Solving the Bafana Puzzle
Text: Tristan Holme. Photos: Gallo Images/Getty Images/AFP. Article from the March 2012 issue of Sport s Illustrated Magazine.
After the 0-0 draw with Equatorial Guinea in January, national coach Pitso Mosimane bemoaned the PSL’s reluctance to give Bafana Bafana preparation time. A month later, SAFA chief executive Robin Petersen announced that they had recruited a mysterious German to help with “talent identification”. Sports Illustated asks what is really wrong with our national football side – and what to do about it?
This July, South Africa’s national football team will mark 20 years since they returned from the international wilderness. It should be an occasion for celebration and for reflection; and yet, as we relive the last two decades, it’s fair to conclude that the local game has never been at a lower ebb than it is now.
Over the past few weeks football fans around the country have watched the African Cup of Nations without any vested interest, wondering how a potential powerhouse like Bafana Bafana could fail to qualify. So strong was the expectation that the domestic calendar was put on hold, which has ultimately added insult to injury for a soccer-starved public who’ve been denied both international and domestic action.
Bafana have not qualified for a major tournament – through means other than hosting it – since 2006. But it’s not just the national team that’s a cause for concern: last year the U23s failed to qualify for the Olympics, while the U20s didn’t make it out of their group in the COSAFA U20 Youth Championship. Perhaps most worrying is the placid acceptance of these failures. When Bafana failed to qualify for the Nations Cup, the South African Football Association (SAFA) preferred to blame a clause in Article 14 of the qualifying rules, rather than admit that the team should never have had to rely on goal difference in the first place.
To cure the real malady, informed observers believe the most critical issue is to change the youth league structure, because the current model is not developing complete footballers.
A look at South Africa’s high participation numbers and relatively low FIFA ranking of 52nd at the start of 2012 suggests that something is fundamentally wrong. Yet the authorities tend to miss the point. When the U23s returned home from Morocco in December, SAFA insisted there was no crisis, but promised to hold a national technical conference to discuss the “endless malaise” of impotent strikers. There was no doubt that goals had been hard to come by, but it was a classic case of treating the symptoms, not the disease.
To cure the real malady, informed observers believe the most critical issue is to change the youth league structure, because the current model is not developing complete footballers with the necessary skills to compete at the highest level. “If you have these numbers of people playing football and you look at where Bafana is on the world ranking, you can be very proud that you develop players for your first teams, but you must be ashamed that you don’t develop world-class players,” says Ajax Cape Town coach Maarten Stekelenburg.
The Dutchman knows a thing or two about youth football, having spent 10 years coaching at the Ajax Amsterdam academy, overseeing the development of players such as Wesley Sneijder. Holland’s youth structure has been replicated around Europe for more than a decade, and Stekelenburg says the key is to consider where a player should be at the end of his youth football – when he’s 19 – and then break it down to when he starts at the age of six.
In this way his development is divided into three main stages. Between the ages of six and 11, he is getting to know the ball and developing basic ball skills. In the following four years he begins to play in a team, learning the various positions and how to interact with teammates within a formation. The last four years, from the age of 16 to 19, he needs to play in a team against another team, where he must learn to work an opposition out, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and decide how to counter them. It is in this phase that the SA system lets players down.
“For knowing the ball, you don’t need a league,” says Stekelenburg. “For knowing the ball you just need a ball and a player.
When you’re going to play together with the ball you need a friend, but you can do that on the street; so in that way, you don’t need a structured environment.”
It’s no wonder, then, that South Africa produces players who can light up a moment with their individual ball skills, which are honed on street corners around the country. Yet when it comes to the final stage of development, Stekelenburg says it is critical that there is a structured league in which players come up against teams at their level of skill, challenging their tactical ability and teamwork.-
For this to happen, a pyramidal structure is required in the leagues, but in South Africa we don’t have that. Instead, youth teams in every province are arranged into Local Football Associations (LFAs) on a purely geographical basis, rather than on strength, resulting in a wide range of abilities among teams in each LFA. Strong sides will therefore only face equally strong opposition once or twice a season, meaning they very rarely have to work out how to break their opponents down. Instead they can rely solely on their individual skills to beat inferior players, and don’t have to develop their team skills.
The net result of this system is seen in the type of footballers that South Africa is producing. “They run a lot with the ball, their technique is good in relation to the ball but not in relation to other players, and they have no education in tactics or coming up with a game plan,” says Stekelenburg.
(This also points directly to South Africa’s chronic lack of finishing ability, as few goals are actually a matter of individual brilliance, but more about mutual understanding – ED.)
By contrast, cricket and rugby benefit from the presence of a very strong (and hierarchical) school structure, which is enhanced by provincial competitions. Most schoolkids face stiff opposition on a weekly basis, while the likes of rugby’s Craven Week and the Khaya Majola Cricket Week essentially serve as the tip of the pyramid for those talented enough to be selected for their provinces.
Three years ago Cricket South Africa (CSA) took the extra initiative of launching a countrywide T20 tournament that includes over 500 schools in a national knockout. The winners in each province face off against the other provincial winners within their CSA franchise, before progressing to the national finals. It’s the ultimate example of a pyramid structure, albeit within a single competition rather than a league, and it shows in the quality of international players that SA produces.
“In senior football there is a pyramid structure, but in youth football you don’t have that at all, so you come from a situation where in Cape Town you have 27 LFAs,” continues Stekelenburg. “But you don’t just have that in Cape Town – you have that in nine regions of the Western Cape, so a fantastic youth player is playing in 1/243rd of the Western Cape, which is not even the strongest l/243rd. Then when he graduates to senior level he must suddenly play in the highest league in the country: the PSL.”
Ajax strive to improve the flat structure through innovations such as placing their U19s in the third league at senior level, and that forward thinking has led them to produce some of the country’s top young talent – such as Thulani Serero, who transferred to Ajax Amsterdam last year, and Sameehg Doutie, who was included in the CAF U23 Championship Best XI last year, despite Amaglug-glug’s failure.
Meanwhile the big Soweto clubs have also been forced to manhandle the system in order to improve it, which they’ve done by taking up membership in the same LFA. This strengthens their LFA and ensures that their youth teams enjoy strong competition against each other, but it’s nothing more than a patchy solution to a flawed structure, and clearly something needs to change. The question is how.
Corne Groenendijk took over from Stekelenburg as head of youth at Ajax Cape Town last July, having spent the previous 15 years at the KNVB – the national governing body for football in the Netherlands. He explains that their structure is designed to cater to the needs of a player’s development while minimising travel costs.
“The Netherlands at U19 level has a one-two-four-eight-sixteen sort of setup. So there is one premier league, two first divisions, four second divisions, eight third divisions and so on. So the less good a player you are, the more leagues there are and the less you have to travel. It’s not necessary for the U15s to have a national premier league, so what we do is we start with four second divisions, eight third divisions, and we just leave the top of the pyramid out. In a theoretical sense this system is simple and quite easy to use.”
South Africa’s geography and socio-economic challenges would demand a unique solution, but it should all begin with a pyramid structure at every level. “If you want to develop U15s to play in a team against other teams, you need to have good opponents on a weekly basis,” says Groenendijk. “They can be found here. So start by putting all the 27 LFA champions in two leagues of 13 teams or so – call them Cape Town Super Divisions or something – and do that in every province.”
Both Groenendijk and Stekelenburg are eager to stress that they are not on some neo-colonialist crusade, and that imposing the Dutch system on South Africa would not necessarily work because they are two countries with very different demographics. “It’s not that we’re saying, ‘Everything is better in Europe and we will come here to change everything’,” says Stekelenburg.
“It’s more that we think that with the talent in South Africa you can do so much more than they do at the moment, and the structure is not helping.”
When questioned about the issue, SAFA were eager to point out that they continue to plough World Cup legacy money into development. State-of-the-art artificial pitches are being built in each of their 52 regions, while R3-million will be spent in the first part of this year on training up a new group of youth coaches.
While not wanting to criticise the initiative, Stekelenburg feels the exercise can’t realise its full potential without first having a structure in place to properly utilise those facilities. “My feeling is when you get the leagues sorted out, a lot will filter out of that. Because when you get the best playing against the best, the best coaches will want to be involved, and clubs that play on the highest level in the pyramid will try to get the best facilities. So the structure is key for the rest to happen.”
Bidvest Wits coach Roger De Sa, a PSL manager for the last decade, agrees with that assessment. In fact, the PSL has been the one positive in SA football of late, with a gradual improvement in quality backed up by a bumper television deal that shows its popularity is on the rise. Yet the league’s progress owes much to the influx of talented players from the rest of Africa, and De Sa can understand why clubs prefer to import.
“The way the industry is structured, it doesn’t favour development,” says De Sa. “We have 24 kids in our academy and we spend over R100 000 per year on each kid. So we’re spending R2.4-million a year on a project where you don’t know what you’re going to get. Any businessman would ask me, What are you doing? Why don’t you just take your R2.4-million and go into Africa where you can find ready-made footballers who are motivated to achieve, who are stronger, bigger and know what they’re doing?’
“It’s left to the clubs to develop players, and rightly so. But for the clubs to invest in this, we need a proper youth league, where there is no age cheating and it’s worthwhile to develop young players.”
Meanwhile, the absence of national youth leagues reflects directly in the results of the national youth teams. “We’ve got so much money in the PSL that I believe we should have a national U19 league,” says De Sa. “I would hate to be the national U20 coach, because I wouldn’t know where to find the players.”
Equally problematic are the restrictive player regulations, which prohibit clubs from moving youth players in and out of their senior teams if they want to test them intermittently at a higher level. Both De Sa and Stekelenburg are at a loss as to why such laws exist. “When I promote an U18 player to my first team, I have to get clearance from the authorities for him to leave that team and play in the pro setup,” explains De Sa. “How can I encourage my youngsters to dabble every now and then in a higher league? I can’t just throw them in for good and hope for the best – it needs to be a gradual process, otherwise you could ruin that kid’s career.”
Stekelenburg and De Sa both feel that too much effort is expended trying to improve the system from the top down in search of a quick fix. Investing in the U23 national side is unlikely to reap rewards with players who have already completed their development, while the idea to force every club in the National First Division to have five U23 players in their starting lineups is fundamentally flawed.
“Eighty percent of those clubs don’t have development structures – they’re just a team, not a club,” says De Sa. “Bay United don’t have a proper structure, so they just go and loan players and find players elsewhere – they don’t develop them.”
A better idea would be for SAFA to start a revamp from the bottom and work their way up. “The Swiss are a good example,” says Groenendijk. “They made a trip around Europe to see what ideas they could find, they made a plan and they implemented it. That was 10 years ago, and now their youth teams have become European champions (Switzerland won the 2002 U17 European Championship and the 2009 U17 World Cup), and their national team is qualifying for the big tournaments again and again.”
Stekelenburg points to Germany, who responded to disappointment at Euro2000 by changing their whole style of football. The results were plain to see at the 2010 FIFA World Cup, where a group of players who’d dominated European youth championships swept into the semis on the back of flowing football.
Almost 20 years on from that heady day in Durban when Doctor Khumalo’s penalty downed Cameroon to signal South Africa’s return, the time for a revolution in SA football could not be better. The World Cup dividends are streaming into SAFA’s coffers at a time when the game needs investment in the right places. With the country unlikely to host another World Cup in the next 40 years, it needs to be recognised that this chance is unlikely to come around again. Let’s make the most of it while we still can.
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