Under the unforgiving glare of the Western Cape sky, dazzling even on an overcast September day like a cold grey spotlight, a frenetic game of kick volleyball is poised at 9-8. On a humble practice pitch near the imperious Cape Town Stadium, the players cajole their effervescent talisman as he skews his ambitious scissor kick just outside the line. This is Benni McCarthy, one of the finest footballing talents the continent has ever produced, and the new manager of Cape Town City FC.
We’re minutes from a Monday afternoon City FC press conference, and McCarthy is wrapping up training with a light-hearted warm-down. He has just led his team to the MTN8 cup final by beating Wits, the reigning league champions (Cape Town City FC lost in the final to Supersport United, a team coached by McCarthy’s former teammate Eric Tinkler). Wits are managed by Gavin Hunt, McCarthy’s coach two decades earlier at Seven Stars, where the 17-year-old striker began his playing career. McCarthy is unbeaten after a fifth win in succession since the start of the season. Spirits are high. Squad players relax with a PlayStation game as a posse of journalists assemble in an ante-room next to the main arena. It’s an unusually big attendance for a press conference for a South African Premier Soccer League (PSL) side – but this is an unusual club.
It is not, however, a new club per se. City FC is more a bold reimagining of an idea that until now has never had the chance to coalesce. Under apartheid, Cape Town football was fractured; white sides such as Hellenic and the original Cape Town City gave way in influence to Seven Stars and Cape Town Spurs, with the former committed to recruitment from the black townships and the latter to giving the city’s talented colored players a platform of their own. These merged to form Ajax Cape Town, daughter team to the legendary Amsterdam club. Down the years, support was spread thinly over myriad reboots; Ajax flew the flag, but the foot soldiers were restless.
In 2016, sensing an opportunity, businessman and former footballer John Comitis, one of the founding members of Ajax Cape Town, purchased the 80-year-old Mpumalanga Black Aces franchise, relocating it a thousand miles south west to the Western Cape. Comitis had sold his stake in Ajax after irreconcilable differences with the other major local shareholder, but understood that a new top-flight club could be free of the baggage of its closest rival. Ajax had struggled to lure away loyal black fans from their preferred township clubs of Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns, and some felt alienated by an adherence to a Dutch playing methodology that was ill-suited to the local footballing culture.
Cape Town City FC was born – and thrived in its first season under coach Eric Tinkler, winning the Telkom Cup and finishing an admirable third in the PSL. When Tinkler was controversially poached by Supersport United in June, Comitis looked to a man who had no interest in managing any club for at least another year.
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“When the phone call came, I said no,” says McCarthy. “I’m doing my pro license in Ireland, and then now this, how am I going to juggle the two?” He’s relaxed and funny one-on-one, after a probing press conference that has flattered his current record while looking to tease out tactical revelations about a gigantic home game in two days against Kaizer Chiefs. “So I said ‘nah, I’m not ready, and I want to complete my course’, and I stuck to my guns… but John Comitis is a very persistent man. He knew just what to say, and he had everything covered.”
“I met Benni when he was 16,” says Comitis. “I took him on loan to Cape Town Spurs, which I owned at the time, and I assisted him in going to Ajax Amsterdam. I’ve given him his first PSL coaching job now. And at 39 there is nothing I could explain to Benni about the game that he would not already know from first-hand experience. My son Michel, who is our Commercial Director, kept insisting he was the right fit for the club’s ethos and growth.”
Benni McCarthy on the sidelines during a match (Photo by Jigga Thomas)
This ethos is front and center on the club’s website, with its exhortation of a liberal vision: “We’re for every religion and lifestyle choice. We’re for everyone with a voice. We’re for every color, race and creed.” The DreamClub 100 outreach program is also a priority, particularly in the deprived areas that may secretly harbour the next nascent superstar.
It was in one of these districts, the notorious Hanover Park gang stronghold in the Cape Flats, that a raw teenage McCarthy first learned his trade in the early 90s. A quick and skilful goalscoring winger, he played in day-long Sunday tournaments organized and financed by local gangsters.
“I made more money playing in that league than I was earning playing for Seven Stars,” he laughs. “If you reach the final you’ve played five matches in the space of a day. But that was the adrenalin. You didn’t even feel it.”
This rite of passage, playing against intimidating grown men, was instrumental in his development.
“They kick the living daylights out of you, so you toughen up,” he remembers. “I was way ahead, physically, of the rest of the kids. So now you go from there, to your own age group, it’s a piece of cake man! With a little kick I’d be like, ‘How old are you? When you kick me, kick me properly!’ But yes, it was tough growing up in those neighborhoods because most kids… you’ll be lucky if you live past 20.”
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McCarthy’s rise from feisty street talent to top-flight elite was swift. Seven Stars’ merger with Ajax Cape Town opened the door to Ajax Amsterdam, where he tasted title success in his first season. After struggling to hold down a place at La Liga’s Celta Vigo, he converted productive loan spells at Porto into a permanent transfer, and a pivotal mentorship under a zealous young coach called Jose Mourinho.
He turns on the disarming McCarthy charm, giggling behind his jacket like a pantomime villain, as he admits to borrowing a little from the master’s philosophy.
“Mourinho was very meticulous, and his players know exactly what to do,” he says. “I love that about him. You’re set up to annihilate your opponents. You frustrate them, and then when they’re most vulnerable, you go for the jugular.”
McCarthy demonstrated a comparable ruthlessness by dispatching his boyhood idols Manchester United with a brace in the 2004 Champions League last 16 match. Porto would go on to win the competition, with McCarthy a second-half substitute in the final. He would later play for Blackburn Rovers under another of his heroes, Mark Hughes, before finishing his playing career back in South Africa; despite a fractious and combative relationship with the national team set-up, he remains Bafana Bafana’s record goalscorer. And his disruptive charisma is demanding attention all over again.
It’s Wednesday evening, and match-day traffic heading to the Chiefs game has slowed to a treacle of irritated klaxons and bass-confident car radios. Cape Town Stadium, a beautiful alabaster scallop on the northern Green Point tip of the Cape, is one of five new stadia built for the 2010 World Cup. Shared with Ajax, it can hold 55,000; tonight it will be half-full, a remarkable turnout for a weekday league game. Most of these fans, however, will be supporting Kaizer Chiefs. It’s an unsatisfactory state of affairs for a club with an appetite for long-term success.
“We can no longer operate like gypsies in our own backyard,” says Comitis. “The fundamental foundation of a football club is its home.”
Fans at Cape Town Stadium (Photo by Jigga Thomas)
He insists that a variety of 10,000-seater options are being actively explored.
In a breathless match of mistakes and counter-punches, it’s Chiefs who gratefully snatch their first win of the season. There’s a strange atmosphere in the chilly stadium, as an animated McCarthy prowls the touchline; Chiefs fans, resplendent in feather headdresses, provide most of the energy in the stands with their songs and synchronized hip-swivelling. In contrast, it’s clear that City FC’s embryonic identity is still developing – their nickname ‘The Citizens’ is yet to find expression in costumes or plush toy merchandise.
“Rome was not built in a day,” says Comitis.
It’s hard not to feel affection for the inclusivity Comitis is trying to engender. Every interaction with the club, from the owner, to the manager, to the communications team, is gracious and accommodating.
“That ethos runs through every aspect of the club’s growth ,” he says. “In the dressing room, among the staff, with our fans, with the corporate world in Cape Town, and the city itself – a project this size cannot exclude any of these stakeholders if it wants to succeed.”
It’s a club that’s reaching far, with a warm Cape wind of goodwill at its back. “When you stand on the side there, and you see that it’s happening… Just the joy that comes within me,” McCarthy says. “Because to see that…wow.”
He leans back and looks skyward. “It’s actually working.” – Written by Alastair Hagger
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