The story of former SA U-23 and Bafana Bafana goalkeeper Emille Baron is a sad one. It is a reminder of the number of social challenges our country is still grappling with, almost 30 years after democracy.
Our readers would have learnt from what my colleague, Marc Strydom, has written of Baron’s challenges after a leg injury forced him to retire from professional football at the age of 33 in 2013.
For a goalkeeper, retiring at 33 is considered a little premature because most of them, especially the good ones such as Baron, can remain competitive until they’re close to 40, if they look after themselves properly.
Baron never had the luxury of prolonging his stay in football as he suffered a career-ending injury when he went for a tackle to save his team from conceding a goal in the dying minutes of a match. He was playing for Bidvest Wits in a match against Orlando Pirates in 2013.
Former Bafana Bafana goalkeeper Andre Arendse retired at 42 in 2009 but also came back in an emergency role to play two matches for Wits in 2013 when he was 46. Ironically, Arendse was standing in for Baron, his Cape Town homeboy, who had just got injured towards the end of the campaign.
Under normal circumstances having your football career end at 33 should not be a train smash if you’ve had a high-profile and earned a decent salary in your time in football as Baron did.
Baron played at the highest level for over 16 years, including five solid ones at the Norwegian club Lillestrom from 1999 to 2004, having started his professional career as a 17-year-old at Hellenic in 1996.
When he came back to SA in 2005, Baron didn’t play for any old club, but was snatched up by Soweto giants Kaizer Chiefs (200-2009) before stints at SuperSport United (2009-2011 and Bidvest Wits (2011-2013), the two PSL outfits who are known to pay their players decent salaries. So, when the injury occurred, Baron should have had a decent bank balance or assets that would have taken care of him and his family beyond his football days.
What I hope will happen in the future is that we start helping our kids while they’re still young. We must also encourage them not to leave school no matter how richly talented they are.
There was also an issue with his last club, Wits, possibly paying him some money from the players’ insurance that covers those who’ve suffered injuries while on the field of play. It’s not clear what happened in Baron’s case regarding that insurance, but he has always said that he received nothing from the PSL after he got injured.
But it didn’t have to end like this for Baron. For starters, like many SA professional football players, Baron didn’t have any other profession to rely on. He had dropped out of school early to follow his football dreams. Nothing wrong with that.
Indeed, after your sporting dreams pay a lot for athletes, but those who can sustain a decent life after their careers have ended, are those who have sound family backgrounds — people who took care of their financial affairs when they were at their peak.
It would seem for Baron, who is now living on handouts on the streets in the south of Johannesburg with his wife and his two boys aged nine and 14, that never happened. He had no-one he trusted to take care of his finances while he was playing.
Baron’s story is a drop in the ocean in so far as former SA football players who have hit hard times after their playing days. There are many others who are in a similar, if not worse situation.
Luckily for Baron, fans at his former club in Norway are reported to have put together close to R2m to return some decency to his family that has forced his 14-year-old son to abandon school. I just hope the assistance won’t land in the wrong hands because if that were to happen the gesture from Norway will come to nothing.
The real lessons all of us should take from stories like this, is the importance of supporting talented sportsmen and women while they’re young. Financial education means nothing to these athletes when they’re already earning big bucks. At the time many say there’s no need for anyone to tell them about how to handle their fame and fortune, which I suspect could have been the case with Baron.
It doesn’t help that SA, because of our cruel history, is a country with many broken families where some of these talented sporting icons happen to grow up without any proper guidance in planning for rainy days.
What I hope will happen in the future is that we start helping our children while they’re still young. We must also encourage them not to leave school no matter how richly talented they are. If they’re not at school, it’s easy to be misled by all sorts of crooks when it comes to planning for retirement.
There are a lot of other mechanisms that the government and sporting bodies can put in place to help athletes take care of themselves after retirement. Some administrators have spoken of tax incentives to help athletes so that they have more money to invest in their future.
But all these things need to be put into law so that they’re enforceable. And they shouldn’t be laws that players and the public know little about. We should all be in the know so that former athletes who find themselves in distress can easily access help.
It would be easy for some to forsake people like Baron and say they have themselves to blame. Well, for me it’s not as easy as that because I sometimes say I could have been in the same place given how and where I grew up. I think sometimes it’s factors beyond people’s control that can lead to people like Baron to end up where he is.
To end such cases, it would be better to support athletes while they’re still young, when they're still able to accept advice and not see themselves as superstars who say they’re in control of their lives when they’re actually messing it up.
Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.