MARC STRYDOM | With rare introspection, PSL might admit own role in Royal mess

The Premier Soccer League (PSL), like any organisation, has its strengths and weaknesses. Introspection has not always proved to be among its strong points.

So as the royal mess surrounding Royal AM and the suspension of their matches amid being put under curatorship by the South African Revenue Service (Sars), which seems entirely possible to end with an expulsion for the club, continues, it would be surprising if the PSL were to admit its culpability in the matter.

The PSL’s strong points include its excellent work monetising the sport professionally. This initially, after the launch of the Premiership to replace the old National Soccer League in the 1996-97 season, saw the league become worth tens of millions of rand after being effectively worth a minus amount. In the build-up to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup, the PSL leveraged that to make its top flight jewel worth around a R1bn today.

PSL chair Irvin Khoza’s strong leadership — strong, in some respects, but not all — and his financial contacts drove this growth, along with others’ major contributions, notably former CEOs Trevor Phillips and Kjetil Siem. Khoza’s influence lining up Betway to jump in and rescue the PSL when DStv withdrew from its Premiership sponsorship a year early in 2024 again displayed his leadership qualities. But that Khoza and the PSL in the 2010s could barely find a CEO who would stick more than a few months, despite strong appointments such as Stan Matthews and Zola Majavu, seems to have weakened the league’s leadership and decision-making.

Brand de Villiers was the last solid CEO of the PSL, whose tenure lasted almost two-and-a-half-years. That Lamontville Golden Arrows owner Mato Madlala has served as CEO in an acting capacity since De Villiers’ departure in November 2015, for over nine years, is a source of mirth and derision from football fans and does not portray best governance.

A lack of conflicts of interests in the leadership structure are clearly not a PSL strong point — Madlala and Khoza, also chair of Orlando Pirates, are club owners, as are the eight members of the executive committee (exco). The handling of Royal AM’s progression into the Premiership was not Khoza, Madlala and the exco’s finest hour.

A timeline — from Sekhukhune United being awarded three points in mid-May 2021 that ultimately cost Royal the 2020-21 National First Division (NFD) championship, to the PSL confirming AM's purchase of the Premiership status of Bloemfontein Celtic in mid-August and dismissal of Royal’s protracted court case by the Constitutional Court weeks later — seems revealing.

An arbitration hearing awarded three points to Sekhukhune in the final week of the 2020-21 National First Division (NFD, then called the GladAfrica Championship) season. The award was for a game in January 2021 where Polokwane City failed to name five under-23 players in their match-day squad, as per NFD rules, for which a PSL DC had penalised City three points but not given any to Sekhukhune.

From almost day one of the timeline, the PSL’s response raised eyebrows and seemed problematic.

A day after Hilton Epstein SC’s arbitration decision, the PSL exco took the highly unusual step of releasing a statement contradicting the award. The PSL did not update the three points given to Sekhukhune on the NFD log for a month, fuelling Royal’s argument they had been robbed of the title.

Why such apparent bias might have been extended to Royal is not clear. Speculation might be the PSL, amid the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic, saw Royal and ‘tenderpreneur’ owner Shauwn Mkhize, who had built a flashy headquarters for the club at the Royal Ranch outside Pietermaritzburg, could offer the league more financially than Sekhukhune.

That Royal’s argument could not stand up in court in a protracted legal saga that went as high as the Constitutional Court, which dismissed Royal’s attempt to be reinstated NFD champions in August 2021, makes the PSL’s stance more baffling. The outlook initially even apparently harmed the PSL’s case against Royal and at first seemingly left Sekhukhune on its own to fight the battle.

One of Sekhukhune’s legal representatives, speaking anonymously to the now-defunct website New Frame, with the story also carried in Daily Maverick in September 2021, said the PSL's handling of the matter could have set a dangerous precedent affecting promotion and relegation, namely that “the one with the deepest pockets can just string everything out in court”.

“If it hadn’t been for the PSL intervention, we would not have been through all of this [the court saga],” they said. “Even in their open papers they at first argued in support of Royal AM and Polokwane, and that came back to bite them because [Royal’s lawyer] Dali Mpofu then threw it back at them and said, ‘but this is what you argued initially.’”

The legal representative said the apparent bias raised questions about conflicts of interest in the PSL’s senior leadership.

“These conflicts are why South African sport is in such a crisis. In football, the most glaringly obvious thing is that the league is run by Irvin, who owns Pirates. The chair of finance is [Kaizer Chiefs owner] Kaizer Motaung. And the acting CEO ... owns Arrows.

“And the woman [Mkhize] buying Celtic has done everything to take the league to court and owes the league millions of rand in legal costs. In her affidavit, she says the conduct of the league CEO is ‘unlawful and unconstitutional and warrants them to be jailed’.”

The PSL’s approval of Royal’s purchase of Celtic, to relocate the much-loved club to KwaZulu-Natal, raised many more questions.

Again the league seemed to bend over backwards for AM. The documentation named Mkhize’s sister Nozipho Ngubo as “the acquirer”. This circumvented the National Soccer League (NSL) Handbook ruling that a buyer may not have been involved in owning a club within a year.

Such eagerness to facilitate the deal was made stranger given Royal, while failing to be promoted through the courts, had refused to honour their promotion playoff fixtures. They had been found guilty for breaking NSL Handbook rules for that, pending a sentencing, with speculation the club might even face an expulsion, when the Celtic deal was approved.

Clarifying the PSL’s position in a press conference at the time, Khoza said it took the exco three days to approve the deal, such had been the interrogation of it. Yet the reasons to not approve it seemed glaring. The club had dragged the PSL through the courts, even at one stage applying for Madlala to be jailed in contempt of court, and been found guilty for refusing to honour fixtures.

Now, just under four years later, Royal are facing potential expulsion from the league again. This time, with the club having not honoured a fixture in almost two months as players and staff remain unpaid, no end in sight to the tax matter and no guarantees made to the PSL, the threat seems real. The PSL exco and board of governors were reportedly set to meet on Monday to discuss the matter.

When they did, it would not have gone out of place in any manner had league’s leadership introspected on its own role in the mess. It seems highly unlikely, though, any such conversations would have taken place.