Jordaan still oversees Safa’s lack of delivery
• South African football will continue to flounder in mediocrity while the faces at the top remain the same
Danny Jordaan was elected South African Football Association (Safa) president for a second successive term on Saturday, and it is difficult to make sense of this.
Does his fresh five-year term signal the dawn of a new era in South African football? Perhaps an era in which some of the frittered-away gains after the hosting of the 2010 World Cup are recaptured and extended?
Or does his re-election signify that South African football remains trapped in a kind of administrative limbo, where fresh faces are rare and largely impotent football fans are condemned to watching the same predictable power plays and trivial debates that light up social media year in, year out?
Jordaan’s re-election at the packed Safa congress at the Sandton Convention Centre provides some clues about the road ahead.
Not for the first time, in the months running up to the elections there were difficult-toweigh allegations against the incumbent, including allegations of rape from two women.
Then, on Saturday, there was the mandatory kerfuffle about due process and threats of violence from Jordaan’s opponent for the position, Ace Ncobo.
A cloud of déjà vu descended over congress delegates’ heads. Hadn’t they seen this before? Some of the faces might be different, but the general levels of fractiousness and intrigue were the same — if not higher.
With bucket-loads of dirt, disinformation and campaigns that revolved around personalities rather than substantive issues, the race between Jordaan and Ncobo looked suspiciously like every other Safa election in living memory.
We were back, in other words, in the same South African Punch and Judy show.
Before condemning the Safa elections too wholeheartedly, we must take a detour to examine the commercial architecture of the South African game.
This is important because Safa is not cash flush, and whether Ncobo or Jordaan sits at the top is, in a sense, irrelevant if they are working with a bank account that is empty.
In the modern world sporting federations make money from the sale of broadcast rights; sponsors flock as a result of products being shown on television; and merchandising.
Safa has precious few commercial properties on its shelf. Yes, it has Bafana Bafana, but the national side might only play 10 times a year.
Yes, Safa also controls the rights to all the other national teams — the women’s side and the age-group teams — but these are comparatively small fish.
What Safa does not own — and this makes it anomalous in the world game — are the rights to the nation’s premier cup competition. The Football Association (England) owns the rights to the FA Cup, which is a huge money-spinner from January to the final in May.
The equivalent in SA is the Nedbank Cup, and for reasons that are both historical and too complicated for a newspaper article, the commercial and broadcast rights to the Nedbank Cup (or its equivalent in SA) are owned by the Premier Soccer League.
Safa desperately needs the Nedbank Cup in its portfolio of properties. Without it, the association finds itself in a kind of commercial straightjacket, unable to raise substantial revenue to fund its programmes. This is a kind of tragic vicious cycle: it remains poor because it has nothing with which to make money; and having little with which to make money, Safa remains poor.
But it also remains bloated. In becoming president for another five-year term, Jordaan is president of a Safa national executive committee on which serve the heads of the 52 Safa regions. To be brutal, some of the heads of these 52 regions add precious little to the organisation. They would be functionally unemployable anywhere else. At Safa, they serve on subcommittees, they meddle and they earn honoraria. They get in the way of the day-to-day operational running of the organisation.
What you have, in effect, are two centres of power.
This perhaps accounts for why, when Jordaan promised nine satellite academies when he was campaigning for election last time, only three have been delivered.
It might also account for why the relationship between Safa and the United School Sports Association of SA remains becalmed. Ussasa is nominally a Safa member, controlling football in schools, yet Safa and Ussasa appear not to be playing on common ground.
Football should be flourishing in South African high schools, the wellspring of cricket and rugby in this country, but it isn’t. It is reasonable to ask why this isn’t happening.
Once again, too much media debate has focused on who is at the top, rather than calling Safa to account for its strategic shortcomings. Safa is self-evidently too big and too political, if politics are understood as the small p trade-offs that seem to constitute business as usual at the association’s Nasrec headquarters. Those headquarters, in the shadow of the iconic FNB Stadium, were built on the promise of 2010 World Cup profits. With those profits (SA kept the hundreds of millions of rand that were generated from ticket sales) came an implicit promise of a more streamlined organisation and a better national side — a World Cup dividend, in other words. This hasn’t come to pass. Bafana Bafana are ranked 72 in the world, sandwiched between Curacao (71) and China (73) in the latest Fifa rankings.
Curacao is a tiny former Dutch island with 160,000 citizens in the southern Caribbean. Its contribution to the world game is negligible.
Most recently, Bafana Bafana failed to qualify for the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations and for the World Cup in Russia, which gets under way in a couple of weeks’ time.
For a nation that cares deeply about football — and always has — it is fair to ask why Curacao, a nation that is synonymous with a citrus-flavoured liqueur, is one place ahead of SA in the Fifa rankings.
It rather puts Jordaan’s reelection into perspective, now doesn’t it?
SOME OF THE HEADS OF THESE 52 REGIONS ... WOULD BE FUNCTIONALLY UNEMPLOYABLE ANYWHERE ELSE