SARS and soccer players alike want their share of the spoils

Believe it or not the South African Revenue Services (SARS) wants to make their own piece of history – they want to tax foreign soccer players at both the FIFA Confed Cup and the 2010 World Cup. This will be the first time that SARS has ever embarked on such a quest. Apparently the legislation now exists that allows SARS to do this.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which side you look at it from, this legislation did not exist during the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the 2003 Cricket World Cup. A reputable daily business newspaper reported that the foreign soccer stars would be subject to a 15% tax on amounts earned from all matches played in South Africa.

I personally don’t see how SARS are going to be chasing soccer players all over the world trying to collect their tax money. If you take into consideration that a lot of the competing countries tend to pay their players weeks, if not months, after the tournament, you start realising what a logistical nightmare this could be, potentially.

There is something very impractical about this whole exercise, but then again, this is Africa, and strange things happen here. My only comment on this one is why not – if the rest of us pay taxes for working in this country why should foreign soccer players be exempt, so good luck to SARS. Then we have the wage demands from the Bafana Bafana squad – nothing new about this one. It seems that the squad is not happy with the R90 000 win bonus per player they have been promised for every Confed Cup game.

The news is that certain senior players are asking for double this amount. My only question is what are these players basing their demands on. They don’t realise that, considering the recessionary times that we’re living in, where thousands of jobs are being lost daily, this is very bad PR on their part. This is a time when everyone should be practicing austerity to save what little resources we do have because of the global recession.

In fact, as role models the players should be showing empathy for the millions that support them, and who are either losing jobs or struggling to make ends meet, by actually asking for a reduction in bonuses as a gesture of solidarity with the millions suffering at this time. Obviously this is a pipe dream as our soccer players are not capable of thinking like this and I would be very surprised if they proved me wrong on this one.

The sad thing about this bonus issue is that it is characteristic of African soccer. You never hear of players from the German national team or Italian national team holding administrators to ransom over money.

This only happens in Africa – remember when the Togolese threatened not to play their group game at the 2006 World Cup over a money dispute – the first time such ‘strike’ action had ever occurred at this prestigious tournament. So now that we have been warned, our administrators should make sure there are no embarrassing money demands like this at the World Cup. This is why they call the Confed Cup the dress rehearsal for the World Cup. It allows us to iron out all the creases like the Bafana Bafana pay-demand.