Dear Portfolio Committee on Sports, Arts and Culture,

I wish the committee can make time to independently dig deep in the administration of football in South Africa and how the football pyramid perpetuates rampant corruption.

District Leagues Sponsored By SAB
This league is sponsored yet there is no transparency on how much the SAB sponsors and is called the SAB Regional League.

No one knows how the sponsorship funds are spent except that the team that wins the district league gets only R30 000 whilst many teams have an average budget of R100 000. The budget is made by supplies that an owner has to provide for kits, soccer boots, medicals, club registration, ground hire, legal referee fees, transport, Special Projects (brown envelopes)

Depending on a number of municipalities a district league may comprise of say 80 teams where there are 5 municipalities (5X16 =80). The 5 municipality winners will also compete in one district to produce one 1 team that will compete with other district winners where only two teams will be promoted to the provincial league that is sponsored by the Motsepe Foundation and called the ABC Motsepe League

So in a province hypothetically you have 320 teams in the SAB Regional League competing for 2 spots. This situation exacerbates the level of cheating and corruption with special project being a norm. A number of referees have been assaulted of late and there have been fights. Most of these incidents have been captured and share at a facebook page titled ABC Motsepe & SAB Leagues which has over 170 000 members and this subject of rampant corruption, maladministration is a daily topic.

Provincial League
This league is sponsored by the Motsepe Foundation and is called ABC Motsepe League, normally has 144 teams, however due to corruption it had 145 teams in the 2018/19.

Each province has space for 16 teams hence the total of 144 teams.

Like the SAB Regional League teams do not know how much the Motsepe Foundation sponsorship amounts to and how that is spent. Teams are supposed to get R1000 per match to cover the logistics. Many teams do not get this grant consistently and at times go to next seasons without having received all the grant monies that were due to them.

Special projects are also a daily phenomenon here with leagues being won in boardrooms rather than the soccer field. A reporter called Lucas Molefe has written extensively about shenanigans in this league and has even been featured on Marawa Sports Worldwide on Radio 2000 and Metro FM. More of his stories can also be found on the same Facebook page.

Only 2 out of the 144 teams will gain promotion to the National First Division (NFD). What does this create - desperation to escape this league at all costs.

The 2 winning teams receive R1m and R500 000 but South African Football Association (SAFA) holds on to this winning purse for a period of 6 to 8 months under the pretext that the 2 teams have to submit football development plans before funds could be released. The teams do not get their prize monies with interests that have accrued during that period. The 2 teams are distracted or prejudiced before they could even begin competing in semi-professional NFD.

The SAFA National Office has been practising this act since the sponsorship came on board, which begs the question of how worse the situation is at LFA, District & Provincial Offices of the FA and with clubs having to pay exorbitant fees to lodge protests and attend cases - players are victims of this rampant corruption.

National First Division
This is the semi-professional below the Premier League and is under the auspices of the National Soccer League. The NFD is not autonomous as things stands.

The NSL is shortchanging the 16 teams that participates in this league by not including them in the Broadcasting Invitation to Tender packages, that the cartel as the league refers to itself, sells to the media industry. Refer to the PSL submission to ICASA to get a sense of how the 11 broadcasting packages excludes and prejudices the NFD Clubs.

It is not clear as to whether the NFD has management and administration support it gets from the cartel as the league has failed to clinch a sponsor since the days of Mvelaphanda where it came to be known as Mvela League.

# The Broadcasting ITT must include the matches of the NFD at a rate of 50% to those of the PSL, alternatively a Broadcasting ITT for the NFD matches separate from the PSL clubs should be called

#NFD should have its own General Manager with sufficient staff to run and administer the affairs of the NFD professionally, sustainably and profitably

#NFD to be expanded to atleast 20 clubs

#Two teams to gain automatic promotion to the PSL and two teams to be automatically demoted from the PSL to the NFD.

SCHOOL OF EXCELLENCE
SAFA has established a school of excellence sponsored by Transnet; however this has become a dumping site and a cadre deployment without capacitating, scouting young talent or refreshing coaches of SAB & ABC Motsepe Leagues

PLAYER SELECTIONS TO NATIONAL TEAMS
Teams at SAB, ABC & NFD have quotas of age-specific categories for players that have to be on the field for the entire matches of the teams. For example the NFD teams must always field 2 under 23 players in all their 30 matches.
How many under 23 Players does the National Under 23 Team select and field from the NFD?
How many players does the National Under 20 Team select and field from the ABC?
How players does the National Under 17 Team select and field from the SAB League?

Vision 2022
This was presented to the portfolio committee and hopefully the update will include progress on expansion from 16 to 18 teams in the PSL and also expansion from 16 to 18 teams in the NFD

SCHOOL FOOTBALL
SAFA should in the interest of football development leave this aspect to SAFSA just as it has left the professional aspect to the National Soccer League. The fight arose between SAFA & SAFSA when the Kay Motsepe Tournament for High Schools came to the fore, otherwise the FA should be fighting with Nedbank for the Schools tournament in private schools and also fight with Varsity Sports which runs a football tournament for universities