On the first Saturday in September, 3,000 rugby fans flocked to the Phillip Herbstein field in Constantia to watch False Bay play Schotsche Kloof Walmers in a Western Province Super League club quarterfinal.
Schotsche Kloof, whose players are largely from the Bo-Kaap and Walmer Estate, led 10-3 at halftime. With five minutes to go, False Bay scored a converted try to level at 10-10. The knockout match had to be decided, so they moved into 20 minutes of injury time.
Had the scores remained level, False Bay would have gone through to the semis by dint of finishing the league higher than their opponents. But Schotsche Kloof Walmers were having none of it. In the 100th minute, they scored a penalty. Semis, here we come.
The quarterfinal was live-streamed by Global Sports Network (GSN), and garnered 8,100 views on YouTube over the next 48 hours. The combined audience of just over 11,000 rivals the size of the crowd for the Western Province vs Boland Currie Cup match at Cape Town Stadium that same afternoon.
Duane Heath, a longtime club rugby administrator responsible for SA Rugby’s Community Cup and Gold Cup, says: “Most clubs now stream and the timing around the digital revolution has been perfect. Clubs are industrious and savvy. Streaming has fuelled club rugby’s boom since the 2023 Rugby World Cup win.”
Live streaming is probably the biggest single reason for the steady growth of club rugby in South Africa, but it’s really in its infancy. GSN had only one camera at the False Bay game and commentary, from Barry Wilson and Estin Jacobs, was, well, idiosyncratic.
There are many amateur commentators out there, with scores of club rugby matches being streamed live each weekend. Small operators with a camera, a mixing desk and effects mic and a van to transport them in can easily enter the market.
True, the final product is not slick. But it’s full of vitality, local colour and self-expression, often available in English and Afrikaans, with the two frequently overlapping. In some respects, the product is as authentically South African as a three-legged potjie. It often feels more vital and earthy than the slicker but predictable professional product — hence its appeal.
One well-known commentator is Zeeko Alexander, whose quip about a player — “He’s so fast, he answers a missed call” — has earned him a lot more than 15 minutes of fame on social media.
GSN is the brainchild of Pierre Rogers, head of finance at Pepkor NexTech and a former referee with 18 years of experience officiating club matches in the Western Cape. Rogers believes the local rugby landscape is dominated by too few people. Streaming, in its basic sense, is a means of broadening the base of the game and making it more accessible, so more inclusive.
“My concerns are twofold,” he says. “There are only a handful of individuals who really run the rugby landscape and there’s one company that monopolises the broadcasting. A society that lacks competition isn’t healthy.”
Rather than seeing himself as a contrarian or digital disrupter, Rogers thinks of himself as a “visionary”. He likes Wilson because he is fresh and puts a smile on people’s faces. He has his own style and vernacular. There’s a definite feel-good and inspirational factor in the way that GSN approaches its work.
Rogers started GSN in 2018 because as a referee he had noticed a player trajectory in local rugby. It went, he says, from elite schools to elite universities to elite provinces. Many young players, for whatever reason (the “wrong” school, failure to be selected for Craven Week), fell foul of such logic.
Everyone has the impression that, say, the Varsity Cup is of a higher standard than good club rugby – I’m not convinced
— Pierre Rogers
“Take a flank like Tyreec Liedeman,” he says. “He was playing for Malmesbury’s Wesbank when we streamed one of their matches. It led to Boland under-21s and on to the Cheetahs. Everyone has the impression that, say, the Varsity Cup is of a higher standard than good club rugby — I’m not convinced.”
Streaming has another virtue: it is international. A scout or director of rugby in Georgia, Italy or France can theoretically watch False Bay vs Schotsche Kloof Walmers online, live or after the fact. Rogers tells many stories of talented local players overlooked by the system being picked up by astute overseas clubs prepared to tolerate a single camera showing a game.
Heath sees streaming as rugby’s “informal sector”. The marketplace is busy, he says, the barrier to entry low and clubs can make their own commercial decisions about sponsorship and advertising, giving them partial autonomy from their union.
It allows clubs an unusual degree of freedom, which they relish. Use of Facebook, particularly among the 204 clubs of the Boland, is high.
“We’re at a bit of a crossroads,” says Heath. “Yes, it’s embryonic and people are finding their way, but clubs are streaming and unions are beginning to realise the worth of their broadcast rights. It’s going to be an interesting few years commercially, as the parties grapple with monetising their rights.”
Heath, who is at present involved with the Gold Cup, the nation’s premier club competition, says media houses and other companies have yet to appreciate the commercial value of club rugby. “They’re generally not prepared to stump up cash for that. But I don’t think real commercialisation is that far off. We’re just in this liminal space at the moment. Soon it could be different.”
Rogers tells his team they’re just “one conversation away” from landing a big deal. His company’s service is available on the Apple App Store and already has 100,000 followers on social media. He’s hoping this will jump to 250,000 in the near future.
Corporates are adopting a wait-and-see attitude and nobody is exactly sure how a buck will be turned. South Africans don’t, as a rule, pay for content they can get for free, so the model would have to rely heavily on advertising. Which advertiser is prepared to test the club rugby water first, rather than staying with conventional forms of print and electronic media?
Let’s look at it from a slightly different angle. The latest SA Rugby and department of sport club rugby audit lists 1,160 rugby clubs across the land. These range from Boiling Water RFC in Keiskammahoek to the Wild Geese in Richmond in the Northern Cape and the Peruvians in Boegoeberg.
The audit tells us that it’s very much a platteland game, with the biggest provinces being the Eastern Cape, Border, Boland, the Western Cape and South Western Districts. Streaming is wonderful for clubs in these communities because it brings them closer to the world “out there”. It reinforces club identity. And it engenders a sense of community in often apparently hopeless nooks and crannies of the land.
It’s also free, providing a service that — you might argue — should really be provided by the public broadcaster, the SABC. That’s assuming, of course, that the SABC was functional.
We shouldn’t, however, assume streaming’s ubiquity. The Sutherland Kudus, who play in the Upper Karoo & Hantam subregion of the Griquas Rugby Union, can’t afford streaming. Their problems are more immediate, like dealing with stones on their grassless pitch at Sutherland High. Or coping with the fact that their community has been ravaged by fetal alcohol syndrome, which affects some of their players.
“But we go on,” says Elizabeth Hendricks, the club’s first woman chair. “What else can we do? Rugby is such a thing for us here in the Karoo.”
This aside, there’s a vitality to streaming. It has a youthful flavour that is impossible to ignore. From a consumer’s point of view, things are cheap. It cost only R20 to get into the False Bay vs Schotsche Kloof Walmers game (under-18s gained access for free), and comment and give-and-take afterwards if you watched the streamed product on YouTube (or extracts on TikTok) were free.
If the digital natives are picking up the ball and running with it so obviously, surely it’s incumbent on the fuddy-duddy older folk to join the grassroots revolution? Failing that, they can precipitate the move towards the commercial try line by giving the club game a big eight-man shove.
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