Latin American Revolution
South Africa’s women footballers could open new opportunities for the country’s footballers in South and Central America, where the men have failed to impress.
In June 1980, two squad members of the South African football team Kaizer Chiefs, Abednigo Ngcobo and Goodenough Nkomo, failed to report for training. While both players’ absences were notable, Ngcobo’s was particularly felt. He had been named South African Footballer of the Year the previous year. It soon emerged that Ngcobo and Nkomo had secretly left South Africa to attend a trial with the Uruguayan club Peñarol. Adding to the intrigue, Kaizer Chiefs’ coach, Mario Tuane, had recently been appointed as the manager of Peñarol and had convinced the two players to join him.
Peñarol is one of South America's most storied football clubs. Its history dates back to the late 19th century. By 1980, the club had already won the Copa Libertadores—South America’s most prestigious continental club competition—three times. In 1980, Penarol was about to defend its Uruguayan Premier League championship, which it had won the previous year. Many of Ngcobo and Nkomo’s new teammates were regulars in the Uruguayan national team, and one, Fernando Moreno, still holds the record for most goals in the league.
How the South Africans ended up in Uruguay reflected changes in football migration from South America. Tuane’s presence in South Africa was part of a broader trend in which players and coaches from South America found work elsewhere, spurred by the success of South American teams in the World Cup (Brazil were champions in 1962 and 1970) and the rise of their star players in top European leagues. A white Chilean, Tuane had arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s after coaching in Greece. He spent the rest of the decade managing clubs in South Africa’s segregated black professional leagues. Tuane's coaching career in South Africa included stints with Vaal Professionals, Orlando Pirates, and Kaizer Chiefs, the latter of which he led to the NPSL title in 1980. After this success, Peñarol came calling.
Tuane was not the only South American coach in South Africa. Walter da Silva, a white Brazilian, played in South Africa’s whites-only leagues in the 1960s before transitioning to coaching black teams in the 1970s. The trend lasted well into the 1990s. Augusto Palacios, a black Peruvian who played for several Peruvian clubs and with six caps with his national team between 1972 and 1981, ended his playing career in South Africa in the mid-1980s, then managed Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates, and the South African national team after apartheid ended. These days, several South American players play for South Africa’s top professional clubs, especially Mamelodi Sundowns.
When Ngcobo and Nkomo arrived at Peñarol, club president Washington Cataldi declared: “The future of football is in Africa.” Apart from the two South Africans, Tuane had also signed Ghanaian winger John Nketia Yawson, who had won the African Cup of Nations with his national team in 1978.
By the end of the 1980/81 season, Peñarol had released both Ngcobo and Nkomo. Ngcobo made only 12 appearances, while Nkomo's impact was similarly underwhelming. A later assessment by the Uruguayan newspaper “El Observador” noted that Ngcobo and Nkomo "performed much less and also played less" than Yawson, the first African to play in a Copa Libertadores match. (He lasted one more season at Penarol before returning to Ghana.)
Peñarol’s team captain, Walter Olivera, later reflected on the physical challenges the South African players faced. In an interview with Argentine journalist Pablo Aro Geraldos, Olivera explained that Ngcobo and Nkomo were “lighter” than their South American counterparts, making it harder to adapt to the physically demanding style of Uruguayan football. "They were not bad players," Olivera said, “but the game back then was different.” This criticism of South African players’ physical inadequacies stuck until Sundowns’ success in African continental competitions and South Africa’s third place in the 2023 African Cup of Nations,
Another reason for Ngcobo’s struggles may have been his age. At 30, he was already in the twilight of his career, having spent nearly a decade playing for Kaizer Chiefs. He had also played in the North American Soccer League (NASL) during offseason breaks, typical for black South African players between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Ngcobo had stints with the Denver Dynamos and Minnesota Kicks. In fact. Ngcobo was still officially listed as a Minnesota Kicks player when he joined Peñarol “on loan.” After his brief spell in Uruguay, Ngcobo returned to Kaizer Chiefs and, four years later, retired from football. He started a taxi business in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, where he lived with his wife and child until his passing in 2014.
Ngcobo and Nkomo’s time at Peñarol is largely forgotten, except for one lasting memory: the nickname Ngcobo was given upon his return to South Africa: ”Valdez.” This name, recalling the 1971 Hollywood Western “Valdez Is Coming,” was meant to evoke his brief association with South American football.
Sadly, it would be another twenty years before Peñarol signed another African player, Michel Tatap, from Cameroon. However, Tatap's stay was also brief. Several African players have played in South and Central America since (the best period was the decade after the 1990 World Cups, following Cameroon’s defeat of Argentina in the opening match), but crucially, no South African player would play for a Uruguayan club again.
A small number of South Africans would go on to play elsewhere in South America in the following years, with Mario Tuane playing a key role in some of their careers. After being sacked by Peñarol, Tuane moved to coach Palestino, a storied Chilean club with deep ties to the Palestinian community there. Tuane signed South African midfielder Rodney Anley, who had first made a name for himself in South Africa’s whites-only leagues and impressed his black countrymen when white and black teams played each other in specially arranged “interracial” competitions in the 1970s. Anley had become somewhat of a cult hero at Palestino for scoring a crucial goal that kept the team from relegation. Around the same time as Anley, South African goalkeeper Dave Waterson played for Magallanes, another club from Chile’s capital territory.
The next time a South African would feature in a South American league had to wait until the end of apartheid. In 1995, Doctor Khumalo, a star for Kaizer Chiefs and the national team, joined Ferro Carril Oeste in Argentina’s Primera División on loan. Although he played only four matches in six months, Khumalo left a lasting impression, scoring a remarkable solo goal against Independiente, which earned him widespread admiration in Argentine sports media. Khumalo’s short stint in Argentina is often seen as a failure compared to the success of other top South African players like Lucas Radebe and Benni McCarthy in European leagues. Khumalo would help lead South Africa to their first African Cup of Nations title in 1996 and play in their first World Cup in 1998.
Around the same time as Khumalo, Teboho Moloi, a star at Kaizer Chiefs’ rivals Orlando Pirates, moved to Colombia’s Once Caldas. Moloi played 18 games and scored five goals in one season, including becoming the first South African to score in Colombia’s top division.
The most recent South African male player to join a premier South American club was Tyroane Sandows. Born in Johannesburg in 1995, Sandows was the first South African player to sign with a club in Brazil after the end of apartheid. He joined São Paulo’s youth system at age eleven in 2006 and then moved to the bigger club, Grêmio’s youth system. After playing for Grêmio’s senior team in 2016 and 2017, he was released and spent time in Brazil's third division with Figueirense. Then he returned to South Africa’s Premier Soccer League, bouncing around small clubs. By 2024, Sandows was listed as playing for a club in Kosovo. Sandows’ career symbolizes the opportunities available to South African players abroad and a cautionary tale about the challenges they face in foreign leagues.
In October 2024, after South Africa’s disappointing performance in the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, South African national team coach Hugo Broos commented on the country’s lack of success in sending players to top European clubs. Broos suggested that for many coaches outside South Africa, the country’s players had become “just South African players,” meaning with little distinction or appeal compared to their counterparts from other nations. In South America, where there’s even less reporting about South Africa, including its football, one can imagine South African footballers hardly feature on coaches' and sports managers’ radars.
It is worth noting that South African women’s football may open new opportunities for South African players in South and Central America. One notable example is Thembi Kgatlana, who plays for Tigres in Liga MX Femenil. Kgatlana is also a key member of the South African women’s national team and was part of the squad that won the Africa Women’s Cup of Nations in 2022. In the 2023 Women’s World Cup, she scored the goal that qualified South Africa for the last 16 for the first time in the tournament's history. In 2024, she was nominated for African Player of the Year. Throughout her career, Kgatlana has played for big clubs in China (Beijing BG Phoenix), Portugal (Benfica), Spain (Eibar and Atlético Madrid), and the United States (Houston Dash, Racing Louisville). When she transferred from Racing Louisville to Tigres, based in Monterrey, in 2023, the move was the second-largest transfer fee for an outgoing player in the history of the NSWL in the US. In the process, Ngatlana became one of the highest-earning footballers in Liga MX Femenil. Her US team was sad to see her go. At the time, the Equalizer website, which covers US women’s soccer, described her as a “standout for years,” “hard to contain on the ball” and a “superstar.” By the end of November 2024, Kgatlane played in the Liga MX Feminil final against Jermaine Seoposenwe of Monterrey, her teammate in the South African women’s national team and a star of the Africa Women’s Cup of Nations in 2022. Both players are likable stars (Thembi and Sebo to the local media and fans). In a historic game — two South Africans in a final together for the first time in football history in Mexico or anywhere in Latin America — Seoposenwe and Monterrey came out top.