Radebe returns to his roots to plough back
Since retiring after a stellar career captaining Leeds United, the former Bafana captain has been involved in youth development at schools
Former Bafana Bafana and retired Leeds United captain Lucas Radebe has been keeping a low profile since hanging up his soccer boots, with his last professional soccer activity being at the famed UK club a few years ago before he called it quits.
But this does not mean the man whose football exploits here and abroad are legendary is not involved back home.
In fact, Radebe appears to be busier than ever, involved in youth development at Gauteng secondary schools.
He is also active as a businessman, running his investment company in which he invested money he made as a soccer player — believed to be millions of rand.
In an interview that touched on his life as a soccer player, Rhoo, as he is popularly known, spoke about rising to the peak of his career, becoming Bafana Bafana captain before achieving the same position in the UK at Leeds United.
Radebe is now also involved in Disney TV as part of a Spanish-language telenovela about a gifted teenager who leaves home for a top football academy. Through a competition run during the screening of the show, Radebe will select youngsters who will receive football coaching.
“When I was approached to be involved in this show, I embraced it immediately because the values it carries, including the passion for youth development in sport, happen to be the same passion that I hold now that I have retired from professional football. I like the characters in this show.
“The story line fits into what I would love to see myself doing now that I have retired from professional football. This show involves the youth, and this is relevant to me because I dedicate my life to development at the moment,” he said.
In partnership with Absa, Adidas and the Gauteng department of sport, arts, culture and recreation, Radebe is participating in a number of youth development programmes.
The most prominent programme is the ET Radebe Tournament, the second of which took place on June 16 and involved eight Gauteng high schools. The tournament is organised by one of his companies, Countrywide Sport.
Held in honour of his late mother, it involved female and male high school students, Radebe said.
“But it is actually not about sport. I am just using sport to develop the youth holistically in the areas of character development, discipline, creating opportunities such as bursaries, as well as preparing them for the workplace with regards to encouraging them to have a vision in life.”
It was a way for him to remain relevant to the society that had produced him, he said, involvement in communities. People looked up to people like him who were seen as role models and who had succeeded against all odds to achieve something, not only locally, but representing the country and all South Africans internationally.
Radebe is clearly focused on building a business empire now that he has retired from the hectic lifestyle of a soccer professional and he is doing it through his other company, Lucas Radebe Management.
“Essentially, it is a management company involved in sport and a range of management services, including investment.
“It became clear what it was that I was going to do after football. I mapped out my professional career after football, four years before retiring, planning it meticulously, including carefully selecting a group of experts that were going to help me make my plans a reality.
“I had no doubt in my mind what it was I was going to do after retiring,” he said.
“Luckily, throughout my career, I have worked with people who guided me in other aspects of life, and our loyalty to each other has always been tight. It was not just a question of fulfilling what was in the contract, but going beyond the paper, making sure that the business side of my career [including legal issues, the commercial aspect of the Lucas Radebe brand,] was taken care of right from the beginning.”
The team he worked with throughout his career was the one he was working with following his retirement, Radebe said. He emphasised the importance of loyalty and the benefits that accrued from it.
Curiously, unlike a number of successful retired players, Radebe has not been involved in professional local football since he came back from overseas.
Has he ever considered getting into coaching locally?
“I have actually been offered an opportunity to coach Bafana Bafana,” he said.
“For me, it is not about jumping into an opportunity, it is also about the sustainability that comes with my involvement.
“I turned down the offer because I know that jumping into an opportunity because it has been offered to you is not wise. There must be support structures accompanying such an offer.
“For example, there is a need for development of players at grassroots level, and it is from these that a coach of a national team can draw players for him to be successful.
“In SA, for example, there have been a number of very good coaches with international reputations that failed [at] Bafana Bafana, the reason being that there are no support structures for coaches of the national team,” said Radebe.
He managed to escape the ghosts that often plagued players who were in the limelight — such as excessive drinking, womanising and blowing the money they had earned, in some cases millions of rand — because he tapped into the basic values that people often had but forsook once they were in the limelight, Radebe said.
“For example, humility is very crucial to one’s success, a good example being Tata [the late Nelson Mandela]. Being humble is being true to yourself as a human being.
THROUGHOUT MY CAREER, I HAVE WORKED WITH PEOPLE WHO GUIDED ME IN OTHER ASPECTS OF LIFE
“Of course, there will always be people following you everywhere, some wanting to touch you, others offering you things that appear irresistible. All you need to do is to remind yourself of who you really are and why you do what you do. Sanity will prevail eventually.
“It is a question of discipline at a personal level. No one is going to follow you home and make sure that you are eating the right food for example, or that you do not go out partying the whole night, forgetting that you are a soccer player that needs to be superfit at all times,” he said.
In the case of some players, especially from SA, the different lifestyle sometimes sidetracked them when they played overseas for the first time, he said.
“As a soccer player playing top soccer in England, there is even more focus on you. More is expected from you, and therefore you need to mentally prepare yourself for that.
“The lifestyle there is totally different from SA, and some of our guys get sidetracked by that,” he said.
“Not me, though, because I have always reminded myself who am I and where I come from and why was I in the UK in the first place.
“If you come from where I come from, which is the township [Diepkloof, Soweto], you certainly do not want to go back there [to poverty].
“The only time you want to go back there is to give back to the society that made you in the first place.
“That is what I am currently doing, building a legacy through developing the youth in our communities,” he said.