OMINOUS noises coming from Safa House indicate there has been a major fallout between the SA Football Association (Safa), football’s mother body, and the SA Schools Football Association (Sasfa).
It has been going on for some time.
I became aware of it when I was sent copies of correspondence between the two bodies and minutes of Sasfa meetings held in response to a unilateral decision by Safa to dissolve the schools body and take over the running of schools football.
Of course the schools association objected strenuously.
Things then went quiet until two weeks ago, when Sasfa held an extraordinary congress to deal with the Safa resolution. It rejected the takover bid and called for a return to the negotiation table.
The schools association was evicted from its offices in Safa House on the Monday after that press conference – and had to go the legal route to be allowed back in again.
The objection to the takeover, I believe, is based on constitutional grounds and on the provisions of the Schools Act, which insists that school activities be organised by teachers.
What is well known is that Safa’s football development is in trouble. Actually, that’s being kind – as far as I can tell it’s non-existent, certainly not in a format that resembles the development programmes of other sporting codes, and nothing like the development structures of the top soccer nations around the world.
Sasfa, it should be remembered, operates within an education system that is seriously challenged.
There are figures around that suggest more than 20 000 of the 24 000-odd schools in the country are dysfunctional – little effective teaching or learning is taking place – so it would be harsh to lay the blame on them entirely.
What world-class development programmes there are in rugby and cricket, for example, are run mainly in the 4 000 or so functional schools, which include the private schools. It’s an area where the apartheid legacy rubber hits the road, I’m afraid.
What Sasfa, through its sponsored national tournaments, has done, however, is bring organised sport to thousands of those dysfunctional schools. Sport that would otherwise not be taking place.
It’s not perfect – organisation is patchy and it’s school-based, not provincial, which makes it difficult to identify talent effectively, but it’s there and the prize money – and some of it is quite substantial – is handed over in educational and sporting infrastructure and equipment, never in cash.
And that, I suspect, is where the problem starts. It’s about the sponsorship money.
Soccer is the national game and corporations that want to be seen as being good citizens are more prepared to put their money into soccer development than into the game at a senior or professional level.
The Sasfa tournaments are well supported financially – and they have to be, given the enormity of the task of taking the game to the remotest parts of the country.
The feeling I get is that the mother body is eyeing that sponsorship cash and would like to manage it itself.
If its reasons were that it wanted stricter controls to be put in place, that would be a good thing – there have been accusations of poor management, and sponsors have expressed concern about what has happened to money. But Safa has not said anything about that.
Meanwhile, however, the Sasfa competitions for this year are nearing completion and are running smoothly.
It’s all speculation at this stage, of course, and we can only hope that the differences are settled without their getting into the courts.
The one thing that is certain is that when elephants clash the grass is trampled, and in this case that means the beautiful game at grassroots level.