The Betway Premiership cannot call itself a professional league while it winks at the muti culture that former defenders like Yusuf Jappie casually admit to. Jappie’s recent confession—that his team sprinkled muti in the dressing room before a 2-1 victory over Kaizer Chiefs—should have been met with an immediate, forceful response from the Betway Premiership. Instead, we got silence. That silence is not neutral; it is an endorsement. When a former professional openly describes a pre-match ritual that has no basis in science, and the league’s leadership says nothing, it tells every young player in South Africa that folklore matters more than fitness, video analysis, or tactical discipline. Jappie isn’t the problem. The Betway Premiership’s unwillingness to confront the absurdity is the problem.
Think about what Jappie described. He wasn’t playing for a backwater club; he was lining up against Kaizer Chiefs, the most decorated team in the country, in a fixture that demands mental clarity and physical preparation. And the response from his camp was to engage in supernatural theater. No one namechecked the specific team, but that’s irrelevant—the fact that a seasoned defender sees this as a normal anecdote, something to share with a laugh, reveals how deeply entrenched this regressive thinking is. Compare that to the standard at Mamelodi Sundowns under Pitso Mosimane, who built a dynasty on data, recovery protocols, and a sports science department that measures everything from sprint load to sleep quality. Mosimane never needed a goat’s blood to beat Chiefs. He needed a better press, a sharper set-piece routine, and players who trusted their coaching. The Jappie mindset is the exact opposite: it outsources victory to the spiritual realm, which conveniently absolves players and coaches of responsibility when the ritual fails. That is not culture—that is cowardice dressed in tradition.
The implication for the Betway Premiership is stark. Global scouts watching the Betway Premiership don’t look for muti; they look for tactical intelligence, athleticism, and professionalism. When former players openly joke about dressing-room sorcery, it reinforces the stereotype that South African football is more mystic than methodical. No Betway Premiership official has released a statement. No club has come forward to say, “That’s not how we operate.” And so the league remains a laughingstock in boardrooms from Brussels to Brazil, while its best young talents—players like Cassius Mailula or Oswin Appollis—are sold off because their potential outweighs the chaos around them. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Betway Premiership could fund education programs, invite sports psychologists, and ban any pre-match rituals that aren’t demonstrably physical or tactical. But they won’t, because acknowledging the problem would mean admitting that a major part of the league’s culture is anti-scientific. The league would rather hide behind the word “tradition” than do the hard work of modernization.
Here is the bold, unavoidable verdict: if the P