The world of football finds itself under the spell of Erling Haaland as the Norwegian striker goes about nonchalantly obliterating football records. At the age of 22, Haaland, who plays for Manchester City, has scored 170 goals, putting Christiano Ronaldo in distant second at 50 goals at the same age. Fans of the beautiful game are mesmerised.
The Telegraph describes Haaland as an aberration. “Big, muscular, quick, sharp, intelligent, skilled: it is hard to think of anyone who has had such a combination of attributes before. Just to witness him in action is to appreciate that he is so special,” the newspaper gushed. Recently, the striker scored a remarkable 14 goals in eight games.
Haaland is said to be among the greatest footballers of all time – in the company of Pele, Maradona, Messi and Ronaldo.
Football pundits cite the ability to win matches almost single-handedly, longevity, and performance under pressure as some of the attributes for a player to be counted among the greatest. At the rate he is going, Haaland is sure to add his name to that list.
On Pele, Benfica goalkeeper Costa Pereira, commenting on his team’s loss to Santos in 1962, had this to say: “I arrived hoping to stop a great man, but I went away convinced I had been undone by someone who was not born on the same planet as the rest of us.”
SA has had its share of special talent: Doctor Khumalo, Ace Ntsoelengoe, Benni McCarthy, Lucas Radebe and Neil Tovey. With football arguably SA’s most popular sport, it is disheartening that players of such greatness are not emerging.
Football stadiums are no longer filled to the brim as fans watch the games on television. The excitement is no longer there. The reason for the dearth of football talent includes the fact that less than 10% of SA’s public schools have a recognised pathway to national team structures.
According to the report of the Eminent Persons Group on transformation in sports, the organised school sports participation pathway ideally consists of three stages: the informal phase which serves as an introductory stage, starting around primary school; the formal stage, which can begin as early as 10 years old and includes consistently playing in established leagues and competitions; and the competitive stage – usually starting around high school, ultimately laying the tracks for the best talent to be filtered through to provincial and national team setups.
It is an indictment of the SA Football Association that structures for football do not exist, which means the talent pool within schools has no formal avenues for progression within the sport. Such structures do exist for cricket, rugby and netball and must be replicated in football to meaningfully promote its level of competitiveness. In the latest Fifa rankings, the national team Bafana Bafana rank outside of the best national football teams in Africa.
With the current team, it would be hard for any fan to name the starting 11, whereas this could be done effortlessly with the Afcon-winning squad of 1996 that boasted the likes of Khumalo, Tovey, Radebe and the late Shoes Moshoeu.
In SA competitive football starts much later than in other codes. This means there can hardly be any continuity from junior national team phase to national team phase. The only evidence of Safa’s involvement in school football is through the Sanlam Kay Motsepe School Cup tournament – which last took place in 2019.
According to football researchers, there are three pitfalls facing local youth football: age-cheating, corruption in the recruitment of young players and the exploitation of these players in academies.
On age-cheating, one scandal stands. During an international tournament held in France in 1998, several age cheats were uncovered, including the captain who was outed as a 24-year-old third-year university student.
For SA to relinquish the dubious epithet as a football also-ran and reclaim its position as a continental giant, school football structures must be revived to implement programmes that will ensure continuity from the grassroots to the national team phase.
Who knows, we may even produce our own Haaland.
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