South Africa Head Coach Hugo Broos believes the nation will need to have more players featuring in European clubs if they are to perform better.
Broos, made the statement following the team’s exit from AFCON 2025 after falling to Cameroon at the round of 16.
With Bafana Bafana’s majority of their squad featuring in the Premier Soccer League (South Africa), Broos indicated, their quality does not match some of the African teams they compete against.
“There are teams at the Cup of Nations with players who play in Europe. We mostly don’t have them, and that is a disadvantage for South Africa,” Broos said as quoted by Flashscore.com before adding, “Cameroon is a brand-new team, and when you see where those players are playing, there’s a guy, the striker Christian Kofane, he’s playing for Bayer Leverkusen. He’s 19 years old.”
The Belgian tactician asserted that the level of PSL is below what other players who compete in top European Leagues experience.
“So this is the opportunity our players need to have because they have to be challenged more. I said from the beginning that the level of the PSL compared with the level we had in the last weeks is very different, and you can only close that gap when you have players who are also playing in very difficult competitions. So let’s hope that players in the future have more opportunities to go to Europe and play in those very difficult competitions and face those challenges, because that should help this team enormously.”
After a disappointing AFCON campaign, South Africa will shift focus to preparations for this year’s FIFA World Cup in Mexico, Canada and USA.
South African football in insular among other things. In fact, Ugandan football is better (academies are ruining it but that’s another story) just lacking proper organization.
Anyway, those who advocate for stronger leagues and more financing need to look deeper because as S. Africa shows, throwing money at the problem will not solve it.
Nor will shipping our best assets off to Europe.
We need to critically look at what it takes to develop top talent and successful teams. It might turn out that you don’t need much financial resources to succeed.
Maybe we need to study European development systems and customize them to our benefit.