Lebogang 'Guluva' Mashishi has traded his soccer boots for the boardroom, where he has pursued a career in player management. Unlike his peers, the young agent has taken a particular focus on moving South African players to Europe's lower leagues and in this conversation with Soccer Laduma, he explains why.
Why I am in player management:
I was struggling with getting my clearance from Chiefs and things like that, you know. I just had two ACL knee operations and I was still recovering from that as well. So we managed to organize trials in France's seventh division where I could just start from the from the very bottom. You. So I went over and played for a couple of months and then I got an offer to play in the 5th Division, thereafter the fourth division up until the third division. So I stayed in France for 3 and a half years and in the three and half years I also went over to Germany where I played for a club in the fourth Division, which is the Regional league in Germany. I saw a gap in South Africa where most of my friends that I grew up with Academy or some of them were playing for SuperSport, School of Excellence and Sundowns all those academies. And so I realized that most of them were without clubs and being my age, they were looking at exploring opportunities outside the borders of South Africa. I told Nimrod [Mbalati] about it and we decided to start a management company because at the time he had just left Jomo Cosmos. He also had a good network of players you know. So we started this thing together.
What I look for in a player:
Firstly, it depends on the age of the player. So if I'm looking for a young player, so obviously I cannot expect to get the same thing from a mature player who's been around. So if the player is between the ages of. Let's say 15 to 19 you can't expect them to be having professional experience. Of course, there are exceptions, but 95% of them don't have professional experience at that age. So if it's a young player, all I'm looking for is the potential. Since I'm dealing with international market, so I look at the physical stature of the player, it counts because well generally in South Africa most players are physically disadvantaged. When you get to Europe,17 year olds have got the physical attributes to compete at the highest level. In South Africa it's very difficult to find a 17-year-old who can immediately walk into the first team. For a more mature player, I just look at the profile where he has played, where he's currently playing, cause they're easier to work with if they have played in a professional environment locally before you take them overseas because if you're bringing a 26 year old in Europe, who has never played in a professional environment in South Africa. The first question they will ask you is 'if he's that good, why was he not a professional in his own country, you know. Cause cause in Europe the numbers game is everything to them. So at 26, you're supposed to be a seasoned professional and maybe having like, six or five seasons under your belt.
A deal that almost happened:
Yeah, beside the Siyanda Xulu deal that we eventually got over the bridge recently in Azerbaijan, there's two that are very close to my heart and I thought they would not only change my life, but the life of the players themselves. A player called Happy Mashau, whom I got immediately after Royal Eagles got relegated from the National First Division. So I took him to Kosovo in the Premier League, to one of the best selling clubs in Kosovo in Europe. His first season was amazing, which caught the eye of clubs in Scotland and in Belgium First Division in Belgium. So we were so close in doing the deal and completing the deal, but because of COVID-19 regulations, Happy hadn't been home for over a year, so he wanted to come home. But the issue was with him coming home and not going to Scotland or to Belgium directly, it was going to jeopardize the deal because remember, South Africa was one of the hotspots in the world. So for him to come back home, it was going to jeopardize everything. It was going to take longer for him to get a visa to go that side instead of him moving directly from Kosovo to Scotland. So he chose to come home and when he got home, he couldn't get out of the country at the time. So that is the first one. That deal was worth thousands of pounds, which if you convert it to Rand, was in the region of millions.
The most difficult transfer:
Siyanda Xulu. There's contributing factors to why I'm choosing this one, because if you remember Siyanda had left the Israeli league due to some circumstances there, he had terminated his contract before it ended. He came back to SA as a free agent in the middle of the season and nobody wanted to take him on board. So basically, he had stayed without a club, without competitive football for about seven months in South Africa. So with a player like him, he's got a good profile. But you know how European teams are, they believe the longer you stay without a club, it means there's something wrong with the player, either physically, or there could be other issues in terms of behaviour. So clubs become very skeptical when you could negotiate with them. They would rather have the player come on trial so that they can see the player's conditioning and all those things and they can study the player's behaviour. But with Siyanda, because of his good profile and that he was part of the national team, he was only out of the national team because he was without a club. Because of his profile, we wanted a direct deal, but nobody was willing to take the risk because to them it meant that there's something wrong with the player. Maybe he's got a niggling injury, or the player is just a bad human being. If you think about it, he's in the twilight of his career now so it was very, very hard to convince clubs to really take him on board and give us a good offer, which would give him what he really desired at the time, but he understood that he couldn't just walk into any club and earn the same money was earning in Israel or even better. So I think that was the most complicated one and we managed to suck out every, every, every little cent that they had left because he was eventually the last signing that the club had out of their budget. They decided to take the risk because of the convincing work that we had to do behind the scenes to say no, take a risk.
Regrets as an agent:
I am a young entity in this game myself and Nimrod. We're still trying to find our feet and understand the dynamics of how everything works, though he does a lot of deals in the country. I do quite a number of deals internationally, even though it's not with the big clubs or in the big leagues, but we're still trying to find our feet. So, for us right now, there cannot even be a regret. It's just a learning experience. It's a learning journey and we are enjoying every single moment of it. There's ups and downs, yes. We fail, we succeed, but that's part of the learning process and we're enjoying every moment. So, for now, no regret at all.
