• Bafana Bafana fail to leave a lasting impression since their return to international football in 1994.
• The team was re-admitted to FIFA in July 1992.

Millions of people had faith that the South African men’s football team would unite a divided country once apartheid ended in the early 1990s.

After a nearly 30-year suspension, the team was re-admitted to FIFA in July 1992.

Bafana Bafana, however, have failed to leave a lasting impression, and observers disagree on the causes.

A lack of consistency, according to some former greats of the national team, while the absence of South African players from the top European leagues as a sign of player caliber.

Others contend that rather than copying how teams grow in Europe, the players and the team need to forge their own footballing identities.

The national squad appeared to be a growing force in African football following the nation’s first democratic elections in 1994.

It achieved an all-time high FIFA ranking of 16 in August of that year and went on to win the 1996 African Cup of Nations (AFCON), collecting the title on home soil on its tournament debut.

Up until the middle of the 2000s, Bafana Bafana had players like Benni McCarthy, Steven Pienaar, Quinton Fortune, Lucas Radebe, and Fish who all competed in the English Premier League. The group then started to lose ground.

Thulani Serero, Kermit Erasmus, Keagan Dolly, Phakamani Mahlambi, and Luther Singh were heralded as possible South African football saviors in the years that followed but failed to show consistency.

Since 2002, South Africa has not successfully qualified for a World Cup. The team will not participate in a third straight World Cup after hosting the 2010 tournament, where it placed third in Group A, as a result of its failure to qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

They earned the humiliating distinction of being the only host nation in World Cup history to not advance past the group stage thanks to their early exit.

The most recent AFCON tournament the squad failed to qualify for was the postponed 2021 competition, which was hosted in Cameroon earlier this year.

Bafana Bafana hasn’t moved past the quarterfinals since 2000, even when they did qualify for the continental competition.

Mark Fish, a former Charlton Athletic defender who represented South Africa in the 1998 World Cup and three AFCON competitions, thinks there needs to be a significant shift in perspective among not only players and coaches but also fans and the media.

Additionally, in the 30 years after their reinstatement to international football in 1992, South Africa has had 20 different coaches.

“The South African national team is inconsistent. Like changing our underpants, we switch coaches, according to Modubi.

“For the general public, progress entails achieving goals. A coach views success as moving his squad in the desired direction. When it comes to coaching, South Africans are less patient than people in other nations.

In addition, Modubi claimed that the nation was losing out on “many talented players” who would rather watch TV and play video games on a console than participate in sports.

He continued, “There are quite a few good players who are too relaxed and don’t really focus on growing themselves.

On what ails the national team, the South African Football Association (SAFA) declined to comment.

Former Bafana Bafana captain and SAFA technical director Neil Tovey, who helped the team win the AFCON in 1996, thinks players’ lack of leadership and “bad mindset” may be a major cause of the inconsistency and decline in performance.

“They are talented, but they lack the kind of leadership we had in 1996. When something went wrong, we fixed it to the best of our abilities. We did not hold off on giving instructions or conducting a post-game analysis until halftime, according to Tovey.

Although a lot of people have commended Broos for criticizing South African football, Tovey feels the Belgian “must stop hunting for scapegoats and attempt to discover anything that would make the team better” and believes South Africa can qualify for the larger 48-team World Cup in 2026.

[embedpost slug=”icc-t20-world-cup-2022-india-vs-south-africa-full-highlights”]