The majority of the Premiership staff members took advantage of the Fifa week in which domestic fixtures take a back seat to international football and departed for Europe on Thursday evening where they will spend two days renewing ties with the German Bundesliga.
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PSL CEO Kjetil Siem revealed that the visit to the 2006 Fifa World Cup hosts will be mainly to exchange views and discuss the challenges the Germans faced when they staged the global event four years ago while the South Africans will also inform their hosts about hosting the first ever Fifa World Cup in Africa.
“But the visit will also help the two countries consolidate their friendship as well as business interest,” said our source. “It must be remembered that the PSL has just signed an agreement with the Bundesliga where they will exchange their experiences regarding the challenges they face daily in trying to improve their respective leagues.”
While the Bundesliga has been classed among the top five commercially successful leagues in Europe, the administrators were quite impressed by the way the South Africans were also running their domestic league and hailed the Premiership as one of the best run they have ever seen.
In fact, most of the senior members of the board of the Bundesliga confessed that the Premiership were doing things they found to be far too superior to what they were doing back in Germany and were convinced that rather than impart their knowledge to the Africans, they could actually learn from the South Africans and vice versa.
“It is for this reason that both countries would be empowering each other in terms of skills exchange in the administration of the game as well as learning from each other how best to make their league commercially viable, not just exchange notes about the Fifa World Cup they have both hosted,” added our source.
As Pitso Mosimane and his technical team departs from Johannesburg for Sierra Leone for their crunch African Nations Cup encounter against Sierra Leone on Friday, Kjetil Siem confirmed that together with his executive committee they will also make a stop-over in London.
The South Africans have long realized that in order to run a commercially successful league, they have to learn and then implement the way the Europeans do their things and there is no doubt that the success of any football league in the world was only possible through selling the rights of their matches to television and to the highest bidder.
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