South Africa Coach Agrees With Benni McCarthy On Key ‘Disadvantage’ After AFCON Failure

South Africa coach Hugo Broos has shared Benni McCarthy’s opinion over the lack of players in top European leagues hurting the national team following their early AFCON exit.

Harambee Stars coach Benni McCarthy has always been critical of South African players for not wanting to test themselves abroad and that sense of comfort seems to be catching up with them.

The South African league is one of the most lucrative in Africa and most players are happy to play at home until they retire, something McCarthy has never agreed with.

"South Africa is an extremely talented country with players who pop up from everywhere, but their ambition is very low," McCarthy said on NTV last year.

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"They don’t want to move because they are in their comfort zone, and for me, that is underselling yourself because to be the best, you have to play against the best."

With that, South Africa were the team that had the most local-based players at the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations with 17 of the 25 selected by head coach Hugo Broos playing in the Premier Soccer League (PSL).

Broos Identifies Bafana’s Biggest Disadvantage

However, while they impressed at the 2023 edition and finished third, 2025 has been different as they were knocked out at the Round of 16 by Cameroon, with teams loaded with European-based players making it to the quarter-final this time around.

Following their early exit, Broos agrees that not having many players playing in top leagues in Europe is hurting the national team.

“You know as a national team you can do little on that because when you see all those teams that you mentioned now [in the quarter-final] those are teams who have players playing in Europe,” Broos told Newzroom as quoted by Afrik-Foot.

“We don’t have them, that is a disadvantage for South Africa even when you play against Angola, you play against players playing in Europe.

“I don’t speak about Cameroon. Cameroon have a brand-new team because they changed everything. When you see those players when they are playing, there’s a guy the striker [Christian] Kofane, he is playing for [Bayer] Leverkusen.”

What Must South Africa Do Going Forward?

Broos says the PSL is giving South Africans a false sense of pride and comfort yet its level is low and the results are what was witnessed in Morocco.

“I said from the beginning that the level of PSL compared to the level that we’ve had in the last weeks is very big,” he added.

“You can only make that gap smaller when you have players that are playing in very difficult competitions so let’s hope that players in the future are having more opportunities to go to Europe and to play in very difficult competitions and have those challenges because that should help the team.”

From South Africa’s AFCON 2025 squad, only Burnley striker Lyle Foster plays in one of the top five leagues in Europe with the other foreign-based players turning up for clubs in Romania, Portugal, Norway and Saudi Arabia.