Football clubs should invest in their supporters

They should be able to acquire a stake in a team, writes Morgan Phaahla, Ekurhuleni.

Sport tourism in South Africa is declining with poor match attendance across all games. Hooliganism is one of the contributing factors, instigated by vanity besetting soccer, owing to the decrepit management and silo-mentality in the administration of most football clubs.

It’s one thing to be a supporter and another to be a stakeholder. Supporters tend to turn a blind eye to the vandalism in the stadi- um because their team lost.

It’s inexcusable, to say the least, if not complicit in the commission of such offence. In brief, this beautiful sport requires role-players to observe restraint during and after the game.

Perhaps it’s time for football clubs to bring supporters on board as shareholders through equity instruments of a similar kind to the broad-based empowerment schemes.

To realise this, it would need the Premier Soccer League (PSL) to be reconfigured for clubs to participate as public companies and thus afford supporters the opportunity to acquire shares.

The current model of clubs in the PSL makes it difficult, particularly for retired players, to acquire teams through empowerment deals.

Teams with rich heritages such as Moroka Swallows and Umtata Bush Bucks could have been saved through such transactions or public offering with the view to gaining control of the clubs.

Often, greed prevents those creative initiatives from seeing the light of day.

This despite the transactions bringing role-players at the centre of development to support sustainable transformation in football.