Kaizer Motaung has not yet communicated his rationale behind the appointment of his club’s new Head Coach to the press and the club’s substantial fan-base. A big club like Kaizer Chiefs has got a greater responsibility than others to always communicate with its stakeholders.
Unlike other businesses soccer is a very emotional sport and more so in this country where the majority of the previously and, dare-I-say currently, disadvantaged people support soccer for historical reasons which I won’t go into now. The point is that there are many people for whom Kaizer Chiefs FC and Orlando Pirates FC’s performance makes or breaks their weeks.
These are people who are on or below the poverty line but still spend their hard-earned and scarce funds to buy match day tickets and replica jerseys. These are the football consumers that have made these clubs great. I also mentioned a while back how the talk and excitement surrounding the proposed Amakhosi Stadium, Chiefs Ambitious new Stadium-building project which would be a first for South Africa, quietly ebbed away. Granted times are difficult due to the global crunch which most big projects having been put on hold but organizations like Chiefs must constantly update the press and their fans about the state of their affairs.
A few years ago there was also talk about Kaizer Chiefs then wanting to be the first soccer club in South Africa to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. This also faded away without explanation. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that the listing of soccer clubs was a trend that has since been reversed with the majority of the clubs that listed now de-listing. This whole trend was started by the great Manchester United but as we all know after the club was taken over by the Glazier family it was immediately de-listed and it is now privately held by its new investors.
The strange thing about our local clubs is that they have got communication practitioners who don’t seem to communicate anything meaningful. Perhaps if clubs communicated more and were a bit more transparent you wouldn’t get the violence that sometimes erupts in our soccer.
For example if the clubs openly communicated their annual turnover and released details about their transfer kitties maybe fans would understand why their club buys a certain quality of player. For example, the same Kaizer Chiefs used to have a monopoly over the best players in this country in the nineties and eighties and for the earlier part of this decade. This is not so since the likes of Mamelodi Sundowns and Orlando Pirates have also started spending big on players.
We know Patrice Motsepe can afford to spend tens of millions on his players but we don’t know whether Kaizer Chiefs necessarily can’t do the same. After all they must turnover much more than any club. Maybe something else is done with their money. This is speculation but that’s precisely the point. These clubs must communicate with their stakeholders and put an end to all speculation.
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