SA football is like climate change. It’s not that there’s not good being done in the world to try to prevent the impending disaster, it’s just that so long as what’s bad continues to outweigh the good, the planet will keep getting hotter, net zero won’t be reached, the polar ice caps will melt and permafrost thaw, and then we’re all screwed.
Like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, the heat will fry humans. Or at least this 4,000-year-old thing humans have labelled “civilisation”.
There are some dinosaurs running SA football who seem intent on keeping the sport on its backwards track that some day might, like West Indies cricket, go past the point of no return in failure, if it hasn’t already. Unlike West Indies cricket, SA football’s greater tragedy will be that its heyday would have come amid sporting isolation when its most magnificent players, a significant proportion of whom were victims of apartheid, were also victims of the boycott aimed against that system.
One Jurassic specimen who bared his dinosaur claws — protruding from the region of a well-proportioned belly that has been known to be a feature of SA Football Association (Safa) national executive committee (NEC) member-osauros, suggesting the R520,000 honorarium is being well consumed — was Tankiso Modipa.
On Friday, when his president Danny Jordaan — ahead of his shoo-in for a third term in Saturday’s elective congress — was asked a vaguely tough question at a press conference, Modipa, as studies of the member-osaurus have revealed can be a behavioural trait, blew a dorsal crest.
Modipa ranted that journalists are “not part of football”, should not ask the Safa president “direct and personal questions” and “must focus on journalist things”. For those of us who have been in the industry for some time, we are astonished to learn asking a direct question is not a journalist thing.
If Modipa’s rant was aimed at protecting Jordaan, it, and the actions of a fellow member-osaurus who impeded eNCA journalist Hloni Mtimkhulu from doing her job filming events, only worsened the notion there is a problem at Safa.
It reinforced claims from the opponents of Jordaan of a cult of personality. The behaviour of NEC members at Friday’s press conference certainly seemed to lend credibility to the Ria Ledwaba camp’s allegations that NEC members were sent — and that some could be willing to go — to regions to bully election results towards loyalists of the executive and Jordaan. The 52 regions, with four votes each, form the largest voting bloc of the national election — 208 votes, dwarfing the six from the National Soccer League (NSL) and nine from associate members.
This plus another factor were what Ledwaba’s camp alleged made for an unfair election. The other was that a constitutional amendment was made that to run for the NEC, a candidate had to have served Safa at a regional level or higher for 10 years. Ledwaba’s camp alleged that was aimed at entrenching the current NEC. Of those NEC members, 18 were regional heads, so do the maths on who they would vote for, Ledwaba’s camp said. Throw in a R520,000 honorarium being paid in stages to NEC members, and another R20,000 payment in December, and the reason for Jordaan’s landslide, Ledwaba’s camp alleges, becomes clear.
That Modipa verbalised some NEC members’ apparent belief that these kinds of allegations should not be questioned is troubling. In fact, the Safa Overberg president was taking issue with a question aimed at an even softer issue, on when Jordaan realised he needed a third term to fulfil his mandate.
Fellow NEC member Emma Hendricks’ statements that she would not back Ledwaba because she “spoke negatively about” and was “trying to destroy” Safa also jarred. To equate criticising Safa’s leadership with being out to destroy the organisation bares similarities to right-wing America's popular idea that to criticise US policy is to be “anti-American”. Also, to equate Safa’s current leadership with the whole of Safa seems to reveal leadership has come to see itself as the organisation, not a custodian of it. They seem to harbour a similar view on SA football as a whole.
And so do the two Tyrannosaurus Rexes — Jordaan and PSL chair Irvin Khoza — who run it all, have squabbled and politicked over it all, and have turned Safa and the league into entities that behave like the houses of Capulet and Montague rather than two wings running the same sport.
Jordaan and Khoza’s positive contributions to SA football must be recognised. They were the CEO and chair of the bid and organising committees that worked to bring SA the 2010 World Cup. They did not, as some assert, “bring SA the World Cup” — there were many influential in that throughout SA corporate and government society, not least one Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
Jordaan’s work in the formation of Safa and as CEO from 1997 was part of the initial successes of the return to international football — Bafana Bafana winning the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations, finalists in 1998, third in 2000 and World Cup qualifications in 1998 and 2002. Khoza has been the most influential architect behind the Premier Soccer League’s (PSL) birth in 1996, its unrecognisable professionalism relative to the 1980s and mega-wealth piggybacking off the World Cup.
But a cumulative 50 years of the pair at the helm has only seen the standard where it is most important — on the field, in the league and for Bafana — drop to appalling levels. Neither has identified nor fixed the structural defects, some arising from a country that underwent a rapid and huge societal change, that have led to that.
Elected as Safa president in 2013, Jordaan promised to restore the School of Excellence to former glory — the last world-class player it produced was Steven Pienaar. He has not reintroduced the school’s nine provincial satellites, as promised. Any improvement to the most crucial aspect choking SA development, the decline in schools’ football and number of schools playing the sport, was scuppered by the political fight and court battle with the SA Schools’ Football Association soon after Jordaan was elected. Development from under 10 years of age seems almost non-existent.
Cost-cutting during Covid-19 saw the 18 men’s and women’s provincial technical officers removed, who technical director Neil Tovey installed to oversee coach education and junior leagues in Safa’s 52 regions. While the start of a national women’s league must be applauded, the intake for the women’s academy at the University of Pretoria’s high performance centre — influential in Banyana Banyana’s success — has been halved from 25 annually to 12.
The PSL, under an acting CEO of seven years in Mato Madlala, has allowed itself to be weakened by the sale of huge brands Bidvest Wits and Bloemfontein Celtic. The league set up a reserve league, the DStv Diski Challenge, and that has helped younger players to be recognised by clubs. However, it was made into an U-21 league, so it no longer facilitates the role of bringing senior players back from injury.
There is still no U-18 league, as many international Bafana coaches have recommended. The second-tier GladAfrica Championship is still not televised and consequently the sponsorship is poor and the clubs are financially under-resourced. The PSL does not seem to police its compliance on clubs having effective youth structures anywhere near as vigorously as it should.
Neither Safa nor the PSL has resolved the core financial structuring that sees a rich top league, but far too poor and under-resourced grassroots creating the talent.
There is a notion at Safa that football is criticised more while rugby and cricket, of the other big three sports, get off lightly for their deficiencies. Yet the controversy over SA Rugby Union CEO Jurie Roux’s legal troubles has been reported ad nauseam, and so have Cricket SA’s administrative issues. Lights are shone on racism in both sports. Both cricket and rugby remain top five international competitors. Rugby has won three World Cups.
It’s a ridiculous and nonsensical notion. Ridiculous to Modipa-esque proportions? Yes, that ridiculous. SA football is doomed, and the dinosaurs trampling it don’t want to stop, or seem to care.
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