South Africa’s ‘soccer grannies’ take the field for kicks and camaraderie
| Polokwane, South Africa
The shot is low and hard, grazing the keeper’s fingertips before the ball slots neatly into the back of the net. Cheers erupt from the sidelines, and a vuvuzela sounds its long, gooselike honk. The goal-scorer’s teammates pull her into a sweaty, euphoric group hug.
The scene could be from just about any recent rec soccer game in South Africa, except for one thing. Every player on the field is eligible for a senior discount. A few are in grasping distance of age 80.
Off the field, many of the women have extraordinarily challenging lives, heading families shredded by poverty, addiction, and AIDS.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onOlder women in South Africa are often overlooked. Beka Ntsanwisi brings them together to care for themselves and their soccer teammates.
But on the field, they are simply athletes, sprinting for a breakaway, faking out the keeper, punching a throw-in out of the air with their forehead.
“You go home too tired to remember why you were stressed,” says Selina Malungana, who took up soccer two years ago at age 70.
This league is the brainchild of Beka Ntsanwisi, a former gospel radio DJ who has dedicated much of her life to an unlikely cause. She wants to coax women in their golden years onto the soccer field.
“Who would think to do something crazy like that?” Ms. Malungana asks. “But it was a very good idea.”
Lightening the load
The idea for a soccer league for older women took shape in the early 2000s. At the time, AIDS was tearing through this part of northern South Africa, ferociously but quietly. “No one wanted to speak about it,” Ms. Ntsanwisi remembers.
She wanted to change that, so she began encouraging listeners of her popular radio show to call in and share their stories about HIV.
What she heard upset her. In particular, she was troubled by the silent struggle of many older women, who had watched their adult children die in front of their eyes, and were now raising their orphaned grandchildren. They were caring for the entire society, Ms. Ntsanwisi thought, but who was looking out for them?
The idea to lighten the load with soccer came by chance a few years later. In 2007, Ms. Ntsanwisi was recovering from cancer, and began going on slow walks with a few retired women from her neighborhood. One day, they walked past a soccer field where teenage boys were playing.
A ball rolled to one of the women’s feet. She swung at it and missed. The boys burst into laughter. Then the women did, too. Before Ms. Ntsanwisi knew it, the teenagers were showing them how to pass and dribble. The next morning, one of the women called Ms. Ntsanwisi. “I’ve never slept so well,” she says. “When can we play again?”
The request came at a fortuitous time. At the edge of Polokwane, a new soccer stadium was rising in preparation for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup. The country was soccer crazy, so the idea of a bunch of grannies starting a team of their own seemed right for the moment. Ms. Ntsanwisi drummed up some sponsors, and the ball, quite literally, got rolling.
Kitting up for their World Cup
Soon, players from Vakhegula Vakhegula FC – which translates to Grandmothers Grandmothers Football Club – were traveling the world as ambassadors for older women in sports. Over the next few years, representatives from the club played in the United States, Brazil, and France. There, they found other leagues like theirs, an international community of women for whom age was no obstacle to playing. But the club’s greatest achievements were closer to home.
The league spread to dozens of neighborhoods and villages across the region, with new players learning about it largely by word of mouth.
“I heard people say you will be healthier if you play soccer,” says Tsatsawani Mashana, who joined a team in 2016 at age 92. Her coach assigned her to the role of defender, she says, “because striker is a position for the young ladies” – that is, the 60-year-olds.
Like Ms. Mashana, most of the women who kit up for Vakhegula Vakhegula are playing for a sports team for the first time in their lives. “When I was growing up, girls playing sports was illegal, culturally speaking,” says Salome Modipane.
She remembers sneaking pickup soccer games with her brothers and their friends while their mother was out tending to their cornfields or collecting wood. It would be five decades more before she found a league of her own, slide-tackling her fellow pensioners instead of her kid brothers.
“Soccer takes your whole body and mind,” she says. “The game takes care of you.”
And the women took care of each other, something that few had experienced before.
“Many people don’t see grannies as people anymore. It’s like we have discarded them,” says Mabasa Vembe, a local undertaker who sponsors a number of teams for older women near his home. “Watching them play is a source of such joy.”
In 2023, Ms. Ntsanwisi organized a tournament called Grannies International Football Tournament, or GIFT. It became better known as the Grannies World Cup. For a week, teams from a dozen countries descended on Tzaneen, the sleepy farming town near Polokwane where Ms. Ntsanwisi grew up. Throngs of fans gathered on the street to cheer the teams as they paraded into a local stadium behind their country flags.
Ms. Ntsanwisi had invited many of the teams on the promise that, once they got to Tzaneen, she would cover their room and board. But she wasn’t able to collect enough donations via her foundation to do that. So she began footing the bills herself.
“We are Africans, so we will always share, but it was difficult,” says Khensani Ntsanwisi, Beka’s daughter. By the time the champions from the U.S. were crowned, Beka Ntsanwisi was deeply in debt. But she did not quit. She organized another edition of the tournament this past April.
Before that tournament, several teams from the Polokwane area are gathered for a series of practice games. On the field, the mood is serious. Players are being chosen for Polokwane’s World Cup squad, and nerves are running high.
But off the pitch, players from opposing squads sling their arms over each other’s shoulders, giggling as they share water bottles and snap selfies in the bleachers.
Pleasure Maapola, who came to cheer on her mother, marvels at the women’s easy camaraderie.
“It’s therapeutic, being together like this,” she says. “It encourages us young people, too. You think, ‘If these old ladies can do this, why not me, too?’”
