SAFA ABC Motsepe League Pre-Season | 22 June 2026
Baroka FC chairman Khurishi Mphahlele has settled the question that has hung over Ga-Mphahlele since the side’s late-April relegation: there will be no shortcut back. Speaking publicly across recent weeks and again as the club opens its first off-season as an amateur outfit since 2013, Mphahlele has ruled out buying a Motsepe Foundation Championship status, set a three-year horizon to return to professional football, and committed to fielding a squad in which no first-team player is older than 21. The plan answers the loudest off-season questions in one breath — coach, market, age profile, ambition — and frames a SAFA ABC Motsepe League Limpopo campaign that will look very different from anything Bakgakga have run before.
No status purchase
The Limpopo Chronicle and Soccer Laduma have both placed Baroka on the list of clubs sounded out about distressed Championship franchises, but Mphahlele has been firm in interviews this off-season: “I am not even considering buying a status. I still have the recipe of how to get promoted to professional football, and we will do it the proper way.” It is a pointed line in a province where rivals Black Leopards are reportedly tracking a Betway Premiership status of their own, and it commits Baroka to the slow road — provincial qualification, then the ABC Motsepe National Play-Offs, then promotion to the second tier earned, not bought.
The under-21 squad rule
The most striking detail of the rebuild is the age cap. Mphahlele has told Kick Off that the squad reassembling for pre-season at Mafori Mphahlele Stadium will be assessed against a hard ceiling — no first-team player older than 21 — with the chairman drawing on the club’s own academy and trial intake from across Limpopo. Salary structures will be benchmarked against ABC Motsepe peers rather than carried over from the Championship era, a recognition that the economics of the third tier simply do not support the wage bill Baroka were running last season, when delayed April pay led to a brief player strike before the final round of fixtures.
Coach and continuity
Tlisane Motaung, appointed in March on a two-year deal with an optional extension after Dan Malesela’s dismissal, has remained in place through the demotion. Mphahlele has publicly backed the former University of Pretoria man to lead the rebuild, framing him as a coach who fits both the youth-development mandate and the financial reality of the new tier. The technical staff around Motaung — striker coach Reason Chiloane and assistant Thoka Matsimela among them — has been left largely int
