Safa-PSL feud is going to cripple some clubs

The uncertainty about the return of football due to the persistent squabbling between the PSL and Safa has been draining for us as football journalists and one can only imagine what it is doing to the players who are expected to train on a daily basis while they are not even sure if they will get salaries at the end of the month.

Players are putting their lives at risk of contracting Covid-19 by travelling to and from training every day but now it isn’t even clear if it is worth it because there is talk that the leagues – both GladAfrica Championship and Absa Premiership – could be scrapped.

Teams have returned to training and most have been at it for three weeks at least. Before returning, they had to do Covid-19 tests and sanitisation of their equipment and facilities which costs a fortune.

Add to that the millions spent on travelling, salaries, signing-on fees, fan activations and all other football business-related costs, all for nothing. I feel especially sorry for the club owners of teams in the Championship and ABC Motsepe leagues who fund most of their team’s activities from their own pockets. They will have lost millions which they invested hoping for a return of some sort.

But because the two organisations tasked with leading our football could not work together all that might go down the drain. I spoke to Highlands Park’s Sinky Mnisi this week. He put the blame squarely at Safa’s door, saying they are employing delaying tactics by wanting to take total control of this project and he felt they should only be playing a monitoring @SbongsKaDonga role.

His main concern was for the players who had not gone home because they were quarantined in Joburg when lockdown was imposed. He says some of them are also from outside the country where they left their family, friends, and in some cases wives or spouses.

I must agree with him. Safa may have shot themselves on the foot with this because it has exposed their short-sightedness. A colleague suggested that Safa were delaying the restart because if the PSL finished before August, they would have had to also finish their leagues for teams to be promoted from ABC Motsepe to the Championship.

Safa are not ready financially to complete those leagues because the teams there cannot afford what the PSL teams have been required to do to return to play which is why they initially insisted that everyone return when lockdown has been scaled down to Level one.

As things stand, Level one will only come into effect at the earliest in October, and that would have been a whole seven months without football by then. This week Safa said they had managed to get the PSL an extension from Fifa beyond 31 August. I think that was a measure to try and avert the danger they had already led football in the country into.