There is much distance between Morocco and SA.
The two sit at the opposite ends of Africa and are oppositional in politics. One is close to Europe, the other has only the Antarctic as a further geographical point.
In football terms SA and Morocco are far apart too. And not in a good way for the SA Football Association (Safa).
Knowing the suits all too well from more than two decades of covering them, Safa — whose president Danny Jordaan once famously declared in a press conference that the association was the “best performing in Africa” — will be finding the positives in SA football from Morocco’s historic run to the 2022 World Cup semifinals.
Safa might well tell themselves Bafana Bafana only lost 1-0 to Morocco as recently as in the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) group stage from Mbark Boussoufa’s 90th-minute strike at Cairo’s Al-Salam Stadium. They might go so far as to congratulate themselves that Morocco a few months ago, in June, had to come back from Lyle Foster’s opening strike for Bafana to edge their 2023 Nations Cup qualifier 2-1, in Rabat moreover.
They might take Banyana Banyana beating Morocco in Rabat to lift this year’s Women’s Nations Cup trophy as a further sign SA football is not far off what’s being achieved by their North African counterparts.
As usual, if that is the message being shared it would — like Jordaan’s proclamation of his association’s success, which was based mostly on junior national teams qualifying for Nations Cups and World Cups, and women's football’s achievements — be grossly misguided. It’s the sort of message and lack of grasp of reality that has got SA football into the hole that Safa somehow tries to deny is a hole.
Such denial was evident when, asked for a report-back on its much-vaunted Vision 2022 — including grand targets that Bafana be ranked in the top three in Africa and top 20 in the world, and qualify for this World Cup — Safa obfuscated and pointed again to junior team successes and women’s football.
But Safa cannot so easily create a fog around how dismally its headline team, Bafana, has fallen short of its targets. They are ranked 67th in the world and 11th in Africa. Bafana qualified for the 2015 Nations Cup but exited in the first round and failed to reach the 2017 tournament. In Egypt in 2019 they scraped through the group stage, shocked the hosts in the second round and narrowly lost against Nigeria in the quarters. It was a promising performance. SA did not qualify for Afcon 2021.
The national team that could lift the spirit of the millions who follow the country’s biggest sport has not qualified for a World Cup, other than automatically as hosts in 2010, in 20 years since Japan/South Korea in 2002.
Safa celebrated when Hugo Broos’s young combination supposedly came close by running Ghana within goals scored in the group stage for Qatar 2022, but conveniently forgets there was a last playoff round where SA would still have had to overcome nemesis Nigeria. The reality is Bafana, devoid of stars in the top leagues in Europe, remain far off World Cup qualification. Reaching a semifinal? That’s dreamland.
In 2019 Morocco inaugurated a renovated Mohammed VI Football Complex costing $60m (R1.08bn).
Morocco are where they are for a reason. By the late 2000s the North African powerhouse had underachieved for a country with infrastructure and wealth. Morocco had won one Nations Cup in 1976. A pioneer for Africa in the World Cup, Morocco were the second team from Africa to reach a finals with a solid showing in Mexico in 1970 and first to progress past the group stage in Mexico in 1986. Like SA, they had not appeared at a World Cup in 20 years, from 1998, before their return with a group stage exit at Russia 2018.
Their continued failure to win the Nations Cup and World Cup drought inspired the launch of a national training centre by King Mohammed IV in 2009. Fédération Royale Marocaine de Football (FRMF) president Fouzi Lekjaa, since his election in 2014, has overseen a major infrastructural overhaul. In 2019 Morocco inaugurated a renovated Mohammed VI Football Complex costing $60m (R1.08bn). Apart from the main complex, each of Morocco’s 12 regions has a feeder centre.
A club such as RS Berkane, who beat Orlando Pirates in the 2021-22 Caf Confederation Cup final, have been praised for the restructuring of their facility that now has one grass and seven synthetic pitches, accommodation in its academy for 112 youngsters, an education and sports medicine centre. Moroccan clubs hold all the continental titles at present. Wydad Athletic, the second-strongest team in Africa of the last decade to Egypt’s Al Ahly, won the 2021-22 Caf Champions League and AS FAR this year’s Women's Champions League.
To put Morocco’s strength in perspective, the squad coach Hervé Renard had at the 2019 Afcon had one player in it from the vaunted Wydad who have dominated continental club football — the rest were based outside the country.
There have been setbacks, such as last-16 and group-stage exits at the last three Nations Cups. But a World Cup semifinal placing strongly indicates Morocco are well on target to surpass Egypt as the continent’s powerhouse and stay there for a long time.
In the absence of effective programmes that can produce talent, Safa have hired a coach in Broos known for being brave at fielding young players and tasked him with a desperation mission.
Jordaan made his return to the helm of Safa, after his years campaigning for and overseeing the hosting of a beautiful 2010 World Cup, in 2013, a year before Lekjaa took the helm in Morocco. With his CV, one expected he might be the man to pull off a similar rebuilding effort, needed more desperately in this country, which has underachieved far worse than Morocco did in its slump.
No other host of the World Cup has performed as miserably at using that privilege to restructure for future success. Jordaan’s empty promises, such as restoring the nine provincial satellites for the School of Excellence and rehabilitating the school, never materialised.
Safa announced in 2015 it would establish a national technical centre (NTC) south of Johannesburg. It purchased the Fun Valley pleasure resort near Eldorado Park, saying it would turn it into a world-class facility. Such an objective remains as elusive as finding the city of gold, El Dorado, was to the conquistadors.
Anyone who wants to see this for themselves should take a visit to Fun Valley — it’s still open to the public as a part-time picnic and leisure venue, complete with water slides and pools. It now does have two fields, but one synthetic pitch is for small-sided games only, and the full-sized grass pitch is not in good condition. A facility that some journalists have mockingly labelled “funny valley” dreams of one day being comparable to Kaizer Chiefs’ village in Naturena, France’s academy in Clairefontaine or Morocco’s complex.
In the absence of effective programmes that can produce talent, Safa have hired a coach in Broos known for being brave at fielding young players and tasked him with a desperation mission to emphasise youth in the hope the young team can grow together into a competitive outfit one day.
SA men’s senior football is streets behind the countries who qualified for Qatar, who run effective programmes and produce world-class talent capable of competing in the world’s top leagues and at a World Cup. The time to restructure meaningfully was two decades ago. Don’t hold your breath for Safa to start any time soon.
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