The following individuals were among the youngsters credited with establishing the South African club, Mamelodi Sundowns, in the 1960s: Frank “ABC” Motsepe, Roy Fischer, Ingle Singh and Bernard Hartze. This group of young stars were residing in and around Marabastad in Pretoria (Tshwane). The newly-established team was named Marabastad Sundowns after an amateur club called Sundowns, which existed in the 1920s, also formed in Marabastad.
The club joined the Federation of Professional Soccer League in 1967 and was relegated to the second division of the National Professional Soccer League in 1980. The club stayed in the second division for five years, only to bounce back in 1985 when the South African flamboyant socialite, Zola Mahobe (Mr Cool), bought the club. Sundowns earned promotion to the first division again under Mahobe’s ownership.
In 1986, Sundowns, commonly called “Bafana ba Style”, claimed their first major cup, Mainstay Cup, since their return to top flight by beating Jomo Cosmos 1-0. Sundowns had turned red hot by 1987 and had won BP Top Eight, JPS Cup and the Castle League Championships. In May 1986, the South African businessman owner of the club, Mahobe, sent tongues wagging when he took all Sundowns players and their partners to an all-expenses paid trip to the FA Cup Final in London. Mahobe, also known as “Mr Big Bucks”, is said to have spent about US$110,000 in boosting Sundowns, which he nicknamed “The Brazillians”, in his first two years of owning the club. Mr Cool paid top dollar to acquire talented players and rewarded them with expensive gifts including BMW cars.
Standard Bank later took ownership of the club in 1988. Then came the Krok brothers who bought the club from Standard Bank. They were later joined by Angelo and Natasha Tsichlas. Sundowns started the post 1994 era spectacularly to claim seven league titles. The first league winning streak started in 1996 with the club coming on top for three years in a row.
Mamelodi Sundowns is now owned by the Confederation of African Football’s (CAF) President and South African billionaire businessman, Patrice Motsepe, who is the founder of a company called Future Mining, which provided contract mining services that included the cleaning of gold dust from inside mine shafts for the Vaal Reefs Gold mine. His investment portfolio includes the renewable energy sector. He also owns African Rainbow Capital Investments Ltd. All these companies are under the branch of his Ubuntu-Botho Investment conglomerate.
Apart from Sundowns’ revenues, from the Betway premier league’s TV and Sponsorship deals, the club also enjoys huge financial backing from these companies and this tilts the advantage over other clubs in the top flight to their side since he took ownership of this Pretoria club. Motsepe bought into Sundowns in 2003 to partner the Tsichlas. He increased his stake from 51% to 100% in 2004 and renamed the club ‘Mamelodi’ Sundowns. The renaming of the club to Mamelodi Sundowns is described by the club as “a nod to its heritage in Atteridgeville, Eersterus and Laudium and the club’s home in Mamelodi.”
This Motsepe’s reign is clearly the club’s global emergence era. As early as 2005, the men’s team club won the league for two seasons in a row (2005-06 and 2006-07). They also claimed the league in the 2013-14 under the stewardship of local coach Pitso Mosimane who then delivered the 2016 CAF Champions League victory. Mamelodi Sundowns then went on to win the CAF Super Cup at the first attempt by defeating TP Mazembe of the Democratic Republic of Congo 1-0 in Pretoria. Motsepe had always wanted the continental glory. He came after the 2001 CAF Champions League that the club painfully lost to Egyptian footballing giant, Al-Ahly.
The Women’s team of Mamelodi Sundowns that was founded on 4 September 2009 by owner Patrice Motsepe is also the most successful women’s team in South Africa with seven titles. They won the inaugural CAF Women’s Champions League in 2021 with invincibility of not losing a single match right from the qualifying stage of the 2021 CAF Women’s Champions League COSAFA Qualifiers and throughout the main competition proper. They ended the 2022 season ranked as the best women’s club in Africa by IFFHS with 174 points. The club was ranked the best women’s club in Africa by IFFHS for the second year running in 2023 with 238 points and tied for 19th in the Women’s Club World ranking.
Massive corporate support has been the key secret behind South Africa’s Premier League Soccer’s profitable league concept since 1996 when it was established. The league has landed huge sponsorship deals with companies such as Castle Lager (1996-2007), ABSA Bank (2007-2020), DStv (2020-2024), and Betway (2024-present). Big firms like MTN, Carling Black Label, Nedbank and Telkom are big stakeholders in the league too. These collaborations generate huge amounts of revenue. For instance, the DSTV Premiership is one of the wealthiest leagues in Africa in terms of sponsorship revenue, with an estimated five-year value of $33 million.
Betway, a gambling firm, just took over from MultiChoice-owned DStv as the league’s main sponsor this 2024-25 season even with a bigger deal despite the fact that the DStv’s five-season pact still had a year left to run. This new Betway Premiership three-year deal is worth US $48.7 million, according to the league’s chairman Irvin Khoza and this revenue is just a little fraction of the league’s TV revenues.
The league’s broadcaster is SuperSport, who in turn sub-leases the broadcasting rights to the SABC, so as to broadcast some matches on public television in South Africa. The five-year television rights deal worth US $277 million was signed in 2011 and an improved deal in excess of $300 million was even struck between the managements of the Betway premier league and the multinational TV network in August 2024. These give huge cash flows to top flight clubs which are shared pro rata, yet not all clubs enjoy the same in this TV bumpers.
In the last season (2023-24), Moroka Swallows and TS Galaxy, two clubs in the Premier Soccer League (PSL), struggled to pay players, revealing the harsh reality of running a professional football team in South Africa. Contrary to the perception of opulence associated with top-flight football, the business of running a club in South Africa is still far from glamorous or profitable. The evidence of financial distress is just as clear. PSL’s average monthly grant to each club at the top flight is only about $136,000, which is insufficient to cover the weekly expenses of most of the clubs. It is even more dire for clubs in the second division who receive just a paltry sum of about $27,000 monthly as grants.
The big three clubs, Mamelodi Sundowns, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates are different though. They are the top beneficiaries in these TV money and corporate sponsorships and they have much better and robust financial models. Mamelodi Sundowns, for instance, enjoy huge match-day followings with capacity crowds in most of their home matches throughout each season and this is another source of the club’s revenue. PSL supporters are among the most devoted and fervent on the continent. Clubs such as Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates, Mamelodi Sundowns, and Cape Town City draw large crowds, with some derbies drawing over 90,000 fans at iconic venues like the FNB Stadium.
For instance, the Orlando Pirates v Mamelodi Sundowns fixture sold well over 43,000 tickets for their clash at FNB Stadium and it cost an adult about US$2.3 to get a ticket in the popular seats and more in the special sections of the stadium. These crowds in all the fixtures of the big 5 clubs in the top flight are not unusual every season and all their home fixtures are guaranteed for decent numbers of spectators all season as well. Mamelodi Sundowns FC remain the richest football club in Africa in 2025, with a staggering market value of US$38.91 million. German multinational corporation, PUMA, has been in partnership with Mamelodi Sundowns since 2016. The kit sponsors being the Motsepe’s Ubuntu-Botho Investments and the South Korean Motor Company, Hyundai the sleeve sponsor up till 2023-24 season. The motor giants have now been replaced by another big automaker, Ferrari. This six years sponsorship deal with Ferrari is worth about US$62 million. Herballife, Redbull, and Southern Huawei are also their sponsors.
In 2021, Mamelodi Sundowns also teamed up with Roc Nation Sports and their Head of Football, Alan Redmond, was engaged to be consulting from the London Office regarding transfers and the global football market. The alliance gave the football club access to commercial platforms and other business big opportunities.
With this comprehensive financial model, no one should look further to how Mamelodi Sundowns is wooing top talents from South America, Europe and the entire African continent. The highest-paid Mamelodi Sundowns’ first team player, for example, is Lucas Ribeiro with an estimated salary of about $53,508 monthly, while the lowest-paid player in the 20-man squad is Jayden Adams with a salary of around $10,702 per month. Goalkeeper Ronwen Williams, the captain of the South African national team (The Bafana Bafana), is the second highest paid in the club with a salary of around US $27,650 monthly.
Ribeiro and Arthur Sales are the two Brazilians in this first team squad of Mamelodi Sundowns. Chilean Marcelo Allende, who moved to South Africa from Uruguayan side Montevideo City Torque this 2024-25 window is also one of the Latin America legion in the squad. He captained Chile’s U20 team at the 2019 South American U20 Championships. The Argentine left back Lucas Suárez and his compatriot Matías Eduardo Esquivel complete the list. Other top internationals in this squad are: Ugandan’s veteran ex international, goalkeeper, Denis Onyango and Peter Shalulile, the Captain for Namibia national team who is regarded as one of the best strikers to play in the South Africa top flight division.
However, Mamelodi Sundowns, the pride of South African football, failed in their bid to win a second CAF Champions League crown in the second leg of the CAF Champions League final at the 30 June Stadium in Cairo on 1 June 2025. Instead, it was Egypt’s Pyramids FC, the ambitious disruptors, who seized their moment and made history. Pyramids, still reeling from the heartbreak of losing the Egyptian Premier League despite a commanding 5-1 win over Ceramica Cleopatra midweek, only for Al Ahly to snatch the crown with a ruthless 6-0 rout of Pharco, beat Sundown 2-1 on home soil to seal a 3-2 aggregate win. After the first leg had ended 1-1 on Saturday 24 May, the tournament’s leading scorer, Fiston Mayele, beat Sundowns goalkeeper from close range in the 23rd minute to put Pyramids ahead in the tie for the first time. Ahmed Samy’s diving header, awarded after a lengthy video assistant referee (VAR) check, made it 2-0 on the night, and 3-1 overall, in the 56th minute. Iqraam Rayners then pulled one back for Sundowns with 15 minutes remaining with a volleyed effort, but the visitors could not find an equalizer, which would have seen them snatch the title on away goals.
Meanwhile, Sundowns will have to get over defeat quickly as the Miguel Cardoso’s men prepare to take part in the expanded FIFA Club World Cup in the United States. They will face Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund and Ulsan in Group F, with their first game against the South Korean side on 17 June.
References:
- “Mamelodi Sundowns net Hyundai deal” By Holmes, Elena for SportsPro, 17 October 2017
- “Mamelodi Sundowns sign lucrative long-term deal with Puma”. TimesLIVE. 13 May 2024.
- “Sundowns Ladies coach excited by return women’s football”. Daily Citizen. 4 February 2021
- “All CAF Awards Winners Revealed” iDiski Times. 21 July 2022.
- “PSL renamed Betway Premiership in record sponsorship deal” By Kieran O’Connor for Insider Sports. July 26, 2024
- “Why PSL is Africa’s Most Commercially Successful League” Editorial Column of SPOTBLOT. April 16, 2025.
- “Football business: How South Africa got game right, and wrong” By Peter Dube, a Contributor Nation Media. 14 August 2024
- “South Africa’s Premier Soccer League scores record US$49m Betway title sponsorship” By ARIF ISLAM for SportsPro. 25 July 2024.
- “Football big business” By José Luis del Olmo Arriaga, Director of the Marketing and Commercial Management degree at the Abat Oliba University.
- THE ECONOMY JOURNAL. COM
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