Cape Town Spurs have slammed the decision of the Premier Soccer League dispute resolution chamber (DRC) to declare young talent Asanele Velebayi a free agent.
The 22-year-old winger is free to join a team of his choice after the DRC ruled in his favour that his contract with Spurs is unvalid since Spurs were relegated to the ABC Motsepe League, which is an amateur league.
Spurs have released a long statement arguing the decision sets a bad precedent for South African football, especially at the grassroots level.
“While on the surface it appears to be a victory for player freedom, the ruling is a legal and logical catastrophe—one built on contradictory reasoning and a willful ignorance of contractual law,” said Spurs.
“More alarmingly, it has fired a fatal shot into the heart of football development, threatening to make long-term investment in young talent an unsustainable and, ultimately, pointless endeavour.
“The premise of the case was simple: Spurs were relegated, and players like Velebayi, Liam Bern, and Luke Baartman (all of whom came through the Spurs academy over a combined period of 30 years) argued this fundamentally changed their employment, entitling them to walk away from their contracts. Spurs, a club with a three-decade legacy of nurturing talent, stood firm on the legal principle of pacta sunt servanda: a contract is a contract. The club sent letters to the players insisting their contracts remained valid and binding.
“The DRC panel, in its wisdom, sided with the player (Velebayi). But the path it took to get there was not one of sound legal principle but of baffling self-contradiction. In its award, the panel first agrees with a previous ruling (Mokhari SC) that relegation does not automatically grant free agency. Then, in a stunning reversal just paragraphs later, it declares that the “ordinary grammatical meaning” of the rules means relegation alone is enough.
“This is not just poor reasoning; it is a gross, reviewable error that creates crippling uncertainty. How can clubs operate when a dispute body cannot even maintain a consistent legal argument within a single judgment?
“But the true devastation of this award lies not in its flawed legal gymnastics but in its complete disregard for the economic realities of football. Cape Town Spurs is not merely a team; it is one of the nation’s premier development institutions. For over 30 years, it has identified, coached, educated, and nurtured young boys into professional men. This is a long, arduous, and incredibly expensive process.
“According to figures verified by the club’s auditors, the input cost for a single player who has been in the academy for 10 years is a minimum of R8,000,000. This staggering sum covers coaching, facilities, travel, education, and welfare. The training compensation fees a club might receive when an academy player signs their first professional contract cover less than 5% of this monumental investment.
“The entire business model, therefore, relies on the sanctity of that first professional contract. It is the club’s only mechanism to protect its investment and, hopefully, generate a future transfer fee that can be reinvested back into the next generation of youngsters. This award rips that model to shreds,” wrote Spurs.
“It tells every development club in the country that their investment is worthless. It signals that a player, nurtured for a decade at immense cost, can simply walk away the moment adversity strikes, leaving the club with nothing but millions in losses. The contracts designed to protect this investment have been rendered meaningless by a panel that failed to even acknowledge their most critical clauses—such as the explicit term in players’ contracts stating they are “not terminable on notice.”
“The fallout is immediate and catastrophic. The contracts of the remaining 15 players at Spurs are now in jeopardy, their futures and those of their families thrown into chaos by a ruling that was meant to protect one player but has instead endangered an entire squad.”
Spurs have hinted they may appeal through the SA Football Association (SAFA) arbitration.
“This is not a victory for players. It is a victory for agents and clubs who wish to acquire talent without paying for its development. The ultimate loser is South African football itself. Today, football development is worse off. And unless this disastrous award is reviewed and overturned, it will stand as a tombstone for the very academies that are the lifeblood of the beautiful game in this country.”
