FRESH START

THE BIG QUESTION HEADING INTO THE NEW 2025/26 BETWAY PREMIERSHIP IS WHO CAN TOPPLE MAMELODI SUNDOWNS?

- By Mark Gleeson

It has been the same question season after season: 'Is there a team to challenge Mamelodi Sundowns in the new campaign?' Over the last years, there has always been a positive answer, but it has been delivered with hope rather than certainty. Not since the infamous COVID-19 bio-bubble season, when the last eight rounds of the league were completed behind closed doors in Johannesburg long after the scheduled end of the campaign, has there been an exciting conclusion to a Premiership campaign. Sundowns won on the last match day of the 2019-20 season as Kaizer Chiefs faltered, squandering a 13-point lead in an extraordinary collapse.

Since then, it has all been predictable as the superiority of Sundowns has tolled in the most emphatic ways. Two seasons ago they won by a record 23 points from runners-up Orlando Pirates in as forceful a statement of superiority as ever there was.

Last campaign, which was completed after 28 games rather than 30 after the expulsion of the Royal AM, Sundowns won by 12 points but never looked to be in any danger of being toppled from their perch, not even after Pirates beat them in a league clash in March.

So, it is then safe to suggest that it will take a Herculean effort to dislodge them in the 2025-26 season.

But for those who are desperately desirous of a change in the pecking order, there are one or two novel factors to consider.