Just when you think Chippa Mpengesi can’t go any lower, he surprises you by showing you that he can go lower than a snake’s crotch. It’s now normal that every season the Chippa United boss will have several coaches managing his team.
Another season, another coach for Chippa United
In sacking Daine Klate to replace him with Morgan Mammila, Mpengesi was making his 34th coaching appointment in 10 years. That’s an average of around three coaches a year. It’s no wonder then that the club has spent the bulk of those years fighting to avoid relegation or campaigning in the first division.
Mpengesi does this because he believes Chilli Boys are world beaters, so when Klate has the audacity to lose to Mamelodi Sundowns through a late winner - then he must go. What are the winners of the last five DStv Premiership seasons anyway when compared to the mighty Chippa United.
It’s unlikely that Mpengesi will change his ways. Mammila will not finish the season as the club’s coach. He hasn’t even been given the job on a fulltime basis. What was low about Mpengesi in appointing Mammila is that the former administrator only has a CAF D License. The license is obtained through a five-day coaching course and is for training children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. There are dire consequences of trusting someone with those coaching credentials, or lack thereof, to manage a team in the highest level of South African football.
But he’s not the only problem
This makes a mockery of the league, but that wouldn’t bother Mpengesi as his conduct makes a mockery of running a professional outfit. The Premier Soccer League (PSL) has made huge strides in going from being managed in the back of car boots to being a billion-Rand industry. With the growth of the game, a lot of things have changed in how things were done. There is a stronger focus in analysis and data. These are areas that the PSL lags behind in, with coaches like Gavin Hunt proudly boasting that they don’t believe in video analysts.
In refusing to adapt to the changes, Hunt does not only do a disservice to himself but also the players he coaches with an outdated approach. But the damage of Hunt’s thinking is small compared to hiring someone whose coaching qualifications shouldn’t see him talk about professional football, let alone coach in it.
South Africa is blessed with raw talent, with skills refined in gravel and on dusty pitches. But what tends to let that talent down is managing it. Many coaches have slammed how there are players at professional level, and even at Bafana Bafana level, who lack basics that should have been taught to them in their early teens.
This deficiency shows itself in the quality of football on display. While a few teams play entertaining and quality football, that isn’t the case across the board with a huge discrepancy in resources, professional approaches, and investment in development. So what Mpengesi did isn’t out of the ordinary, he is just making official an approach that exists in many clubs.
In fact, the PSL has no requirement for anyone to coach in it. It’s criminal that a league that thinks so highly of itself would create a free-for-all type of environment in one of the most important positions. Serious leagues across the world have tighter and stricter measures on who can coach there. Even the Confederation of African Football (CAF) is catching up with coaches who manage in their competitions needing a UEFA Pro License if they are from outside the continent and a CAF A license if they are Africans. The most financially lucrative league on the continent should also have a minimum requirement for people who can sit in its technical area.
It starts at the basics
This blasé approach towards coaching qualifications means that there is no push for former players and anyone interested in coaching to arm themselves with the necessary skills to manage at this level. It’s one of the reasons why our game is in critical condition. Youth football has many coaches who shouldn’t be coaching children because they are teaching them the wrong things that will take years to unlearn. And at the highest level we have dinosaurs and ill-equipped coaches.
It’s almost impossible to solve that overnight, as there needs to be a systematic approach and stronger monitoring of youth coaches. But what is easier to manage is having a benchmark of a minimum requirement that is needed to coach at the highest level. And the reason why Chippa could start with two wins under Mammila is because of the technical deficiencies in our game.
The appointment of Mammila should have raised alarm bells, but it didn’t. It’s not such a wild thing because we don’t see the value in protecting our game. The Eastern Cape has a wide pool of talent to choose from. The province has given us talented players like Klate, Kermit Erasmus and Ronwen Williams to name just a few. But all of them shone in Gauteng, at SuperSport United, who have one of the best development structures and scouting networks in the country. The Chilli Boys could have done something great with that talent with Klate at the helm. But Mpengesi has never been one for the future.
It affects the game, the players, the fans, and the bets
And this is where it gets sad, Mpengesi’s approach isn’t out of character if you look at the big picture of the game in the country. His lack of patience, trigger happy approach and not respecting technical nuances of our game exists all over the country. Mpengesi just proudly wears it on his chest. It’s not just Mpengesi who has to change, but the entire approach and outlook of South African football. Because if South African football was doing things right, and took itself seriously, the reaction to Mammila’s appointment would have been different rather than being indifferent.
In fact, one of the only sure bets you can place on the current state of South African soccer is that the incompetence will keep relegating talented players to a bush league status.
For the product to change, and the game to go to a higher level, it’s important that these things change. But if it doesn’t, South Africa will consistently find itself with a goal scoring problem and having 25-year-olds being viewed as youngsters and only then making their professional football debuts.