Danone is still on board and one day, hopefully, its Nations Cup will be back

 

I was at the St David’s Challenge Cup schools football tournament a few weeks ago and reflected on the all-round excellence of the event while, at the same time, bemoaning the fact that it is one of only a handful of tournaments at which football at this level (there were under-15 and under-19 teams there) gets its place in the sun).

It is, sadly, an elitist and exclusionary event. The entire ethos is based on the traditional way of organising sports at a certain type of school. I’m talking about schools that believe in mass participation, in encouraging their learners to play many different sports, and in playing the same set of traditional opponents, year after year.

So, the schools at the St David’s tournament are the same ones, with a very few exceptions, that have been there every year since it started. Norkem Park High School, the runners-up in the under-19 section this year, are outliers – they aren’t a boys-only or a private school like the others – but they have been playing there all along.

Football at the vast majority of schools in the land is not run this way.

There is very little organised sport in most of the schools in this country. There are no quality fields or facilities at those schools, and no resources to provide them. The stark inequalities that exist between the haves and have-nots in our schooling system persist, 25 years into our new democracy, with its promises of changing that.

There are other priorities for what money is available for education and, somehow, sport is not regarded by the authorities as being an important part of the educational programme. That much was made clear by the response to the Covid-19 epidemic when a blanket ban was placed on sport at schools and no attempt was made to reinstate it when the schools were gradually re-opened later on.

That’s the context in which the St David’s tournament takes place. 

There are those, of course, who are dedicated to uplifting the children at those under-resourced schools through the medium of sport, specifically football. I was reminded of that the week before St David’s when I went to the DanUP Soccer Clinic at the Discovery Park center at the Wanderers. It involved some 50 nine to12 year-old boys, and a few girls, and it was laid on by yoghurt manufacturer, Danone. They were township kids, bussed in, and the idea was to give them a morning to remember, to give them some life-skills tips and some skills training from the Discovery Park coaches.

Danone, in the days before Covid, sponsored the Danone Nations Cup. It was an international under-12 tournament organised by the South African Schools Football Association (Sasfa). Sasfa had all sorts of problems, but at least it brought organised soccer to the poorest schools and to the remotest corners of the land. The activities were limited and the numbers involved in each school are small, but if it weren’t for Sasfa’s interventions there would be no sporting activity at all in many of those places.

Things went on hold in 2020 because of Covid-19 and the future is unclear, but before the lockdown Sasfa ran sponsored tournaments in five age groups. There’s pretty substantial prize money on offer, but no cash changes hands. Instead, the winning schools draw up a wish list of long term improvements that can be made at their schools and the sponsor pays for them.

The Danone Nations Cup was different in that the first prize there is participation in a World Finals tournament, with the winning school being sent to some overseas venue to compete against 90 other national champions. What made the competition special is that the original idea was that the participating nations shouldn’t send their elite youth champions to the World Finals but that the winners should emerge from some sort of “football for good” project in their countries.

Not everyone stuck to that, it seemed, but the Brazilian team, for example, used to come from a programme run in the favelos of Rio de Janeiro and the England representatives were not the under-12 academy team of one of the Premier League clubs but rather the winners of an inner city upliftment- through-sport project.

South Africa never sent its national champion team – there is no competition to determine who that would be anyway – instead, the Sasfa process has sent youngsters from impoverished schools in townships, and in the deepest of rural settings, to play on a world stage. It’s a shining light in an otherwise bleak sporting landscape.

Those tournaments were last played in 2019. I spoke to Emmanuel Marchant, managing director for Danone Southern Africa at the DanUp clinic and he told me that, because the Covid lockdown and its effect on the economy had affected them like every else, they have had to put the Nations Cup on hold for now. They have every intention though, as does Groupe Danone – their international mother company – of reinstating it.

“It’s in the company’s DNA,” he told me, “to make a difference wherever we operate. Education is the area we have chosen, through the medium of football, and we intend carrying on with it.”

That morning’s clinic, he said, was a small step back on that road.

But it’s not just football. On display at the clinic that Saturday was a tiny school desk, made entirely out of recycled Danone plastic yoghurt tubs, and a concrete block, amazingly also made out of used yoghurt containers. They will be used to build and furnish schools in South African townships.

“We have clever people behind that project,” Marchant said, “but more importantly, they are passionate about finding solutions to the problems facing the children. That’s the Danone way.”

There was enough evidence of that among the Danone people on duty at Discovery Park that morning. My prayer is that they will get the chance sooner rather than later to put all of that passion and innovation into a relaunched Danone Nations Cup competition.

The children need it back, badly.