LaLiga Expands Into South Africa With New Girls’ Football League

LaLiga has expanded its footprint into South Africa with the launch of the Mzansi Equality League, a six-week girls’ five-a-side tournament set to take place annually in Cape Town.

The project is an extension of La Ligue D’Egalité – a collaboration between Fundación LaLiga and Petrichor that started in Cameroon in 2022 and subsequently expanded into Kenya – which partners with development organisations to create tournaments in underserved communities.

Around 100 girls across five clubs are participating in the Mzansi Equality League at U13 and U16 levels. The tournament is thus significantly smaller than its counterparts in Cameroon (featuring around 600 girls) and Kenya (around 400). In Cameroon, the tournament runs for four months – around three times as long as the South African version.

Petrichor president Paul Dreisbach told ESPN: “For this one, we’re starting small. It’s a pilot project, so we’re working with five local clubs in the Cape Town area.

All of them are sports development organisations.

“They use sport as a way to reach underserved or low-income communities – using sport as a tool to teach leadership, safety, education – lots of different skills along with football.”

LaLiga Africa managing director Trésor Penku confirmed that the Mzansi Equality League was not founded with the intention of preparing girls to become elite players, but rather to promote football as a community-building tool.

However, LaLiga has separately worked to find top talents in South Africa to bolster its academy, Penku said: “We have been very active in South Africa. We had camps also in the past. We have programs where we took two young girls to Spain – they stayed for one year on a scholarship at the LaLiga Academy. That was [based on their] performance.”

Penku added that young players have gone to the academy from other African countries, too, such as Nigeria and Tanzania. LaLiga has opened several academies around the world since the first one opened in Dubai in 2017.

Penku continued” “We always say, and it’s important for us to get this message through: We’re not calling it a performance league… We have had success stories where we have had young girls who have gone on and graced their national teams, but the idea is not to get to the purely performance talent. The idea is to engage young girls.”

One of the five clubs invited to the inaugural Mzansi Equality League was from Oasis Reach for Your Dreams, a non-profit organisation (NPO) which previously sent a men’s team to the Homeless World Cup and finished fifth out of 74 countries.