The 2018-19 ABC Motsepe League season which is expected to kick-off on Wednesday will see seven new clubs join the tightly contested promotional league in an effort to gain promotion to National First Division (NFD).
Last season’s runners-up. EC Bees sold their franchise to Bush Bucks Academy in East London two months ago.
Lion City sold to Peace Makers from Port Elizabeth, and City Lads sold their club status to Yakha United in Mount Ayliff.
Spear of the Nation – formerly known as Matatiele Professionals – sold their status to The Guys, and Ginsberg’s Future Tigers has relocated to Uitenhage under new ownership.
Former NFD side, Mthatha Bucks who were relegated to the third-tier league at the end of 2017-18 season, have rejoined the amateur league after Bucks spending three seasons playing in the NFD after they gained promotion at the end of the 2014-15 season.
There are also two new teams who were recently promoted from SAB League to the third-tier league – Birmingham City from East London and Amavarara from Queenstown.
Safa-Eastern Cape provincial secretary Isaac Klaas, said they had to do due diligence on the selling and purchasing of third-tier league club status.
He said there were stakeholders involved in the entire process of transferring a team’s ownership, such as local football associations, and regional Safa structures.
“The registrations of the teams was very tough, I must say the process of selling franchises had a lot of delays in terms of contracts.
“Because people think selling a franchise is easy.
“But it’s not that simple, because there are clear contractual issues that have to be addressed before a deal can go through.”
He said another stumbling block was submission of incomplete player registrations forms, hence the final league fixtures were only released last Wednesday afternoon.
“People were submitting documents that were incomplete, including blurry pictures of players.
“Hence our league suffered delays in kicking off.
“We had to go back to the clubs and request this information and proper pictures.
“So it’s a process that was very challenging for our office, hence we were only able to release the fixtures now.”
He said the late response from clubs was the reason that the Motsepe League season was only startingnext week.
“We requested people to submit their documentation as early as July – so that we could scrutinise and verify information,” said Klaas.
“But no one listened to that and when we released the fixture, only two weeks before the kick-off date, people were starting to flock to the office with their registration documents.
“So that was a challenge, because sometimes the system rejects documents.
“But we are 95% ready to kick-off the new season and hopefully by Wednesday we’ll be 100%,” Klaas added...