Mamelodi Sundowns Chairman Thlopie Motsepe has opened up on the club’s sustained dominance on the league and how they continue to set the standards.
Motsepe and Sundowns were in Uganda during the recent FIFA international break with several members of staff, technical team and Denis Onyango as they visited his home, former club and school grounds to give back to the community where their club legend was developed.
And in a rare interview, Motsepe was asked about how they continue to dominate the league, with Masandawana currently on course for their eighth consecutive league title, and in the hunt for the Nedbank Cup and CAF Champions League, before the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States of America.
“We have, as club, core values; excellence, humility and respect, with those three things, we believe there’s a secret, or a formula to make sure we continue to be successful,” he said on Pitchside with Peter Tabu.
“When I talk about excellence, it’s based on our motto, sky is the limit, that hand that points to the sky says there’s no limit to what you want to achieve, and there’s nothing that can stop you from your dreams, and that’s why I was so excited hearing about your channel and what you’re doing.
“We believe in believing in others, we believe in the African dream, every African person who has a dream and is bold enough to chase that dream, we want to find a way to encourage you.
“So excellence for us as a football club is based on that value, to say ‘look, we have big dreams, we want to win the Champions League, we want to perform as best we can at the Club World Cup’, that’s where excellence comes into.
“We want to be excellent at what we do, in practice, how we engage in training, how we engage with our food, how we engage with each other as people and the second one is of course, humility.
“When you win as a champion, sometimes people lead you to believe you are better than you really are, they overhype you – you forget about the hard work that took you to that place of being a champion, and you feel back.
“So every season, Sundowns, we try to be humble to say ‘okay, what we’ve done we’re grateful for that, we’re happy to win the league or cups but now we have to forget about it, stay humble and remember what it was to be hungry, to be that challenger’.
“There’s going to be challenges, if you don’t have that hunger and the challenger has it more than you, chances are, more often than not, they will get it. So instead of the challenger humbling us, we want to humble ourselves, so every practice, every time we play we have that same mentality.”
Sundowns are back in action on Friday with the Nedbank Cup quarter-final against Sekhukhune United at the Lucas Masterpieces Moripe Stadium (19h00).
