Angry Wits employees shocked after club’s sale

Employees of Bidvest Wits are shocked at the manner in which owning company Bidvest allegedly kept the club in the dark about the nowconfirmed sale of its Premier Division franchise to Masala Mulaudzi.

Various sources from within Wits‚ who did not want to be named‚ said the club’s employees and management are angry that a buyer could not have been found to preserve the 99-year-old club‚ the oldest existing team in the Premier Soccer League’s (PSL) top-flight Premier Division or GladAfrica Championship first division.

The sources said the first indications the management had of a sale was via phone calls from the media asking if a deal existed.

They said they found out about the deal being closed in the weekend’s media reports.

A source said that the Wits management were getting calls from the media asking if the club was being sold‚ and when they approached Bidvest for clarification they were told: “‘If we are for sale you guys will be the first to know’.”

The source said: “But we were the last to know.

“We found out about it on Sunday via the news reports.”

Wits’ sale was apparently concluded by club CEO Alan Fainman‚ who is also CEO of Bidvest Services.

The management were kept under the impression that business was continuing as normal to the extent that they renewed the contracts of

“about five” players in recent weeks‚ and signed two more on precontracts for the coming season.

Mulaudzi, who confirmed the sale, is the owner of Limpopo-based GladAfrica Championship team Tshakhuma Tsha Madzivhandila FC (TTM).

The sources said the employees have been left angry that a club that has such a long and pedigreed history interwoven into the story of SA football‚ and which was at the forefront of pathfinding interracial football in the late 1970s and 1980s‚ could not be sold to a buyer wanting to preserve the team.

Wits‚ founded in 1921‚ would have turned 100 next year.

Fainman could not be reached for comment.