FOREIGN STARS

South African football has seen some top imports liven up the local game over the decades, so who have been the best?

- Mark Gleeson

South African football has rarely had a time when it has not been under heavy foreign influence.

That was certainly true back when the whites-only National Football League was launched in 1959, dominated by expats from Britain. Once multi-racial football began in the late 70s, it was still players from England and elsewhere in Europe who dominated the foreign ranks.

In 1983 the trend began to change, with a sudden influx from Malawi and then the best from Lesotho and what was then called Swaziland. Economic expediency trumped the sports boycott.

When the democratic era was later ushered in, Zimbabwean and Zambian began to flood in, and within years, the National Soccer League and then the Premier Soccer League had become a veritable United Nations of players from around the continent.

It has become even more international of late, with Eastern Europeans, South Americans, the odd Japanese, and more recently, an exotic footballer hailing from the Solomon Islands, former Maritzburg United winger Micah Lea'alafa.

THE BEST GOAL SCORERS

Clubs have always looked primarily for top strikers to deliver goals and a look at the list of leading goal scorers over the last quarter-century attests to the foreign influence in the game.