Multiple Factors At Play

That South Africa has just a single player featuring in Europe’s top five leagues is a telling indictment of the country’s football, which has seemingly been left behind by the rest of the world.

- Nick Said

England, Germany and France had seen a steady stream of South Africans since readmission to international football in 1992, Spain and Italy perhaps less so, but now that flow has dried up to almost nothing.

Strasbourg forward Lebo Mothiba is the only player in any of Europe’s elite leagues, cutting a lone path for Bafana Bafana at a level all players should aspire to. And he is hardly setting the world alight, with a single start in his team’s first 23 Ligue 1 games this season.

Bafana Bafana forward Lyle Foster should win promotion to the Premier League with Burnley at the end of this season, which will at least take that number to two … if Mothiba is retained.

The question, therefore, is why this should be. There are multiple issues at play and perhaps the biggest being the fact that the domestic Premier Soccer League (PSL) now pays on a par with many European leagues, while the reported low standard of the national team means foreign scouts are not looking towards South Africa and there is a lack of desire from players at home to put in the hard yards.

While moves directly from South Africa to English, French and German clubs have been relatively common in the past, they are now a rarity with players needing to prove themselves in ‘lesser leagues’ in Belgium, Netherlands or Sweden first.