Oldest soccer club swaps assets with Premier United

By Mark Gleeson

Cape Town – SOUTH Africa’s oldest professional soccer club Hellenic have sold their premier league status to a first division club, but could make a quick return to the top flight in what appears an inspired piece of business.

Greek-owned Hellenic, one of the last clubs left over from the days of whites-only professional soccer in South Africa, have swapped assets with Premier United, a first division team based in Benoni, a dormitory town of Johannesburg and owned by a black family, in a deal worth R5-million.

Hellenic played their last game in Cape Town on Wednesday, drawing 2-2 with Lamontville Golden Arrows to remain firmly rooted to the bottom of the table.

Premier United will now take over Hellenic’s place in the top flight while Hellenic will get United’s berth in the first division.

League rules allow for the sale of a franchise during the season, but do not allow a change of club names until the season is completed. So Hellenic will remain in the top flight in name only, although their colours, personnel and home ground will all be totally different.

The new owners are taking a major gamble as the club sit seven points from a position of safety at the halfway point of the season, and are firm favourites to be relegated.

Premier United’s franchise, however, is among the front runners in the first division, six points off the leaders and with every chance of promotion in May.

It means Hellenic’s owners could well be back in the top flight in August, once the name changes are effected, while their previous franchise drops down a division.

Hellenic’s sale comes after years of dwindling spectator support and perennial battles against relegation, the club being victims of changing times in South African sport and society.

At their height in the 1960s and 1970s, the Cape Town club regularly attracted crowds of around 40 000 and had players like George Best, and England World Cup winners Gordon Banks and Bobby Moore guesting for them.

They were champions in 1971, the same year a rival black professional league was first created. But when the white and black leagues amalgamated in 1976, support for clubs like Hellenic dwindled dramatically as white supporters stayed away from mixed soccer.

All the country’s formerly white-only teams, who had established professional soccer in South Africa in 1958, are now extinct. The only survivor from the era of colour prejudice is Wits University, who were in the second division of the white league in 1975 before the racial barriers came down.

Soccer was one of the first sports to break down apartheid barriers, but it took another 16 years before the country was allowed back into international football following the end of white minority rule. – Reuters

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