South Africa women's coach Desiree Ellis has called on authorities to expedite their efforts in a bid to start a professional women's league to help her team compete better on the international stage.
This follows Banyana Banyana's exit from the ongoing 2023 Women's World Cup after falling to the Netherlands in a 2-0 defeat on Sunday
Speaking after the game Ellis said she was looking forward to massive investment into women's football in South Africa which could better their chances in such competitions in the future.
“I don’t want to go into that but if I were to look even further than that I think we need a professional league,” the coach said.
“I think that’s absolutely essential. To have an amateur league back home and the players to come out and perform at this level against countries [whose players] play week in week out, month in month out against the top [club] teams in the world shows we have talent.
“We have urged everybody on the African continent to assist [starting pro leagues]. We had three out of four African countries qualify for the last 16.
“We know that whatever happened back home [in the dispute with Safa] should have happened much earlier and things would have been sorted. And I’m sure a lot of lessons were learnt from that.”
Meanwhile, their fellow Africans Nigeria bowed out on Monday after a defeat to England on penalties after a goalless 120 minutes in the round of 16.