S’bu Mngadi, the newly appointed CEO of the South African Football Association’s commercial wing, says one of his friends went down on his knees and prayed for him on hearing he had accepted the job.
Another offered to take up life assurance for him.
If you did not know about the shenanigans that seem to follow the local game, you would think Mngadi’s friends were being a bit theatrical. If you followed the news, however, you would admire their loyalty and foresight, perhaps even wish you had such friends.
Mngadi, a former journalist turned corporate high-climber, will need the support. Divine intervention would also come in handy.
If you were a business leader with more than 40-million shareholders, each believing they could run the business better than you, it is possible that you would age prematurely and news of your untimely demise from stress-related complications would not be exaggerated. Football bigwigs in this country are a fractious lot. In cahoots with their chosen band of journalists, they have made it their life’s mission to leak or manufacture stories intent on showing their rivals in a bad light, only for the injured parties to hit back in other media.
Just this week, a Safa source reportedly told City Press that the association did not have the money to pay coach Alberto Carlos Parreira, and that one of the sponsors had to come to the bridge.
Mngadi says the story is ‘completely false and outrageous”.
Happily, he reports to the independent board of directors and not to Safa. And he intends to hold the job for between six and nine months because, as he says, ‘I have a very exciting life outside of football” — a reference to his stake in a boutique investment house with interests in leisure-property development and telecommunications. One of his mandates is to find a long-term CEO for what is officially called South African Football (Pty) Limited. The organisation counts among its board members business and football personalities such as Trevor Phillips, Goolam Allie, Danny Jordaan, Danisa Baloyi and Saki Macozoma.
He expects that there will be differences with his colleagues during the brief period he will spend as football’s great hope.
‘You will always find conflict in any organisation, even the Salvation Army. The key competence of any manager is conflict management. I believe it is a competence I have.
‘I don’t plan to be a protagonist, but I will take a straight line. It may mean making unpopular decisions, but I have the courage to make them in the interest of shareholders.”
After the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations win, the fortunes of the national side have been steadily declining. Having been number one in Africa at some point, Bafana is now ranked 58th in the world and 12th on the continent. It is a situation that has called for some urgent steps to be taken. The founding of a commercial wing is football leadership’s acknowledgment that the administrators of the amateur game — Safa’s core business — cannot be trusted to run a professional outfit.
Rugby underwent this metamorphosis in the 1990s, and it has become the norm in various other sports codes across the world.
To that end, the association set up the independent board of directors to run Safa’s flagship team, Bafana Bafana, as if it were a private club and to take responsibility for all matters associated with the team, from procuring players, managers and coaches to ensuring that it always has enough money.
This is where Mngadi, hitherto CEO of Africa of Fortune 500-listed Cendant Vacation Network Group and vice-president and director of Coca-Cola Southern Africa, fits in.
He does not pretend to be a football administrator par excellence.
‘I accepted the position with a sense of humility. I am aware of the huge responsibility the role carries. I am not undermining the challenge of rebuilding Bafana Bafana, and ensuring we perform well at the World Cup,” he says.
By the time he relinquishes the post, he hopes to have achieved one of the main measurables of the job: to generate, by the end of May this year, R50-million in sponsorships and revenue from broadcast rights for the 2007/08 financial year, and to develop a business plan for the under-23 and women’s national teams a month later.
Football fans will do well to join Mngadi’s friends in offering their prayers. And hope somebody up there is listening.