The departure of Sifiso Hlanti and Keagan Dolly from Kaizer Chiefs is not a crisis but a long-overdue surgical strike against the mediocrity that has festered at Naturena for half a decade. For too long, the club’s dressing room has functioned as a retirement home for players who once promised the world but delivered only occasional flashes of brilliance between long spells of invisibility. Hlanti, a defender whose positional awareness often resembled a tourist lost in a shopping mall, and Dolly, a midfielder whose best performances now live exclusively in the memories of his Bidvest Wits and Montpellier days, were the living embodiment of that rot. Their exits—combined with the club’s third-place finish in 2023-24—signal that head coach Nasreddine Nabi is finally willing to make the uncomfortable choices that previous regimes avoided.
The evidence is everywhere on the pitch. Watch any Chiefs match from the past two seasons and you see a team that loses its shape the moment the opponent presses. Hlanti, for all his experience, was consistently caught ball-watching when counters developed, his 0.7 tackles per 90 a stat line that speaks to a player who had checked out mentally. Dolly, meanwhile, managed just three goal contributions in 22 league appearances last term while earning a salary that would fund an entire Under-19 academy. These are not the numbers of players you build around; they are the numbers of players you cut loose. Nabi