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...

A goalkeeper who dazzled at the Africa Cup of Nations finds himself, four months later, quietly edging toward the exit in Bloemfontein. The arc of a footballer’s fortunes can bend in the space of a single summer. For Goitseone Phoko, the Botswana international goalkeeper, it has bent sharply – and in the wrong direction. Barely four months after he put pen to a two-year contract with the South African club Siwelele FC, Phoko is now...

After years of delays, the Botswana Football Association is preparing to launch its long-awaited football academy, with trials for Standard 7 graduates scheduled ahead of a January 2027 opening. The academy will receive up to P2.76 million in support from FIFA as the association works to establish a structured pathway for identifying and developing the country’s most promising young players. The recruitment drive represents a renewed effort to get the programme running after accommodation problems...

The Botswana Football Association is poised to collect an annual subvention of roughly P10 million from the Confederation of African Football, a windfall that arrives as the continent’s governing body opens its coffers wider than at any point in recent memory. The sum reflects a steep climb. CAF’s support for its member associations has swelled from US$200,000 in 2021 to a projected US$700,000 in 2026- a near-fourfold expansion in half a decade, and a meaningful...

In Botswana, the applause from one triumph has barely faded before the demands of the next begin. So it is for the Botswana Athletics Association, which now finds itself in a familiar and unforgiving position: racing against the calendar to assemble the machinery for the 2028 African Senior Athletics Championships, a continental showpiece it won the right to stage but has not yet begun to build. The association is moving to establish a Local Organising...

After six years in the wilderness, Botswana’s most prestigious knockout competition roars back to life – richer, prouder and hungrier than ever. For six years, a silence hung over Botswana football where its grandest spectacle used to roar. The Mascom Top 8 – once the jewel in the crown of the domestic game, the stage where champions were crowned and legends made – had slipped quietly into the shadows, seemingly dead and buried. Season after...