The thing about the game of soccer is that a match of significance does not finish at the end of regulated time. It goes on long after the referee has blown his whistle for the last time, long after the players and coaches have returned to their homes and families.
In this country we currently call SA, you often see a sequel to a major football match on a Monday morning, with fans of a winning team arriving at work draped in their club’s colours.
This was certainly the case last Monday as black and white as well as yellow soccer shirts were the order of the day as Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns fans celebrated their PSL Championship and CAF Champions League victories respectively.
The two sets of fans had the bragging rights and did not miss the opportunity to rub it in for their long-suffering Kaizer Chiefs rivals.
However, Amakhosi Amahle were never going to take all of that lying down. They had retorts of their own. For instance, some mocked The Buccaneers over the fact that it had to take two bizarre own goals by relegation-bound Orbit College for the Soweto giants to finally get their hands on a trophy that had eluded them for 14 years.
Light-hearted claims of backroom dealings abounded. But that was all understood to be part of the banter.
Football banter is what many die-hard fans look forward to after every big soccer weekend.
This is certainly not an exclusively South African phenomenon. It happens all over the world. For instance, when Arsenal famously lifted the English Premier League title last Sunday, some of the messages from opposition fans were congratulating the Gunners “as well as VAR”.
When the club lost on penalties in the European Champions League on Saturday, the club’s rivals in England had a field day making fun of the team’s penalty-taking skills.
Banter is the lifeblood of the beautiful game.
But even in sports, banter can get out of hand and, therefore, needs to be checked. A case in point is how sections of our football-loving population have responded to the final squad selected by national team coach Hugo Broos to represent SA at the 2026 World Cup.
Naturally, we cannot all agree with all of the coach’s selections and omissions. The goalkeeping department, for instance, was always going to be a point of heated contestation as Broos had to choose three from four goalkeepers who have been excellent at different times for most of the past two seasons.
Three of them were regulars in his squad, while the fourth, Brendon Petersen, really pushed hard to claim a spot as one of the best. In his wisdom, the coach opted for the tried and tested.
Understandably, some fans are up in arms over this, and the coach’s decision has unfairly revived claims of his alleged prejudice towards players from a particular team.
Again, nothing wrong with a set of fans speaking up for their tribe. But what is unacceptable is to see this tribalism literally spilling beyond our borders. It is one thing for Chiefs, Pirates, Sundowns and Siwelele fans to joke among each other about who is or is not in the national team; it is another for local fans to go onto the Mexican football association’s website and declare their support for the Latin American nation simply because they are not happy with Broos excluding a Kaizer Chiefs player.
To do well in the tournament, SA has to set the tone by beating Mexico in the opening match. Now, to have some of our compatriots disowning the team just because a player from their tribe was not selected smacks of betrayal.
We may see this as not too serious, as something that shows that South African fans – especially those who swear by gold and black – are prone to hyperbole. But I am afraid it is indicative of a greater problem that is beginning to emerge where nationhood – whether in sports or politics – no longer seems to come before the tribe.
In our youngest years as a nation, sports – especially soccer – taught us that there is strength in diversity, that unity is power. Once a player donned the Bafana jersey, you’d forget which local team he came from and embrace him as the best representative for SA.
This quickly extended to politics and other facets of life – where you didn’t ask which language a political leader spoke or which province a senior civil servant was born in. As long as they represented the will of the people and were willing to serve the nation.
I fear that we are slowly losing that. That instead of becoming a nation, some of us are sliding back to little tribes, in whatever form they may be.
