Football teams are judged by results, performances and the quality of the game they produce. SAFA appears to have developed a different scoring system, one in which thirteen years of failure can still earn its president another four-year contract. The 157 votes tell their own story.
By Themba Khumalo
South African football has been remarkably generous to Danny Jordaan. For thirteen years, it has given him talented players, passionate supporters, world-class moments and the enormous inheritance of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
In return, the game has been given an administration that has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the problems it was supposed to solve. The talent keeps coming, the promises keep being made, and yet the football system remains stubbornly incapable of turning South Africa’s natural football wealth into sustained national strength.
When Jordaan took over as president of the South African Football Association (SAFA) in 2013, he did not inherit a broken association crawling out of the ruins. He inherited the greatest opportunity South African football had ever been handed. The 2010 World Cup had given the country international credibility, infrastructure, commercial momentum and a global football platform.
It should have been the starting point for a serious national football project, with better development structures, stronger national teams, properly run competitions and an administration accountable to the people whose game it was supposed to protect.
Instead, thirteen years later, South African football is still living off the glow of an event that ended sixteen years ago. The administration has had more than enough time to build, repair and modernise the game, yet the familiar problems remain: financial distress, criminal charges, internal power struggles, administrative failures and broken development promises.
At some point, blaming circumstances becomes an insult to everyone who has had to watch the same failures repeat themselves.
What makes the situation particularly troubling is the deterioration of accountability inside SAFA. Under Jordaan, the association increasingly came to resemble a closed shop in which power protected itself, and dissent was treated as an inconvenience. The sidelining of figures such as former SAFA Vice-President Ria Ledwaba became part of that picture. An organisation that stops listening to criticism eventually loses its ability to recognise its own failures.
Those failures became impossible to ignore when the Hawks arrested Jordaan alongside SAFA Chief Financial Officer Gronie Hluyo and businessman Trevor Neethling. The State alleges that Jordaan used R1.3 million of SAFA money to hire Grit Communications for personal reputation management and to secure private security, without board authorisation.
These are serious allegations, and they should never become background noise around a national football association. When the machinery of football becomes more concerned with protecting the people running it than protecting the game itself, something has gone badly wrong.
The damage has not stopped at governance. SAFA’s financial position has also become a source of concern, with cash-flow problems, delayed payments to service providers and disputes around national team compensation forming part of the organisation’s troubled picture. Matters became so desperate that the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture had to provide an emergency R5-million advance against SAFA’s annual grant simply to keep basic operations moving.
Then there is Fun Valley, the long-promised national technical centre that was supposed to provide South African football with serious development infrastructure. Instead, it became another example of promises that sounded considerably better in speeches than they appeared on the ground, weighed down by budget overruns and administrative inertia.
The consequences eventually find their way onto the pitch. Banyana Banyana’s 2022 WAFCON triumph was a magnificent achievement and deserved every celebration it received, but it also demonstrated that South African footballers can succeed despite institutional shortcomings. Bafana Bafana, meanwhile, spent more than a decade struggling for consistency, failing to qualify for the 2014, 2018, and 2022 FIFA World Cups, and enduring a succession of disappointing AFCON campaigns.
The deeper failure, however, is developmental. SAFA’s most important responsibility should be building a functioning football pipeline from the township, village, and school pitch all the way to the national teams. Instead, Premier Soccer League (PSL) clubs and private academies have increasingly had to carry the burden of finding, developing, and technically preparing young players.
Even basic administration has too often become a source of embarrassment, with travel visa failures, compliance problems, and repeated uncertainty over the implementation of Video Assistant Refereeing (VAR), despite public funding being allocated towards it. The problem is not that South African football does not know what needs to be done; it is that too much of what needs to be done never seems to get done properly.
Against that record, the result of the 12 September 2026 SAFA Elective Congress is difficult to comprehend.
Danny Jordaan was re-elected to a fourth term with 157 votes against Sandile Zungu’s 82. Those 157 delegates looked at thirteen years of financial problems, criminal charges, administrative failures and a development system that continues to leave too much of the work to clubs and private academies, and still decided that Jordaan was the man to lead South African football for another four years.
The 82 who voted for Zungu had clearly rejected that argument and opted for change. It is the 157 who chose continuity who must now answer the more uncomfortable question: after thirteen years, what exactly do they believe another four will fix?
Football provides a useful measure of what this means. A team that keeps conceding goals cannot spend season after season blaming the referee, the pitch, the opposition and bad luck while refusing to examine the tactics that keep producing the same result. Eventually, responsibility has to move from the excuses to the people making the decisions. SAFA has had thirteen years to make those decisions, and the latest election has ensured that the same leadership will now have another four years to defend them.
The tragedy is not that South Africa lacks footballers capable of competing at the highest level. It is that the country continues to produce that talent while the institution responsible for nurturing it struggles to provide the structure, accountability, and long-term planning required to turn individual brilliance into sustained national strength. The game keeps producing reasons for hope; its administration keeps providing reasons for doubt.
SAFA under Danny Jordaan has therefore become an uncomfortable study in what happens when continuity becomes more important than correction. The problem is no longer whether the administration has had enough time to prove itself. After thirteen years, the record is there for the delegates, the clubs, the players and the supporters to judge.
By giving Jordaan another four years, the majority at the Elective Congress have decided that this record is not yet enough to demand a change of direction. South African football will now have to live with that decision.