Under the unforgiving glare of the Western Cape sky, dazzling even on an overcast September day like a cold grey spotlight, a frenetic game of kick volleyball is poised at 9-8. On a humble practice pitch near the imperious Cape Town Stadium, the players cajole their effervescent talisman as he skews his ambitious scissor kick just outside the line. This is Benni McCarthy, one of the finest footballing talents the continent has ever produced, and the new manager of Cape Town City FC.
We’re minutes from a Monday afternoon City FC press conference, and McCarthy is wrapping up training with a light-hearted warm-down. He has just led his team to the MTN8 cup final by beating Wits, the reigning league champions (Cape Town City FC lost in the final to Supersport United, a team coached by McCarthy&#8217;s former teammate Eric Tinkler). Wits are managed by Gavin Hunt, McCarthy’s coach two decades earlier at Seven Stars, where the 17-year-old striker began his playing career. McCarthy is unbeaten after a fifth win in succession since the start of the season. Spirits are high. Squad players relax with a PlayStation game as a posse of journalists assemble in an ante-room next to the main arena. It’s an unusually big attendance for a press conference for a South African Premier Soccer League (PSL) side – but this is an unusual club.
It is not, however, a new club per se. City FC is more a bold reimagining of an idea that until now has never had the chance to coalesce. Under apartheid, Cape Town football was fractured; white sides such as Hellenic and the original Cape Town City gave way in influence to Seven Stars and Cape Town Spurs, with the former committed to recruitment from the black townships and the latter to giving the city’s talented colored players a platform of their own. These merged to form Ajax Cape Town, daughter team to the legendary Amsterdam club. Down the years, support was spread thinly over myriad reboots; Ajax flew the flag, but the foot soldiers were restless.
In 2016, sensing an opportunity, businessman and former footballer John Comitis, one of the founding members of Ajax Cape Town, purchased the 80-year-old Mpumalanga Black Aces franchise, relocating it a thousand miles south west to the Western Cape. Comitis had sold his stake in Ajax after irreconcilable differences with the other major local shareholder, but understood that a new top-flight club could be free of the baggage of its closest rival. Ajax had struggled to lure away loyal black fans from their preferred township clubs of Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns, and some felt alienated by an adherence to a Dutch playing methodology that was ill-suited to the local footballing culture.
Cape Town City FC was born – and thrived in its first season under coach Eric Tinkler, winning the Telkom Cup and finishing an admirable third in the PSL. When Tinkler was controversially poached by Supersport United in June, Comitis looked to a man who had no interest in managing any club for at least another year.
“When the phone call came, I said no,” says McCarthy. “I’m doing my pro license in Ireland, and then now this, how am I going to juggle the two?” He’s relaxed and funny one-on-one, after a probing press conference that has flattered his current record while looking to tease out tactical revelations about a gigantic home game in two days against Kaizer Chiefs. “So I said ‘nah, I’m not ready, and I want to complete my course’, and I stuck to my guns… but John Comitis is a very persistent man. He knew just what to say, and he had everything covered.”
“I met Benni when he was 16,” says Comitis. “I took him on loan to Cape Town Spurs, which I owned at the time, and I assisted him in going to Ajax Amsterdam. I’ve given him his first PSL coaching job now. And at 39 there is nothing I could explain to Benni about the game that he would not already know from first-hand experience. My son Michel, who is our Commercial Director, kept insisting he was the right fit for the club’s ethos and growth.”
<div id="attachment_34839" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34839" class=" wp-image-34839" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Benni-McCarthy-8-by-Jigga-Thomas-e1513328101585-300x200.jpg" alt="Benni McCarthy Cape Town FC" width="500" height="333" />Benni McCarthy on the sidelines during a match (Photo by Jigga Thomas)</div>
This ethos is front and center on the club’s website, with its exhortation of a liberal vision: “We’re for every religion and lifestyle choice. We’re for everyone with a voice. We’re for every color, race and creed.” The DreamClub 100 outreach program is also a priority, particularly in the deprived areas that may secretly harbour the next nascent superstar.
It was in one of these districts, the notorious Hanover Park gang stronghold in the Cape Flats, that a raw teenage McCarthy first learned his trade in the early 90s. A quick and skilful goalscoring winger, he played in day-long Sunday tournaments organized and financed by local gangsters.
“I made more money playing in that league than I was earning playing for Seven Stars,” he laughs.  “If you reach the final you’ve played five matches in the space of a day. But that was the adrenalin. You didn’t even feel it.”
This rite of passage, playing against intimidating grown men, was instrumental in his development.
“They kick the living daylights out of you, so you toughen up,” he remembers. “I was way ahead, physically, of the rest of the kids. So now you go from there, to your own age group, it’s a piece of cake man! With a little kick I’d be like, ‘How old are you? When you kick me, kick me properly!’ But yes, it was tough growing up in those neighborhoods because most kids… you’ll be lucky if you live past 20.”
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McCarthy’s rise from feisty street talent to top-flight elite was swift. Seven Stars’ merger with Ajax Cape Town opened the door to Ajax Amsterdam, where he tasted title success in his first season. After struggling to hold down a place at La Liga’s Celta Vigo, he converted productive loan spells at Porto into a permanent transfer, and a pivotal mentorship under a zealous young coach called Jose Mourinho.
He turns on the disarming McCarthy charm, giggling behind his jacket like a pantomime villain, as he admits to borrowing a little from the master’s philosophy.
“Mourinho was very meticulous, and his players know exactly what to do,” he says. “I love that about him. You’re set up to annihilate your opponents. You frustrate them, and then when they’re most vulnerable, you go for the jugular.”
McCarthy demonstrated a comparable ruthlessness by dispatching his boyhood idols Manchester United with a brace in the 2004 Champions League last 16 match. Porto would go on to win the competition, with McCarthy a second-half substitute in the final. He would later play for Blackburn Rovers under another of his heroes, Mark Hughes, before finishing his playing career back in South Africa; despite a fractious and combative relationship with the national team set-up, he remains Bafana Bafana’s record goalscorer. And his disruptive charisma is demanding attention all over again.
It’s Wednesday evening, and match-day traffic heading to the Chiefs game has slowed to a treacle of irritated klaxons and bass-confident car radios. Cape Town Stadium, a beautiful alabaster scallop on the northern Green Point tip of the Cape, is one of five new stadia built for the 2010 World Cup. Shared with Ajax, it can hold 55,000; tonight it will be half-full, a remarkable turnout for a weekday league game. Most of these fans, however, will be supporting Kaizer Chiefs. It’s an unsatisfactory state of affairs for a club with an appetite for long-term success.
“We can no longer operate like gypsies in our own backyard,” says Comitis. “The fundamental foundation of a football club is its home.”
<div id="attachment_34840" style="width: 511px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34840" class=" wp-image-34840" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cape-Town-City-fans-at-Cape-Town-Stadium-by-Jigga-Thomas-e1513328374985-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="501" height="332" />Fans at Cape Town Stadium (Photo by Jigga Thomas)</div>
He insists that a variety of 10,000-seater options are being actively explored.
In a breathless match of mistakes and counter-punches, it’s Chiefs who gratefully snatch their first win of the season. There’s a strange atmosphere in the chilly stadium, as an animated McCarthy prowls the touchline; Chiefs fans, resplendent in feather headdresses, provide most of the energy in the stands with their songs and synchronized hip-swivelling. In contrast, it’s clear that City FC’s embryonic identity is still developing – their nickname ‘The Citizens’ is yet to find expression in costumes or plush toy merchandise.
“Rome was not built in a day,” says Comitis.
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It’s hard not to feel affection for the inclusivity Comitis is trying to engender. Every interaction with the club, from the owner, to the manager, to the communications team, is gracious and accommodating.
“That ethos runs through every aspect of the club’s growth ,” he says. “In the dressing room, among the staff, with our fans, with the corporate world in Cape Town, and the city itself – a project this size cannot exclude any of these stakeholders if it wants to succeed.”
It’s a club that’s reaching far, with a warm Cape wind of goodwill at its back. “When you stand on the side there, and you see that it’s happening… Just the joy that comes within me,” McCarthy says. “Because to see that…wow.”
He leans back and looks skyward. “It’s actually working.” &#8211; Written by Alastair Hagger

Ruthless? You Can Bet On Benni

When meeting Benni McCarthy for the first time, it is hard not to size him up. Firstly, he is larger than life and says what is on his mind. Secondly, his size has been open to cruel national debate.
Benni McCarthy’s weight has been the staple of comedians, talk shows and Monday morning office gossip along the lines of Benni in a cafeteria rather than the 18-yard area.
“I am now finding it easy to stay in shape,” he says. “The weight issue really came up when I was living and playing in Europe and experimenting with all kinds of food that was new to me. Most of it clearly didn’t agree with my metabolic system, which resulted in me packing on the pounds, but now I know what works and that is how I’m keeping the excess weight off,” he continues.
By now it has become clear that McCarthy lives his life as an open book. I had expected the weight question to go down like a triple cheeseburger—which it didn’t, and next he was taking us on a tour of his Parkwood mansion and making jokes about his current team’s coach and ruminating about his future.
“I think that I am fitting in well at Orlando Pirates. For me, coming back home was not necessarily because I had no other options—it was mostly for the purpose of giving back to the community that made me the international star that I became,” he says of his 14-year spell in international soccer.
“I am finding the level of discipline with the players to be of a lower quality here than at the clubs in Europe, though, and most times you find that a lot of players aren’t as dedicated or as excited to be on the field representing the country’s biggest teams. But the pace of the game and all the other technical elements are up there with the best worldwide,” he says.
McCarthy is the only South African football player to ever win the UEFA Champion’s League. His former team, FC Porto, won in 2004, thanks to his 20 goals in 23 matches, plus a golden hat-trick in the final. McCarthy had a strange career at Porto. He scored in 11 matches for FC Porto in 2002 and left them only because the club could no longer afford him. They bought him back for €8 million ($10.5 million) a year later and McCarthy went on to win the UEFA Golden Boot.
Besides his uncanny ability to find the back of the net, McCarthy’s list of achievements would make even the most jaded critic realize that he is the real deal. He was the first soccer player in the world to feature on the cover of TIME magazine; he still holds the record of international goals by a South African and is Bafana Bafana’s all-time top scorer with 31 goals for his country.
McCarthy’s time spent in Europe wasn’t all roses. As he reminisces, he tells a chilling tale of rabid racism among Spanish supporters.
“For quite a while, my skin color became the bane of my existence. There were times when some fans would throw banana peels onto the stadium as I went in, and I still remember very vividly how they used to also make monkey sounds when I walked onto the pitch,” says McCarthy.
After enduring the hatred for months, McCarthy came up with a technique to block out all the hatred.
“Whenever I would encounter racism off the field, I would always take out a wad of cash and either burn it or tear it up right in front of the perpetrators. That was my way of rubbing it into their faces: you hate me, yet you still come to my games, effectively making me richer,” McCarthy quips.
McCarthy does have money to burn. His home drips with it.
“Growing up in Hanover Park in the Cape Flats of Cape Town, I never knew that it was possible that I could achieve so much, and make the kind of money that I made just by kicking a ball around. I know what it is to be poor, and the fact that I do not want to return to that has made me very wise in the way I handle my finances,” explains McCarthy.
“There are too many stories about ex-footballers going back home and becoming dead broke. I understand the reason behind why that happens: you go overseas as a teenager, get access to more money than you ever thought possible in a very short time and it gets to your head. It also becomes very hard to resist the lure of the football star’s lifestyle, which famously entails hard partying, bling and lots of beautiful women with expensive tastes. Add to that the bad friends that surround you and the fact that there isn’t much financial education that was given to you before you found yourself in that position,” he says.
McCarthy maintains that his family, which consists of his mother, three daughters, a steady girlfriend from Scotland and a baby on the way, have kept him focused on making financial decisions that will ensure that everyone gets to keep the lifestyle that he has worked for.
“I have six properties in Europe, a couple of houses in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and I am in the process of starting a business as a property developer—focusing on building luxury apartments for the growing middle class,” he says.
The Maserati and Bentley parked in the front drive shows McCarthy isn’t always parsimonious.
“You know how it is with us guys and how we love our toys… I do admit that I have a serious weakness for sports cars, and I am a keen collector of top-of-the-range watches… so basically, I collect houses, sports cars and Rolexes,” he gushes.
If the rumor that he earns around R500,000 ($64,000) a month at Orlando Pirates is true, then McCarthy doesn’t have much to worry about.
“I hope to play for one or two more seasons, then retire from football for good. I have been very fortunate in that my career hasn’t been marred by injury or anything that I can’t handle, so I look forward to one day being on the level of my all-time icon, Jomo Sono,” he says.
Benni McCarthy may have come a long way from his roots in the Cape Flats, but he has not forgotten his roots or the ball artistry of one of his illustrious predecessors. Legend has it that Jomo Sono left his wedding reception to take the field for Pirates, who were losing, to score goals for victory. Surely, McCarthy would have done the same.

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