Why top flight can’t stop firing its coaches

Barely seven rounds into the new FNB Premiership season, the coaching carousel is already spinning at alarming speed – four coaches gone, several more uneasy in their seats.

Barely seven rounds into the new FNB Premiership season, Botswana’s top-flight football has already acquired the frantic rhythm of a game of musical chairs – except the music stops not for players, but for the men in the technical area. Four coaches have been ushered through the exit, and several others now coach with one eye on the standings and the other on their own job security.

The churn has a logic, if an unforgiving one. Across the division, patience has become a luxury few boardrooms are willing to afford. Early results have hardened into verdicts. Ambitions have outpaced points tallies. And in more than one case, a quarrel over who is actually in charge – the club or the coach – has done the dismissing for them. The result is a campaign that has barely found its feet yet has already rewritten half a dozen organizational charts.

What is striking is how little past glory counts for in the current climate. A coach’s résumé has offered scant armor; some have been swept aside by raw arithmetic, others ensnared in administrative disputes, and at least one quietly demoted to a supporting role while his club hunts for a formula that wins.

Mochudi Centre Chiefs set the tone early, cutting ties with Spanish coach Miguel Torreira with immediate effect after only three matches. The club confirmed the end of the relationship in a statement issued in September. Torreira’s brief account – one win, one draw and one defeat – was the kind of middling return that persuades a nervous boardroom to act rather than wait. In his place, the Kgatleng giants reached for a familiar name from the regional game: Reneilwe Letsholonyane, the former Kaizer Chiefs midfielder, who arrived fresh from a stint as an assistant coach in Zimbabwe’s Premier Soccer League. The appointment reads as an early bid to steady a listing ship.

Orapa United moved too, drawing the curtain on Elias Chinyemba’s short-lived tenure. The Zimbabwean, who had joined the Ostriches at the season’s outset, was suspended in September before departing altogether. He has since surfaced at Matebele FC – one more coach on the move in a league where standing still is no longer an option. Nico United, for their part, released head coach Vincent Kgaswane after just two months, pulling the trigger with immediate effect following a six-game stretch that produced two wins and four defeats.

A Tonota Standoff Clouds the Picture

Not every parting has been clean. At Tonota FC, the status of head coach Thaloba Nthaga has curdled into a public disagreement, with club and coach offering flatly contradictory accounts of whether he still has a job.

The club announced that Nthaga had tendered his resignation and that it had been accepted. Nthaga saw it differently. Taking to social media, he disowned the statement outright. “I have noted Tonota Football Club’s announcement concerning my employment. For avoidance of doubt, I have neither resigned nor requested release from my contract. Any statement attributing such a request to me is incorrect,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

The friction sits against the backdrop of his expanding national portfolio. By accounts gathered, Nthaga was named interim head coach of the Zebras following Morena Ramoreboli’s departure, with Tonota signing off on his release to the Botswana Football Association (BFA). From there the relationship frayed. After he returned from international duty in Tunisia, the club reportedly asked him to sit out the clash with Matebele FC, citing his absence from the week’s preparations. Nthaga reportedly declined and took his place on the bench regardless.

The BFA then secured his release for a CAF Strategic Workshop in Cape Verde, costing him the fixture against Sua Flamingoes. On his return from Libya last week, Tonota again reportedly asked him to stay off the bench against Police XI, uneasy that his national commitments were pulling his focus.

Sources close to the matter say Nthaga pushed back on the reasoning, noting that the club had itself blessed those same national duties. Complicating the ledger is his standing at the club: it was Nthaga who steered Tonota to an unbeaten First Division North title last season and the automatic promotion that came with it. The newcomers have hardly looked out of place in the top tier, sitting second with 14 points, a single point adrift of leaders Gaborone United – a record that makes his cloudy status all the more conspicuous.

Rollers and Galaxy Join the Reshuffle

The upheaval has reached the division’s heavyweights as well. Township Rollers have remodeled their technical department around the arrival of Serbian tactician Sreten Pavlovic on a season-long deal, with Oupa Kowa shifting into the assistant’s chair as the club looks to sharpen its push. Jwaneng Galaxy, meanwhile, have placed head coach Ivan Minnaert on suspension, handing interim command to Seemo Mpatane.

Minnaert had signed a one-year contract with Galaxy in July 2026, arriving on the back of coaching spells in Uganda and Liberia. His suspension, the club indicated, stems from internal or administrative matters.

Taken together, the opening weeks have laid bare a hard truth about the Premiership dugout: it is among the most precarious seats in Botswana sport. With clubs already swapping coaches and others nursing unresolved standoffs, the new season has offered an early, unsparing lesson in just how demanding — and how disposable — the job has become.

 

Source note: the Tonota sequence rests on information gathered and sources close to the matter; hedged attribution has been retained and the sequence should receive a final source check before print.