Pitso Mosimane is the one of the few young local coaches who has joined the elite group of successful coaches in South Africa. The other one that comes to mind is Gavin Hunt of Supersport United. Like the rest of Africa, we seem to have a propensity to import coaches from overseas, with a few African coaches like Shepherd Murape also having been given a chance to establish themselves.
However, the big clubs seem to think that their coaching jobs are too high profile for local, let alone young local coaches. I commend Moroka Swallows for taking a risk on the relatively inexperienced Ian Gorowa and appointing him Head Coach at Swallows. This raised many eyebrows among the soccer fraternity, and the media didn’t help by criticising the appointment and predicting a gloomy outcome.
This put a lot of pressure Gorowa and the club, and, the minute results stopped coming, the club were forced to sack the novice coach. However, times have changed. One of the biggest clubs in the world, FC Barcelona, entrusted the coaching reigns to Pep Guardiola who had previously been the coach of the Barca B team.
Guardiola has gone on to win the historic Spanish La Liga, Spanish King’s Cup and UEFA Champions league treble in his very first season in charge. AC Milan of Italy have followed suit by replacing the experienced Carlo Ancellotti with the Brazilian Leonardo who had no coaching experience whatsoever.
He had been quite involved with the club as far as player transfers, specifically those involving Brazilian players such as Kaka, Pato and Thiago Silva. At the time of his appointment, he was very also very involved with the Milan Foundation. The point is that a great club like AC Milan with a long history of success is willing to give a novice coach a chance. This should be a pointer to our clubs as to which direction soccer is headed.
Kaizer Motaung’s comment that there are only two local coaches capable of managing Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates is very myopic when looked at in the context of global football trends. Mamelodi Sundowns did give Neil Tovey a chance to co-manage their team with Miguel Gramondi in a caretaker capacity. They managed to win the league but despite this, the two were fired prematurely when results stopped coming.
This leads me to my next point, which is that South African clubs have an ownership structure which is similar to that of the English clubs as opposed to that of Spain. This allows the clubs to have a more long-term view as far coaching appointments are concerned. Sir Alex Ferguson went for 5 years without a trophy at Manchester United before he won his first major title, the English FA Cup.
We all know how he has over-achieved since then. However, the fact is that he under-achieved in his first 5 years but the owners of United had the vision to see his project through to great success. Ferguson would not have been given the same chance had he been manager of a club such as Barcelona or Real Madrid since these clubs are owned by the members who elect the Presidents and boards of directors via elections for terms of about 4 years.
This puts tremendous pressure on the coaches to deliver results instantly otherwise the Presidents risk being voted out at the end of their term or a vote of no-confidence before their term ends. So it further emphasizes how big a risk Barcelona took on Guardiola.
The result was huge sporting and economic success for the club at very minimal cost as Guardiola was not a big name signing but was rather promoted from within. This is a very sustainable model that our local clubs would do well to consider rather than spend big monies on imports.
I am not saying there is no room for importing new blood from outside but young coaches should also be given opportunities as we are bound to unearth our own version of Guardiola. Furthermore, our ownership structure allows our clubs to be able to adopt longer term objectives which would lead to great success.
It’s time our clubs caught up with the trends of world football and adopted policies that are working in today’s football. If we don’t, we will forever be paying the likes of Joel Santana, Henri Michel and Hristo Stoichkov big monies with little return.
