South African Football this week announced a program to try and copy the SA Rugby schoolboy program that has been so successful. I think it is more of a move to try and generate new sponsors for a bankrupt governing body. If we look at the World Rugby Rankings across world rugby South Africa is number one across all the age groups. This is not happening overnight and has taken a good 7 years to get to this point. 7 years, but that does not take into account the system that has already been in place for decades.

Grassroots Is The Key

SA football thinking they can pull this off and copy the template SA Rugby is using is never going to work and I will explain why. The Sa schoolboy rugby system has years of tradition with not much having changed for the last 50 years. The school system is where South Africa gets it's strength with the only tweak or change is that there is now a national ranking league in place so every match has more significance. The top teams in the country now play each other so a number of the school rugby matches have moved from regional to national.

The SA Football does not have the long lasting tradition with the schools in the same way as the rugby and they do not even have the facilities in place. School rugby teams have been playing against each other for the last 150 years in the Cape and finding that sort of history in SA Football is just not there so they have no base to launch this program. Replicating what SA Rugby has is not possible nationally and this is obvious to everyone involved in rugby as the grassroots base is not there already in place.

The top SA schools in the country do not play football and support sports like rugby and cricket and the interest is just not there. The top athletes play these two sports and football has never been popular in the upper to middle class schools. There is a big swing in football popularity if you move to the townships, but then those schools do not have the facilities and the financial clout.

SA Football obviously sees the difference when comparing schools in the suburbs to the townships so they have opted for football hubs with weekly training once per week for 8 weeks. This is actually quite pathetic and you would think football clubs in the areas would be offering more training and skills courses than what is being offered here.

Schoolboy rugby is one notch down from professional rugby and why they produce so many talented players. One must ask why SA Football wants to do this program as they as a federation are bankrupt with no funds. Rugby is on the wave of having more money than they need due to sponsorship deals wanting to be part of the teams success.

The top sport in SA is football by the numbers yes there is no money in football with the top professional football players making in a year what average professionals in Europe make in a year. Many of SA's professional football clubs have no money and why young players choose playing rugby over football as a career. We have ex professional football players advising local players to move overseas and to try and crack into Europe as local football is of such a low standard they are a joke. There is a good reason why there is no money in SA Football as sponsors will not pay top dollar for a sub standard league.

There may be 40 million football fans countrywide with the majority having played football at some point in their life. Rugby has the 14 million "consumer class" adults who earn over R10K per month. This is why the sponsors have jumped on board as this is their client base and are not backing football because there may be more people, but they have no money. The 14 million consumer class is the employed people in SA and the rest do not count due to the high unemployment that has ravaged the country since the ANC government took over in 1994.

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