The R20 million South African football received from government to implement VAR? Not even close to enough. Safa CEO Lydia Monyepao has confirmed the full three-year rollout will cost at least R50 million — and that figure doesn't even include what the Premier Soccer League will need to cover daily operations across 240 matches and playoffs.
Monyepao was speaking at a joint briefing with the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture (DSAC) in Pretoria, where Safa was essentially asked to explain itself. The R20 million has been sitting untouched since April — it's now grown to R20.5 million in interest — because, as Monyepao outlined, several regulatory steps need clearing before a single VAR camera goes live.
A three-year plan that nobody fully priced
The roadmap breaks down like this: year one covers procurement of equipment, including mobile broadcast vehicles, insurance, and connectivity. Year two shifts to referee training, with Safa consulting Cosafa after noticing the regional body was already further along. The R20 million was only ever meant to fund year one of that cycle.
"The budget that we submitted to DSAC was a three-year budget," Monyepao said. "The first budget was R20 million... but the total budget was R50 million."
Then comes the caveat that makes the R50 million figure feel almost optimistic. The PSL — the body that actually runs the matches VAR would be used in — wasn't at the press conference, and hasn't yet calculated its own operational costs. Monyepao was upfront about it: "We don't know yet, from a logistical point of view covering 240 matches and playoffs, how much that will cost."
The tender hasn't been awarded either, though bids have been received and the PSL has submitted recommendations.
What this means for South African football's credibility
South African football has watched continental rivals inch closer to VAR implementation while the conversation here stays stuck in budget meetings. For a league trying to attract serious investment and quality foreign players, the absence of VAR is increasingly a marker of where the PSL sits in the pecking order — and that perception has real consequences for the league's commercial appeal.
Any odds on VAR arriving before the 2026 World Cup on home soil would have been generous. Right now, with procurement still unresolved and PSL costs unquantified, that timeline looks even tighter than the budget.
"The PSL has raised that concern, and we will engage them," Monyepao said. After years of delay, that sentence is doing a lot of work.
