NKARENG MATSHE | Deluded Danny is the reason why Safa struggles for sponsors

Amid the prevalent chaos, negative publicity and dry coffers at the SA Football Association (Safa), its head, Danny Jordaan, seems to be living on another planet closer to Disneyland than reality.

Last week after the Safa ordinary congress, I directly asked Jordaan if he didn’t see himself as an impediment to Safa’s battered image, given that in the last year, there has been a raid by the Hawks at the association’s headquarters, followed by his arrest and Safa CFO Gronie Hluyo.

Jordaan responded bullishly, telling me, “There’s no executive in the history of Safa” that has achieved what he and his henchmen have. The achievements mentioned included Hugo Broos being the longest serving Bafana Bafana coach with an unbeaten record running more than 20 matches now.

Barely days later, Jordaan’s delusion had been laid bare. Besides Banyana Banyana, who are in Morocco for the Women's Africa Cup of Nations, reluctantly agreed to return to training despite still awaiting their match payments from Safa – one key Safa sponsor, Sasol, confirmed they won’t renew their deal with the organisation under the current climate.

Also this week, Safa’s ongoing ABC Motsepe League playoffs were plunged into chaos after the exclusion of teams from the Eastern Cape and Limpopo pending dispute resolution. Just yesterday, the playoffs were postponed in Pretoria because Safa failed to read a City of Tshwane memo about a long-planned water outage, which left dressing rooms without water.

Jordaan, however, told us at the weekend that “we’ve done tremendously well”. He accused us of running a smear campaign, “beating the same drum” of unfounded allegations. The fraud case brought by the prosecution authorities against him and Hluyo was nonexistent, he maintained.

Somehow, we are expected to have ignored his appearance in court and the failure by him to get the case struck off the roll. We were supposed to see last March’s Hawks raid of Safa House as nothing more than a desperate plot against the Safa executives who’ve “done tremendously well”.

The fact that sponsors are running away from Safa, at a time when they should be lining up in droves to back our well-performing national teams, has nothing to do with the organisation being led by a fraud-accused president, apparently. These sponsors are somehow expected to throw in their money and trust it’s in the safe hands of a CFO similarly accused of fraud.

Bizarrely, Safa – after reporting its R5m in the red for the last financial year – has proposed a review of the current bonus structure in national teams, suggesting Banyana and Bafana should not be remunerated for representing the country and that they should merely get daily allowances.

Yet the association says nothing about cutting costs elsewhere, such as that bloated 50-plus national executive, most of whom flew in business class and invaded five-star hotels in Sandton for last week’s congress and will receive handsome honoraria just for showing up and propping up Jordaan’s misrule.

At a time when Banyana begin the Wafcon as defending champions, having also reached the second round of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, a key sponsor shouldn’t even be saying about possibly leaving. But when you’ve dealt with a self-serving leadership that doesn’t embrace professionalism, is more interested in protecting individuals and continuously bumbles even straightforward tasks, who can blame corporate SA for playing far away from the Safa madhouse? 

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