The Ubuntu Football Academy has only been in existence since 2011, but already has a growing list of graduates who have played international football … and not just for South Africa.
But they are not only about the professional player – a total of 22 graduates have gone on to receive academic scholarships in the United States to add to the 25 players that have signed for professional clubs in South Africa and overseas.
In all, 28 players have received junior nation team call-ups, with SuperSport United’s Jesse Donn, Kaizer Chiefs’ Luke Fleurs and Stellenbosch FC’s Antonio Van Wyk having received senior call-ups for South Africa too.
Munashe Garananga has played for the senior national team of Zimbabwe and this season featured in the UEFA Europa League with Romanian side Sheriff Tiraspol.
Few other academies in South Africa have had as much success in a short space of time, and their boys’ Under-15 side was recently crowned winners in the COSAFA qualifiers for the African Schools Football Championship, meaning they will next year vie for continental honours.
Executive Director of Ubuntu Casey Prince about the team and what the future holds.
What was it like competing in the African Schools Football Championship COSAFA qualifiers in Zimbabwe?
It’s so fantastic, for many kids it’s their first time out of their country, their first time, certainly in the national championships, flying. So that experience is just a life-skill, learning how to navigate an airport, an aeroplane and a hotel. It’s a really important skill.
Your academy is about much more than football …
Yeah, we’ve always been about trying to give talented kids a real holistic opportunity to have their potential fully realised. We recognise that in communities, the talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn’t. And so we feel like we’re the only place in Southern Africa that’s giving an elite kid an opportunity to be holistically invested. That means his education, his character, leadership and obviously his football. We have a boarding facility and the full formation programme along with football training. If you are a graduate and you’re playing professionally or in the national team, but you’re a horrible person, then we failed. And so we’re ultimately most interested in the person they’re becoming because our vision is to see families and communities and society healthy and thriving, because of the influence of our graduates, and it’s exciting to see that is actually happening. Those boys who were 11, and 12, when we started 2011 are now 24 or 25. And some are teaching, some are investment professionals and some are professional players. And that’s equally as exciting. We are as excited about the guy who is a policeman as we are about the guy playing professional football.
Where do you draw most of your players from?
Our kids are predominantly from Cape Town, the whole of the city and the region, but we do have kids from beyond in other parts of the Western Cape. We have a group from Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha), we’ve had players from Mpumalanga. So yeah, from all over. We really would like to be as countrywide as possible, just because it’s an exciting thing. We want to find the kids that are equally talented academically as they are football-wise. And so you’ve got to spread the net wide to make that happen. We’ve had 22 kids study in the US on bursaries and a bunch study in South Africa. We want every kid to get to Matric and have multiple options, so he can make the choice that excites him. So yeah, they’re coming from all over the city, predominantly from townships and coloured communities, and we’re really excited to invest in all those different communities.
You had a professional team a few years ago that spent two seasons in the Motsepe Foundation Championship. Is it still a focus for you to have a professional team?
Our major focus has always been the academy. The purpose of having a pro team at one time was to give a clear development pathway for those kids and it worked for those two years. Unfortunately, we were relegated (in 2019) and we still play in the ABC Motsepe League, which is the third tier. And that’s a perfect pathway for our academy boys to play in when they’re 16, 17 or 18 and beyond, and then take their step into professional clubs.
What is the ambition for you now looking into the future?
We would love to see players from our academy playing in the (UEFA) Champions League and representing the full national team, we’ve had a few but we want the day when there’s five or six in every Bafana Bafana squad that came from Ubuntu. But we also want to see guys who are just going to do significant things with their lives. We had our first wedding this year, we are having the first children born. It’s those exciting things, to see them become great Dads. So yeah, one day, maybe we’ll be back in the professional game again, really only as a pathway for our kids to make a difference because ultimately our focus is always going to be on the kids. I guess the new big development in 2024 is that we’re actually adding ladies to the programme. We’re having our first four or five girls in the school, along with an Under-12 team, and then hope that from 2025 onwards we’ll start bringing in six or seven girls in every grade to the school. That’s our hope, that we’ll be fully integrated and balanced and then hopefully one day we’ll be representing South Africa in the African Schools Football Championship with both genders. That would be the dream.
