Asanele Velebayi, a midfielder for Cape Town Spurs, is now a free agent after a resolution was reached regarding a dispute in the Premier Soccer League, and the club has voiced its dissatisfaction with the result.
The 22-year-old former Ajax Cape Town youth player made the step up to the Spurs senior side in 2020.
He went on to play 33 times for the relegated Motsepe Foundation Championship side.
Kaizer Chiefs were interested in signing both Velebayi and Luke Baartman and had hoped to sign the players for free as the club dropped into the ABC Motsepe League.
But Spurs took the matter to a PSL DC, arguing that they were entitled to a transfer fee. With this ruling, Velebayi is now able to join the Betway Premiership side, but it remains unclear as to the status of Baartman.
PSL DRC chairperson Mosupi Mashele said in a statement: “The application is heard on an urgent basis in terms of clause 45.5.
“The applicant is declared a free agent. The counter-application is dismissed since the applicant succeeded.”
Spurs expressed shock at the outcome, calling it a catastrophe. “While on the surface it appears to be a victory for player freedom, the ruling is a legal and logical catastrophe—one built on contradictory reasoning and a wilful ignorance of contractual law.
“More alarmingly, it has fired a fatal shot into the heart of football development, threatening to make long-term investment in young talent an unsustainable, and ultimately pointless, endeavour,” reads a statement by Spurs.
Read the Full statement:
In a decision that has sent shockwaves through the South African football community, a National Soccer League (NSL) Dispute Resolution Chamber (DRC) (Panel Members: Mosupi Mashele (Chairperson), Amanda Vilakazi and Adv. Saleem Seedat) has declared Cape Town Spurs player Asanele Velebayi a free agent following the club’s relegation. While on the surface it appears to be a victory for player freedom, the ruling is a legal and logical catastrophe—one built on contradictory reasoning and a wilful ignorance of contractual law. More alarmingly, it has fired a fatal shot into the heart of football development, threatening to make long-term investment in young talent an unsustainable, and ultimately pointless, endeavour.
The premise of the case was simple: Spurs were relegated, and players like Velebayi, Liam Bern, and Luke Baartman (all of which came through the Spurs academy over a combined period of 30 years) argued this fundamentally changed their employment, entitling them to walk away from their contracts. Spurs, a club with a three-decade legacy of nurturing talent, stood firm on the legal principle of pacta sunt servanda: a contract is a contract. The club sent letters to the players insisting their contracts remained valid and binding.
The DRC panel, in its wisdom, sided with the player. But the path it took to get there was not one of sound legal principle, but of baffling self-contradiction. In its award, the panel first agrees with a previous ruling (Mokhari SC) that relegation does not automatically grant free agency. Then, in a stunning reversal just paragraphs later, it declares that the “ordinary grammatical meaning” of the rules means relegation alone is enough.
This is not just poor reasoning; it is a gross, reviewable error that creates crippling uncertainty. How can clubs operate when a dispute body cannot even maintain a consistent legal argument within a single judgment?
But the true devastation of this award lies not in its flawed legal gymnastics, but in its complete disregard for the economic realities of football. Cape Town Spurs is not merely a team; it is one of the nation’s premier development institutions. For over 30 years, it has identified, coached, educated, and nurtured young boys into professional men. This is a long, arduous, and incredibly expensive process.
According to figures verified by the club’s auditors, the input cost for a single player who has been in the academy for 10 years is a minimum of R8,000,000. This staggering sum covers coaching, facilities, travel, education, and welfare. The training compensation fees a club might receive when an academy player signs their first professional contract covers less than 5% of this monumental investment.
The entire business model, therefore, relies on the sanctity of that first professional contract. It is the club’s only mechanism to protect its investment and, hopefully, generate a future transfer fee that can be reinvested back into the next generation of youngsters.
This award rips that model to shreds.
It tells every development club in the country that their investment is worthless. It signals that a player, nurtured for a decade at immense cost, can simply walk away the moment adversity strikes, leaving the club with nothing but millions in losses. The contracts designed to protect this investment have been rendered meaningless by a panel that failed to even acknowledge their most critical clauses—such as the explicit term in players’ contracts stating they are “not terminable on notice.”
The fallout is immediate and catastrophic. The contracts of the remaining 15 players at Spurs are now in jeopardy, their futures and those of their families thrown into chaos by a ruling that was meant to protect one player but has instead endangered an entire squad.
Furthermore, the case reeks of the insidious influence of “tapping up”—the illegal approaching of contracted players. Some of the players’ own letters admit they had “secured employment” elsewhere before their contracts were terminated. This is a flagrant violation of football regulations. Yet, instead of sanctioning this behaviour, the DRC award has effectively rewarded it. It has given a green light to agents and rival clubs to prey on the players of any team facing the hardship of relegation, knowing that a flawed legal precedent now exists to validate their exit.
In a statement, Spurs CEO Alexi Efstathiou expressed concern that the young players had been “misled or unduly influenced,” reaffirming the club’s commitment to handling the matter through the proper channels to protect its rights and the integrity of the sport. “We would never accuse someone with no evidence, as it would be irresponsible and unprofessional,” Efstathiou later stated, clarifying that any miscommunication was not an accusation of wrongdoing against any specific club. He emphasized that the club’s stance is based on principle, stating, “We know what the player is valued at, he has a contract with our club and that needs to be respected no matter the club.”
The situation is made more mysterious and suspicious by the delay in the Luke Baartman award, which has not been delivered 21 days after his hearing on July 21, 2025. This pre-dates the Velebayi hearing on 4th August, 2025, and the lack of a verdict raises serious questions about the consistency and fairness of the dispute resolution process. The prolonged silence is inexplicable, fuelling concerns about whether administrative issues or other factors are influencing the outcome. Baartman’s ruling ,when given, will certainly raise eyebrows if Spurs go on to lose that case as they will rightly argue that they have been seriously prejudiced by the long delay in the outcome of that case due to the Velebayi ruling.
“We will ascertain after consulting with the legal team the possibility of arbitration and appeal,” Efstathiou has said, indicating the club is not ready to give up the fight. “In the meantime, that will depend on the Baartman case and also the yet to be heard Bern case.”
The message this ruling sends is chilling and unambiguous: Do not invest in youth.
Why would any club pour millions into a ten-year development project when the resulting “asset” can vanish overnight, with the backing of an official dispute body? Why build for the future when the rules reward short-term opportunism?
This is not a victory for players. It is a victory for agents and clubs who wish to acquire talent without paying for its development. The ultimate loser is South African football itself. Today, football development is worse off. And unless this disastrous award is reviewed and overturned, it will stand as a tombstone for the very academies that are the lifeblood of the beautiful game in this country.