11 June 2010. Stellenbosch. The afternoon was going flat and gold before anyone noticed it.
In a house where football had never been the main language, a girl moved the coffee table forward. One metre from the TV. No more space than that between her and the screen.
Outside, a country was holding its breath. Inside Soccer City, 84,490 people were watching a goalless opening match tilt toward history. In the 55th minute, Siphiwe Tshabalala broke into space on the left and struck. The net moved. Soccer City detonated.
The whole country went with it. Bars, taxis, forecourts, corner shops from Musina to Mossel Bay. Everywhere, simultaneously, the same eruption.
In that living room in Stellenbosch, the girl erupted alone.
"I just sat there and I was like, oh my word, like I'm going through this moment alone."
She attended a school that did not play football. Nobody in her circle understood the game the way she did. The moment that electrified a stadium electrified her, and she had nobody to turn to with it. Just the screen, and the coffee table, and the feeling of something she could not yet explain.
Her name is Jana Swart. She would go on to build one of the more interesting careers in South African football media, not by waiting for a door to open, but by building her own entrance. That begins here. A girl in front of a screen, deciding something the rest of the room would only understand years later.
A Seat That Was Not There
She did not come into football through journalism. She has a Sport Science degree. Her first work at Stellenbosch FC came through CSI and community coaching with the under-6s and under-8s. She was in the field, with kids, doing the unglamorous work that does not appear in any match report.
Then someone needed photographs. Nothing formal. Documentation for the company, evidence of the project work, a record that could sit in a folder somewhere.
"Someone needs to take pictures just for documenting it for the company. And I kind of took that role and slowly but surely it just evolved into a whole different role."
Junior teams first. Then the Diski Challenge. Then the senior side. Then Media Officer. Then Head of Events, Hospitality and Fan Engagement. A staircase she built while climbing it.
In her camera roll today, there are photographs of a fourteen-year-old Tylon Smith. Before the senior appearances. Before Bafana. Before the European transfer. She was at those under-age sessions with a lens because nobody else was covering them, and because she paid attention to what the game actually contained, not just to what it eventually produced.
That is what it looks like when a person is in the right place by conviction rather than by accident. The camera found her, but she went looking for everything the camera pointed at.
The Story Not Enough People Are Writing
South African football journalism has its rhythms. The result. The table. The manager's presser. The transfer window. The governance scandal. These stories exist because they matter and because there is a readership for them.
What they have not consistently covered is the person in the stands.
Not the VIP. Not the personality photographed at a high-profile fixture. The woman in row G who drove ninety minutes from a branch meeting because football has lived in her family longer than most people have been asking her about it. The grandfather beside her who does not speak the same first language, who has been sitting in the same section for years, and whose name nobody has ever asked for.
"My two biggest passions are sports and people."
That sentence is not a caption. It is a methodology. For Jana, the game is the occasion. The people are the subject. And the question she keeps asking, at fixtures and in community spaces and in the comment threads that pull strangers into the same conversation, is: who are these people, and what does this mean to them, and why are they still here?
Mainstream football media in South Africa has an available re-orientation. Not a replacement of the coverage that already exists. A supplement. A willingness to point the lens at the stands and ask what is actually happening there. Jana was asking that question before she had a platform to ask it from.
I Made That Up, Actually
She runs @mzansi_soccergirl now. A creator account built on the gap she kept noticing: South African football media was not paying enough attention to the people around the game. It was reporting outcomes. She started reporting the people behind them.
When the Lekompo moment from Alex Mall travelled widely online, she was already inside that conversation. Not because she engineered a viral moment. Because she had been in those rooms long before anyone else thought they were worth filming.
Ask her what she does.
She will tell you, with a slight smile in it: "I call myself a social media sports reporter. I've made that up, actually."
She made up the title because no title existed for what she was doing. The work had no industry category. The description did not appear in any job posting. So she wrote the description herself, and then she did the work.
She did not enter through the front door. The front door was not opening. She found a path around the building, and when she arrived, she did not knock. She started working.
The Way In
The way most people enter football media. A journalism degree, an internship at a publication, a beat that already exists, a title someone else wrote before you arrived. The door is narrow. Most people who knock are turned away. Many of the ones who get in spend years trying to make the seat their own.
Another Way
The way Jana entered. A Sport Science degree. Under-6 and under-8 coaching. A camera picked up because someone had to. A title invented because the work outgrew the description. No one handed her a finished seat. She walked around the building and built her own entrance. The seat existed because she made it.
The Language Anyone Can Speak
She grew up in a school that did not play football. Not a language she was handed. One she went and found.
"If someone else speaks Zulu and I speak Sepedi, if we have a ball, we have something to talk about."
Football, the way she describes it, is not only a sport organised around a result. It is a shared vocabulary that crosses language, income, school, neighbourhood. A ball on a patch of ground in Alexandra is a translation device. You do not need to share anything else.
South Africa is a country that still speaks in parallel lines, communities that live alongside each other without ever quite arriving at a common frequency. Football can close that distance in a way formal infrastructure often does not. You sit beside someone in a stand, and by halftime you have spoken more honestly with a stranger than most institutions will ever allow.
That function of the game is not the part getting reported often enough. Jana reports it. It is what her camera is pointed at when she is not photographing the result. It is what @mzansi_soccergirl is actually about, underneath the footage and the commentary and the moment that travelled widely online.
The ball is the conversation. Everything else is translation.
Take The Gift You Have
She talks as if speaking to the young girls who might be watching now. The fifteen-year-olds who watch her the way she watched Linda Motlhalo and Motshidisi Mohono growing up, looking for something they could not yet name. A version of themselves that did not exist in the media they had access to.
"Take the gift you have and you build on that. I think that's the best way for any person to go forward."
Not: wait for the industry to acknowledge you. Not: find the door that everyone says is the right one. Take what you already are. Build on that. The Sport Science degree was not a detour from the real career. The community coaching was not time lost before the real work started. The camera picked up in a car park for a documentation job was not an accident. Each one fed the next. The gift was always there. She kept building on it.
This is a piece about football only if you want it to be. Read it again without the sport. The architecture holds. A thing you love that nobody in the room understands yet. A role that does not exist until you fill it. A title you invent because the work outgrew any description that already existed.
The seat you want is out there somewhere. If it is not, you are allowed to build it.
Go back to the coffee table in Stellenbosch. 2010. A girl one metre from a screen, the country erupting and the room behind her quiet.
She is not alone anymore. She sits with branch supporters who have never been interviewed by anyone and listens to them for hours. She sits inside comment sections where strangers find they support the same player, same club, same memory of a goal in a tournament nobody else remembers. She sits in stadiums watching players she photographed at fourteen earn Bafana call-ups, and she is still taking the photograph.
Excellence is a form of stewardship. What you build outlasts you.
She built a seat. Now there are seats next to it.
