Jomo Sono, the South African icon known as the Black Prince, praises the quality of Botswana’s topflight but warns that a generation of talent is slipping away for lack of academies and school sport.
For ninety minutes at the National Stadium, Jomo Sono watched Botswana football at its most electric. Township Rollers dismantled their oldest rivals, Extension Gunners, by three goals to none, and the roar that followed each strike carried the unmistakable sound of a football nation that knows what it wants.
Yet the man they call the Black Prince – the former Orlando Pirates talisman who once shared a pitch with Pelé at the New York Cosmos – left the stadium thinking less about the scoreline than about the twenty minutes that preceded the goals. In those opening exchanges, Sono saw both the promise and the predicament of Botswana football laid bare.
“To my surprise, the standard is pretty high,” he said, and the surprise was genuine. He had arrived expecting less. “I think you can compete in South Africa with the Premier League from number eight down. Definitely, your league can compete.”
It was, from a man of Sono’s stature, an emphatic endorsement; and he was not finished. Botswana’s leading clubs, he insisted, deserved a loftier comparison than South Africa’s second-tier National First Division. “I don’t compare it with the NFD,” he said. “Your sides can beat most of the NFD teams.”
A weekend guest, an expert eye
Sono was in Botswana over the weekend as a guest of Hope Kontle, invited not to coach or consult but simply to witness one of the country’s fiercest traditional rivalries. The hosts obliged with a spectacle. Rollers’ commanding 3-0 victory ensured the occasion would be remembered.
But an eye trained over decades does not switch off, and Sono’s assessment came with a diagnosis. Beneath the intensity and the flair, he detected a structural flaw – the residue of players who had never been properly schooled in the fundamentals of the game.
“What I have noticed is that the players are good, but you can tell that some of them were never properly developed,” he said. “You could see in the first 20 minutes that the players were giving the balls away easily, wrong passes and wrong ball controls.” The talent, in other words, was undeniable. The technical grounding that should underpin it was not.
‘Go back to school sport’
For Sono, the remedy begins long before a player ever pulls on a senior jersey. It begins in the schoolyard. “It’s important for the country to go back to the school sports and development of young players,” he told WeekendSport.
He drew on the South African model, where professional clubs have poured resources into youth academies built to identify and mould players from their earliest years. In that system, he noted, clubs work with children from as young as six, guiding them through the formative stages until sixteen; the crucial window in which raw ability is refined into discipline, awareness and touch. It is precisely that window, he argued, that Botswana has been leaving open.
Academies as the missing link
The vision Sono sketched was not of isolated training grounds but of a connected pathway – schools feeding academies, academies feeding clubs, clubs feeding the national teams. A single, unbroken chain of development.
“I think it is important that Botswana must start creating development and academies,” he said. “They must use their academies because that is the way top teams all over the world are bringing young players.”
An academy, in his telling, is not merely a place to train. It is an engine of consistency – a means of guaranteeing that each new crop of players arrives at senior level already technically equipped for the demands of the professional game.
“That’s what Botswana should do for the sake of consistency. They need to have development teams, academies. In South Africa, 95 percent of the teams have academies,” said the former Bafana Bafana coach. “This is the direction I think Botswana should take.”
A debate whose time has come
Sono’s intervention lands amid a broader conversation about how Botswana nurtures its young footballers and how they make the passage from school pitches to professional contracts.
The stakes extend well beyond individual careers. A more robust school-sport structure would widen the talent pool available to clubs while offering young players a steady diet of competitive football and technical instruction. It would also fortify the national-team pipeline, ensuring that gifted players are spotted and cultivated long before the senior game comes calling.
A return, years in the making
The visit marked Sono’s first return to Botswana in several years, and he arrived in a role far removed from his last. The previous occasion had been a contest, not a courtesy.
“The last time I was in Botswana was with the national team. I was with Bafana Bafana to play Botswana in the COSAFA and we beat them 2-1,” he recalled.
This time there was no assignment, no touchline to patrol – only an invitation from Kontle and a front-row seat to Rollers and Gunners at their combative best. The football gave him plenty to admire. It also gave him something to say. And in a country weighing how to convert its evident promise into lasting achievement, the Black Prince’s message was as direct as a well-struck pass: build from the ground up or watch the talent drift away.
