Europeans influences impacting negatively on African football

Lazarus Sauti

Former South Africa national team coach Ted Dumitru believes ‘European influences’ are impacting negatively on African football.

He says African football is far from entertaining, it puts football fans to sleep and he partly blamed lack of technical leadership.

“I think you have to link this with the lack of technical leadership for some years. If you do not have technical leaders in the country, you are subject to influences that might be harmful to your game,” said Dumitru.

Dumitru also bemoans the direct football African teams’ play while he argues the continent has a lot of ‘skilful’ players.

He said: “When it comes to styles of football, you cannot globalise it; the examples are Spain, Germany and Brazil. If you go to these countries and tell them they have to globalise their game, they will laugh at you and show you the door.

“There are countries that did not have strong technical leadership and they made a wrong turn, such as South Africa.”

African national teams should therefore look at traditions that are valuable and that entertains football supporters.

Instead of looking at traditions that are very valuable for instance creativity, decisive dribbling and quick combinations of short passing, African teams threw away all this.

As a result, most African teams, because of influences, adopted direct and predictable football.

Dumitru: “We have paid the price and it is a huge, huge price. We paid dearly and all of us are suffering.

“We do not play football; instead we just kick the ball.”

The highest paid players in the world are the best dribblers. Africans are naturally gifted to beat two, three defenders but if you dribble now, especially at youth level, you are in big trouble. You will be taken out and put on the bench.

African teams should quickly accept that direct football is boring to quickly rectify the problem.
“The longer we delay to accept that we got it wrong, the more damage is going to be done … When you want to develop football, you first develop youth coaches,” Dumitru said.

The type of football currently played in most African countries is one of the reasons for the empty stands.

Dumitru said: “Have you seen our fans dancing? They do not even look at the game and they are only interested now at the final result.

“I remember in the 1980s and 1990s our supporters were glued on the game. There was no time to move around in the stadium, even speaking to spectators around you.

“Fans were fully, fully involved in the game. Very soon you are going to have empty stadiums if we do not change the way we do things.”