Da Gama’s Future Uncertain, Meeting With Chairman Planned

Magesi coach Owen Da Gama remains uncertain about his future with the club, but he is scheduled to meet with chairman Solly Makhubela to discuss the team’s plans moving forward.

Da Gama joined the Limpopo-based outfit in December last year, succeeding Clinton Larsen, who had previously led them to victory in the Carling Black Label Cup.

The former Orlando Pirates coach played a pivotal role in helping Magesi avoid relegation from the Betway Premiership. They concluded their 2024/25 campaign on Wednesday with a stress-free 1-1 draw against Pirates.

Magesi finished the season in a respectable 12th position with 31 points, an encouraging achievement for their inaugural PSL season.

Da Gama confirmed that he, along with his technical team, will sit down with Makhubela to outline the club’s future direction.

When asked if he had any assurance from the chairman regarding his retention, especially given the common tendency in South African football for coaches to be let go after successfully avoiding relegation, Da Gama responded:

“I think, you know, it’s a new team in the PSL, it’s their first team. There’s a lot of stuff that the team still has to learn and put together. So we’re having a meeting on Thursday morning and we’ll know what the future holds,” he said.

“I asked him if we can just focus on the last game, and then after that, we can sit down with the technical team and with the management, and we can sit down and hear his views, what he would like to do, and how we’d like things to move forward.

“So it’s all in his hands, he’s the boss and he’s the decision maker. We’re there to just add value to whatever he decides for us to do,” he added.

Additionally, Da Gama was named the PSL Coach of March after a stunning win streak in the league.

Da Gama also revealed that he and his technical team have already identified potential player acquisitions, emphasizing the need for the team to have more experienced players on the field and to reduce their reliance on loaning players for long-term certainty.

“Definitely, I’ve already compiled some sort of a strategy of prospective players that we might acquire,” Gama stated.

“But we just wanted to focus on this game and get it done with. So we’ll sit and just put our brains together, and we need more leadership on the field. We need a little bit of experience, more experience on the field, and definitely certainty because you can’t keep on loaning, because there’s no surety what’s going to happen this coming season.”

He continued: “So we’ll definitely sit down on Thursday, and we could have done it, you know, on the 24th, but unfortunately, because of the backlog of games and Pirates had to play so many games, the game had to be shifted.”

“Otherwise we would have also been already announcing a few things, but I think we leave it on Thursday, we put our minds together and we’ve already compiled as I’ve said, the technical team has already compiled our list of players that might be leaving us and players that might be coming in.

“But it’s all the chairman’s final decision because there are a lot of financial implications involved.”