Approximately 5 to 6m South Africans could be a potential market for local soccer

One of the reasons soccer is so big in England, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Argentina, to name a few examples, is that the game has crossover appeal. People support the game whatever their colour or creed.

In South Africa the game is losing out on the vast majority of the Caucasian market. The bulk of this target market falls into the highest LSMs, meaning that the game is losing out on a market with plenty of disposable income. Yes, there is rugby. Yes, there is cricket, swimming, and whatever else. But the truth is, soccer has been branded as a black sport and therefore ‘uncool’ to Caucasians.

Most of the Model C and private schools in South Africa with great sporting traditions tend to shun soccer and relegate it to the role of a minor sport with Rugby as the undisputed main sport. In fact a few months ago the Headmaster of St Davids Marist Inanda, a prestigious private school in Johannesburg, was planning to stage a soccer festival featuring schools with a similar ethos and background to St Davids, to try and change the negative attitudes of those other schools towards soccer. He was quoted as saying that most such schools perceive soccer to be ‘undesirable’ even though the game is very popular among the students.

So therefore soccer begins to lose this potential target market to other codes at this very early stage. Soccer must start devising means to ‘sell’ the sport to these schools and show them that soccer is really ‘the beautiful game’ and not at all ‘undesirable’. Imagine the potential season tickets and replica shirts that could be sold to products of these schools, and, as potential TV audiences for local soccer.

Another strange phenomenon is that the section of the Caucasian market that are passionate about soccer tend to follow English Soccer. Walk into any sports bar in any ‘burb’ and all you will see are fans wearing Man U jerseys; Chelsea Jerseys; Arsenal Jerseys; you name them. We need to find out why this market is not supporting the likes of Sundowns, Chiefs, Pirates, Ajax and Swallows. Soccer needs to come up with strategies to get a share of the Caucasian Rand. Attitudes and perceptions must be changed in order for soccer to crossover.

The interesting thing is that in order for Rugby to grow in the long run it’s got to tap into the mass market sooner or later – the market that soccer is entrenched in.  My suggestion is that the soccer think tanks should get together and share insights and strategies with their rugby counterparts, and in fact create joint strategies to break into each other’s markets. Cross marketing between the codes with be a win-win situation for all codes and could be a means of finally erasing the colour lines between the thoughts. So I guess you can say that growth for soccer also, but obviously not exclusively, lies in a change of attitudes.