Pitso was a real handful, but a rewarding handful

Stan Matthews – SuperSport United CEO

“When I joined SuperSport (United), Pitso ( Mosimane) was still making his way as a development coach and establishing himself as a good spotter of young talent. He’s obsessed with football and with learning more – that’s something we share. Pitso was my student, just so you know, when I was at Boston City Campus. From 1992 to 1999, I was at Boston City Campus and, in 1998, enrolled as a part-time student and graduated with a sports management diploma. That’s where I met Pitso. Later, when I left Boston and joined SuperSport, I found him there. We had that passion for academics and he had that strong passion for learning. We went to the Netherlands together. Raymond Verheijen was his mentor, so he wanted to go and spend some time with Raymond in the Netherlands and I wanted to go see the Dutch landscape, which resulted in us doing a deal with Feyenoord Rotterdam and it’s a deal which lasted for six years. We also went to the UK together, to the English FA and Liverpool. Wherever we went, everybody took a liking to Pitso and his desire to learn and his knowledge and insight of the game. We could see early on that he was gifted. He’s not an easy guy to work with. He speaks his mind, he’s confrontational and he challenges people. He is very passionate, which means situations with Pitso will always be flammable because he’s got fire in him and there will be explosions along the way. He is not easy to work with, but he is also a rewarding person to work with because he will push you to the maximum and he will challenge you. I didn’t have a great relationship with Bruce Grobbelaar and that ended with him leaving the club. That was Pitso’s opportunity to get that caretaker position. In many ways, the journey that I went on with Pitso shaped me in my career. I’ve worked with coaches who have won 14 of the last 20 league titles – Gordon Igesund, Gavin Hunt, Stuart Baxter and Pitso. It’s not easy to work with those type of coaches. To be blunt, if I didn’t get a dynamite package like Pitso at the start of my career, I am not sure if I would have developed my own career the way I did. Pitso was a real handful, but a rewarding handful. He gave me a good confidence that I could trust my coaches. I came out of the Bruce Grobbelaar relationship insecure and I was new in the game and I had just had a fallout with a legend in football. I was disillusioned on whether I was the problem, but the relationship with Pitso gave me a lot of confidence that I could trust my coaches if they were good and not interfere too much and