Johannesburg – Danny Jordaan has been involved in the murky world of football politics for long enough to know that there is no such thing as a dead certainty.
Yet it does, at this stage, seem more likely that a flock of porcine creatures will nosedive their way across Kyalami on Saturday, than Mandla Mazibuko will beat Jordaan to the presidency of the South African Football Association.
Jordaan has failed, in recent years, in bids for a seat on the executive of the Confederation of African football (CAF) and the presidency of the Confederation of Southern African Football (Cosafa). But the vote for the Safa presidency is surely his.
Jordaan was a candidate four years ago, only to step down to concentrate on the 2010 Fifa World Cup. The eventual president, Kirsten Nematandani, was Jordaan’s ally at the Football Transformation Forum (FTF), and Jordaan said this week “the 32 regions that nominated me in 2009 were the same regions to nominate me now. They want me to take over and now I cannot say I have a World Cup to run”.
With 32 of the 52 Safa regions on his side, it is difficult to see how Jordaan will not get the majority vote at Safa’s elective congress tomorrow. He is already speaking like the Safa president, happily announcing his plans to launch a new sponsor and a provincial academy in KwaZulu Natal at Soccerex in Durban next week.
“We will be launching our first academy in KZN, our first sponsorship to Safa and our first grant to the development agency,” said Jordaan at the Michaelangelo hotel in Sandton.
Jordaan has been involved in South African football right through its emergence from the apartheid era. He was briefly named interim president of Safa back in 1991, when Safa made a presentation for re-admission to CAF. From 1997-2004, he was Safa’s CEO, and the key force behind South Africa’s bids for the 2006 and 2010 World Cup finals. All his efforts came to fruition in 2004 when South Africa won the right to host the 2010 World Cup, and Jordaan then headed up the much-lauded organisation of the tournament.
There are those who see Jordaan’s ever presence in South African football as a negative. After all, the national team has gone backwards since winning the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations, and there is no real sign of improvement, with youth structures in a complete mess. But Jordaan’s counter-argument is that the development of the national game could never be his focus, because of his commitment to bringing the World Cup to this country.
“I was in Safa, but not in Safa,” says Jordaan. “I was CEO on the 2006 bid and the 2010 bid, and I travelled throughout the world, to more than 180 federations. I travelled more than 1,5-million miles a year. When people say I was always in Safa, I was not in the country, so I could not get involved in development and all those issues.
“Once we were given the World Cup in 2004, immediately there were attacks in South Africa. Being CEO of the World Cup in South Africa was more than enough for me to worry about – not whether Safa had good teams or bad teams or development. We were under siege from the British press.”
Now he does have that time, development is a key issue for Jordaan, alongside coaching and in the more immediate future, the revival of the Under-23 side.
“Players are selected at amateur and junior level and the next level is the national team. We don’t have provincial structures,” says Jordaan.
“Rugby has the Sharks and the Cheetahs, where are the Sharks and Cheetahs of football?”
Jordaan also wants a broader base for the junior and amateur leagues. “In Germany they have 80000 junior matches on any weekend. In Spain they have 30000, in France 40000. In South Africa you have 2000 if you are lucky. In terms of development, they say the broader the base, the higher the peak. Germany has 80000 matches, we have 2000 and we say we want to beat Germany.”
Coaching provides a similar statistical nightmare for Jordaan.
“Spain has 12000 A license coaches, England has 10000, South Africa has 23,” he says. “How can you have kids pass at university when you don’t have professors?”
A more immediate issue is Bafana’s failure to qualify for anything, which stems, in Jordaan’s mind, from the failure of the youth sides. “Our Under-23 side last played in December 2011,” he says.
“If we want to have a chance of qualifying for Russia 2018 our Under-23 team must make it to Rio 2016. It is very important that as soon as possible this team must start preparing and playing.
“We have to try and fast track solutions in the short term but in the long term there are massive structural problems we have to solve to be among the best in the world. We are not there.”
All of these ventures will require financial support, and, as well as money already available from the Fifa Legacy Trust, Jordaan is confident he can get the sponsors investing in the future of South African football
“I have served on the marketing and television board for Fifa, I am the vice-president of marketing for CAF. I worked with Fifa on the organising committee for sponsors for the World Cup in South Africa. We raised $120-million, that’s R1,2-billion. I have long relationships with many of these companies and I am sure I will be able to convince them to come back and support football,” he says.
The Star