Bafana Bafana head coach Hugo Broos says the last 22 years show there’s been no improvement in South African football and has made calls for the solution.
Bafana suffered a 2-0 defeat to Morocco in their opening 2023 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier which was the third loss in his tenue after the 1-0 against Ghana at Cape Coast and the 5-0 drubbing at the hands of reigning FIFA World Cup champions France.
In his opening remarks of the explosive press conference at Nasrec this afternoon, he eluded to the fact that the gulf in class was clear between the respective squads in the defeats and called out the level of footballers being produced in the Premier Soccer League (PSL).
Broos then picked apart the achievements of the national team over the last two decades saying they have not achieved anything and the only reason for qualifying for the global showpiece was due to being hosts and that only trophies in CAF inter-club competitions should be celebrated, urging for a change in mentality within the local football system.
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“You’ve seen what’s happened the last 22 years, you have a few quarter-finals I think in AFCON, that’s all huh? And you were in the World Cup because it was a present. Yeah no, you organised it, it was a present you were there. You didn’t have to do anything for it,” he said at SAFA House on Tuesday.
“But except that, again and again, don’t take that as criticism to Orlando Pirates or [Mamelodi] Sundowns, they did very well in CAF. But in the end, it’s two Moroccan teams who won it and then you can be happy with a semi-final okay… With the final, you play, but you don’t win it! We have to be stricter and severe about that kind of thing.
“We can’t be happy, ‘oh Sundowns yes, oh Pirates’, hey no they didn’t win, come on!”
With South Africa 69th in the latest FIFA ranking system and outside the top fifty for more than a decade – something which prevented players from securing work permits under previous English Premier League regulations – he hinted earlier in his statements that they should follow the system Belgium adopted back in 2006 after their World Cup failure that’s now resulted in a wealth of world-class talent emerge like Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku and former captain Vincent Kompany.
“We have to be better and that’s something we have to do here, sit together, have a meeting with the league, with the PSL coaches and everyone says what they think about [the problems] and then we solve the problem and say next year we’ll all do this, we’re working like that,” the 70-year-old continued in his rant about the problems the national team faces.
“Everybody… and we try to [develop] better players and we try that – and in Europe, they will want South African players. I’m very very severe now, in Europe they don’t want South African players, they want Ghanaians, they want Ivory Coast, they want players from Cameroon, those players, Senegal.
“But [not South Africans]. It has to change! It has to change. And if we succeed, it will not be ten years, but if we start working everyone together for the same goal, you will have results quickly, very quickly. But go on like this, in twenty years you’ll still be between 60 and 70 in the FIFA rankings like you are now for the past 20 years, that’s the problem.”
In the ten matches Broos has overseen since succeeding Molefi Ntseki in May 2021, he’s won five, drawn two and suffered three defeats.
Story by: Lorenz Köhler.
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