Cape Town City chairman John Comitis believes that South African football may never recover if the season doesn’t resume soon.
The Premier Soccer League (PSL) or Absa Premiership has been suspended since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The PSL initially wanted to resume the season this past week but made a u-turn, saying that match officials were not up to match fitness and would need until the first week of August to be ready.
And Comitis is cutting a frustrated figure, saying his players are itching to go having been waiting patiently for three months while conducting their zoom meetings and more recently physical training sessions.
And the former Ajax Cape Town CEO says sponsors are getting fed up having to go without pay and the longer the season was delayed the more it would test their patience.
“If we don’t resume, there’s going to be problems. Sponsors are going to start asking questions – like our own sponsors are asking questions,” Comitis said.
“I don’t know where we will be without DirectAxis, who have stuck with us regardless. We are hoping that we will return to football because we are going to suffer (if we don’t).
“The disaster that looms means that people are going to lose their jobs and the industry will collapse.
“We’ve been training via zoom and until we were given permission to get back to training. We’ve been training for the past three months. The players are getting frustrated.
“The entire industry is getting frustrated. It is not nice. The coaches are getting fired. We are aimlessly training for nothing.
“We are hopeful that sanity will prevail and (we will) return to business, like other businesses that have been allowed to return. We are just waiting to see what will develop. We will find out what is going on maybe Monday or Tuesday.
“We’ve been told to get ready. We need to wait for PSL and Safa to finalise what is going to happen.”
