s bracket, but we somehow threw it all away in the early 2000s when we stopped producing good players who were good enough to stand the test of time at big football clubs around the world.
All we’re doing now is hoping for the best, while hopping from one Bafana coach to another. As Mosimane said, it’s only when we have good players, not just top coaches, that we’ll see the results and have confidence in Bafana.
To show how bad we’ve been, we must look at the German national team which had one coach, Joachim Low, after the 2006 World Cup all the way to 2021. In those 15 years Germany did not win every tournament, but were still good enough to win a bronze in the 2010 World Cup and gold in 2014.
Safa on the other hand changed Bafana coaches nine times — Ted Dumitru, Carlos Alberto Parreira, Joel Santana, Parreira (again), Mosimane, Gordon Igesund, Shakes Mashaba, Stuart Baxter and Molefi Ntseki — and won nothing.
Looking at this makes you realise how far our football has regressed. I wish I could say I see some signs that we will improve in two or three years’ time. With the leadership that we have, I can’t. Change will only come when we accept that we’ve been doing nothing to improve our players.
We can elect new leaders any time but if those leaders continue to worry more about their stomachs than about serving people, we’ll continue to produce a Bafana team that coaches like Broos will have no confidence in. It’s such a sorry tale.
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