What Is Life After Football?

One wonders what is life after football? Perhaps this is an important question in developing South African football. Does South Africa have a lot of football coaching academies? Does South Africa have a lot of youth academies?

Over the years we have seen some of the retired football players taking on the hat to be coaches and doing exceptionally well. Shaun Bartlett took on the coaching job for University of Pretoria and recently Benni McCarthy has a coaching certificate, Lucky Lekgwathi, Arthur Zwane and John Maduka have been involved in youth development of their clubs in the PSL and this is great in sharing knowledge and developing youngsters.

On the other hand, a lot of retired players have taken the job to be sports personalities and sports analysts like Jabu Mahlangu, Jimmy Tau, Mathew Booth and Amanda Dlamini. Is sport analyst the next career path for some of our retired stars? There hasn’t been a lot of foundations started by football players except Thabo September and Thuso Phala who is still playing. This is something that should be encouraged in the wake of developing a new career path for retired and retiring football or sports stars.

Our media should be flooded by such news rather than getting lifestyle personalities to be on our front screens talking about sports. We need people familiar with the territory rather than fame seeking personalities. Kingdom rise kingdom fall is everywhere especially coming across a once great football star who now is seating at home and you wonder what happened?

We also need more female retired sports personalities, this is to break the inequality in sports. However, there is no simple solutions to such matters as they need to be tabled and discussed in detail to find viable solutions.