Johannesburg - Are you still dreaming of a Sky Sports-like transfer deadline day drama in the Premier Soccer League? Well, it is becoming increasingly unlikely with clubs tightening their belts and finding new ways to bring in quality players without having to pay outrages fees in what PSL chairman Irvin Khoza calls an “artificial market”.
The reality is that the top clubs are feeling the pinch and leaving it late to beef up the playing personnel is simply a disadvantage for coaches tasked with winning trophies.
In a rare interview, Bidvest Wits CEO Jose Ferreira agreed with Khoza and even went further by adding that football administrators were working in a “depressed market”. Ferreira was buying and selling players for two of Tshwane’s influential outfits, Mamelodi Sundowns and SuperSport United, before being roped in by the Clever Boys in 2012.
“We are operating in an extremely difficult market,” he says. “This is more so now because it is a depressed economic market. The values of players just keep rising but we can’t afford to go pay transfer fees because we don’t have the financial resources of other clubs. We need to think smart, keeping an eye on a player that is free in a season or so. That restricts us because you almost get what is available and not necessarily what you want. That is basically our business model.”
But Ferreira’s worst nightmare could be coming to haunt him as rival clubs are beginning to play in the same space. Kaizer Chiefs have signed Ramahlwe Mphahlele, Enocent Mkhabela and Keagan Buchanan as free agents ahead of the upcoming season and SuperSport have carried on with their former CEO’s transfer policy.
“There’s been a major shift in transfer window strategy or application in the PSL,” says Stan Matthews, CEO and director of football at SuperSport. “In the beginning - and I remember this well while working with Jose - we were a transfer window ahead all the time. If you look at this current window, we have actually made only one signing, which is Thabo Mnyamane from AmaTuks. He became available when his club got relegated, which we didn’t think would happen. All the other players were lined up from when they could sign pre-contracts, so they were not surprises for us.”
What was then an exclusive way of snapping up marquee signings for Ferreira is no longer the case, but he says Wits will have to find other ways to beat their rivals to the chase. “Going out and buying players is simply not our domain. We know we can’t compete so often we don’t even inquire about certain players. This is the only strategy we can afford because we operate on a very strict budget. My strategy has always been about survival,” he explains.
Matthews says costs for clubs are spiralling and the reserve league has offered some reprieve for club bosses more excited about promoting a youngster showing potential than a member of the senior team with a salary package that could rise to nearly a million a year.
“The challenge for clubs is to bring the average cost down because player wages are also not cheap. They are eating into all the gains we have made. As much as the grants have gone up (PSL teams receive R1.5-million a month from the league), we have not made strides as clubs and that will not happen until we have efficient youth structures, which will help buffer the cost of what are actually silly transfer fees. I say that, but our club has in the past cashed in on those. If you are a selling club it’s great; not so for a buying club,” Matthews says.
Chiefs were once a buying club but the Glamour Boys are no longer guaranteed the crème de la crème due to figures that are being demanded, often for one-season wonders. Bobby Motaung, the Amakhosi football manager, says playing with money now would give even Albert Einstein a tough time. And when Amakhosi were reportedly prepared to break the bank for Sibusiso Vilakazi, Wits were unwilling to sell at the time, only to eventually agree a deal, which included two players going the other way, with Sundowns last month.
“The biggest challenge is the economy,” says Motaung.
The Star