In the previous edition of iDiski Times, former SAFA Technical Director Serame Letsoaka, who is now working for FIFA, told Velile Mnyandu about their plan to ensure South African coaches had the proper qualifications.
Letsoaka told Mnyandu that when he was at SAFA they put a plan into place to make sure coaches had the correct badges, and they were looking to implement a plan from the bottom up.
Letsoaka says he is not sure why the plan was never implemented correctly, as he left the association.
With CAF now expecting all coaches leading teams in continental competitions to have the correct licenses and qualification, this subject has become a hot topic again.
“You see in football, we talk about best practices. We always watch the UEFA Champions League, we watch the EPL. We watch the Spanish LaLiga, we watch all these leagues. And we always talk about top football. It’s top football because they do not allow anybody without a qualification to coach at that level,” Letsoaka told iDiski Times.
“I remember around 2012, Zinedine Zidane, who was one of the top players in the world, was fined for coaching without a proper qualification and if you talk Zidane, who was fined for coaching without a formal qualification, and we in South Africa are still saying, I can do with somebody without the qualification, I can do somebody with a B license.”
“We have a beautiful product in South Africa, which is football. We have the finances, which are really there to make sure that we get the best from our game. The only disappointment in our league is that, we don’t have the best expertise technically. “
“The plan was in line with that to say, it was not like Botswana, where it was a top down approach. It was a down up approach where we said by 2013, we must make sure that in the third tier of the league, you can’t coach without what we called then a level one. And then we said in the second tier a year later, you cannot coach without a level two which was now an A license. We were giving even the coaches an opportunity at the highest level, to prepare themselves to get qualifications.”
“But it is unfortunate that these things were not implemented. All the other things we are doing in South Africa, but when it comes to coaching, we never really look for the right expertise.”
Keep an eye out for the next edition of iDiski Times, which will hit the streets on the 15th of December.