Inside Mamelodi Sundowns: ‘Our ambition is not the South African league – it’s the continent’

The Athletic was granted access to South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns as the team prepared for the Club World Cup in the United States.

---

Mamelodi Sundowns’ training ground in Chloorkop is just outside Johannesburg, where the urban sprawl blurs northward all the way to Pretoria and the township the club is named after; a half-hour drive away if the traffic is moving.

The place feels like a fortress, with high stone walls painted in yellow hiding two villas, one for the day-to-day football operation and the other for administration. There is a sense that Sundowns’ players have everything they need, but the centre, which includes pitches for the men’s and women’s teams, is pretty basic.

From the leather couches inside his white-washed office, sporting director Flemming Berg talks about facilities being the next stage of development. He thinks about the pitches especially; they are in decent condition, but they could be better. “The faster you can play, the more you can dominate,” he reasons. “And to play fast, you need good pitches.”

Since Patrice Motsepe bought Sundowns in 2003, the focus of the billionaire’s investment has been talent and infrastructure. As Sundowns prepare to take their place at the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States, Berg believes the latter is now comparable to any of the most forward-thinking clubs in Europe.

Having moved to South Africa in 2022 from the Danish Football Association, where he was technical director, Berg is central to the chain of command. He describes his job as “connecting the dots”, with seven departments reporting to him, before he reports to Motsepe’s son, Tlhopie, who is chairman of the board.

The system is inspired by what Berg considers “the central European and Scandinavian model”, which has been embraced only over the past decade by British clubs. Berg is in charge of the short- and medium-term aims of the club, stretching over the next two to five years. The chairman, whom Berg describes as a “visionary young leader”, and the board look further into the future.

Berg says he has implemented a streamlined and “holistic” structure, giving autonomy to the heads of each department. This means using all of the experience, knowledge and qualifications at his disposal to try to come up with the best decisions.

Like most sporting directors, Berg is in control of recruitment — the area of his work that gets analysed most nakedly. Domestically, Berg uses local scouts, with a sharp focus on youth talent — “that’s where you need people on the ground everywhere. South Africa’s a big country with a lot of players, some of which are not in structured football” — but abroad, he leans on data, online systems and his own contacts to get deals done rather than any broader scouting system.

At the start of the 2024-25 South African Premiership season, Sundowns had five South American players on their books. The process behind the arrivals of each of these players were different but involved data checks by Berg’s assistant sporting director, Ryan Hunt (who also holds a “head of data” title), either at the very beginning or at least somewhere before negotiations started.

Berg regularly meets with the coach and technical staff to discuss possibilities as far as three transfer windows into the future. Together, they define what they are looking for before Hunt scours his systems, bringing up different possibilities. Berg’s experience in video analysis allows him to assess footage swiftly and, from there, if he has any doubts about a player, he will refer back to the coaches to see what they think, or proceed and enquire about their availability through his connections, which allows him to establish facts quickly.

Berg knows his markets because they are well defined: Sundowns might be one of the richest clubs in Africa, but European-based talent tends to be emerging from the second tiers or South Americans who have been overlooked by European clubs.

---

If Berg is unfamiliar with a player, his representatives or the place he is trying to buy from, he uses the TransferRoom online platform, which gives direct access to the clubs. He estimates, however, that 90 per cent of deals are brokered because of findings in data as well as his relationships. Before his role with the Danish FA, he was Brondby’s chief scout. Before that, he covered the Iberian peninsula as an international scout for Chelsea under the guidance of Frank Arnesen, before moving on to the South American patch.

One of Berg’s biggest success stories since arriving at Sundowns has been the Brazilian No 10, Lucas Ribeiro, whose two goals in the final game against Magesi meant he finished as the South African Premiership’s leading scorer.

Ribeiro was playing in the Belgian second division with Beveren when Berg discovered he had just 18 months left on his contract. “All of the data fitted into how we are playing football and what we were looking for,” says Berg, who nevertheless presented three options to the technical staff. Ultimately, he would never sign a player the head coach didn’t want, but in this case, Ribeiro stood out.

Two years ago, Berg flew to Belgium to watch Ribeiro in games as well as training sessions. He also had meetings with the player’s agent as well as the CEO of his club. “I spent a lot of time going into the details because he was such an important position, but also because we’re going to invest quite a substantial amount of money in him.”

For every transfer, Berg has to submit a proposal to Motsepe and the board and, once ratified, only then can he begin hard negotiations. Up until 2023, Ribeiro had spent his career moving between clubs in France and Belgium after growing up in the north east of Brazil. He was used to relocating but had never considered South Africa as a place of interest.

“I didn’t know much about the club or its history,” he tells The Athletic. “But I was enchanted because it was always fighting for titles. I could see the ambition and that made me come here. It has been the best decision of my life.”

Ribeiro encouraged another Brazilian, Arthur Sales, to join him at Sundowns after scoring lots of goals for City Football Group-owned Lommel in the Belgian second division. Berg admits that he has a soft spot for South American players due to his experiences at Chelsea, where he worked for seven years. “They understand how to find space in the game and are technical on a very, very high level,” he says. “And we also have realised here that they adapt very fast to South Africa because there are many similarities.”

Berg references the standard of the pitches again, which can be good and bad — like in South America. There is also the weather, whether it’s the driving rain or searing heat. Sometimes there are altitude issues: it is not easy to play even at home in Pretoria, nearly 1,800m above sea level.

It would take three months for Berg to reach an agreement with Ribeiro. The signing of Chilean midfielder Marcelo Allende in 2022 was a lot quicker because Berg already liked the player. Allende’s starring performances for his country at the Under-17s World Cup in 2015 almost took him to Arsenal, where he trained on and off over the next few years with the first team, then managed by Arsene Wenger. Berg says Allende was always on his radar and after arriving at Sundowns in 2022, he checked his availability on TransferRoom.

By then, he’d bounced between clubs in Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, where he was playing for Montevideo City Torque, another member of City Football Group. “The truth is, I never thought of coming here, to a country very far from Chile,” admits Allende, who combats the six-hour time difference from his homeland through daily Zoom calls and WhatsApp messages with his family. “Obviously, at the beginning, there is a bit of doubt about Africa, maybe it is not very… well known, but when I got here, I found myself with other things that made me happy, and most of all, with great players.”

Allende says Berg especially made him feel wanted after moving around so much in his early life. “I felt cared for, loved, and for a player that’s very important,” he stresses.

Berg insists he has “surprisingly” not found it especially difficult convincing players to move to South Africa. One South American player, however, decided not to join when his national coach told him that his place in the side would be in jeopardy because he would not travel to watch him on a regular basis.

But Berg believes he knows his story and how to paint a picture of what players will experience professionally, as well as the lifestyle they’ll lead. Many live in the villas and apartments of Waterfall City, just outside of Johannesburg, close to shopping malls and the outdoors, but Berg thinks the promise of playing for a winning team that competes in the CAF Champions League has helped the most, along with their qualification for this summer’s Club World Cup.

Sundowns, he believes, offer consistency and reliability: the players’ contracts are often incentivised around performance, but their basic salary is competitive with the other big clubs in Africa. “But nobody doubts here whether the salary comes next month,” says Berg. “There’s good structure and the club is run professionally.”

During discussions with players and their agents, Berg is also able to lean on his own decisions. He had a nice job in Denmark, but he decided to bring his wife and two children with him to South Africa because he saw the opportunity to help build a club and broaden his horizons.

“I think they also understand that, OK, if someone from the north of Europe can come to the south of Africa and have a good life, probably I can as well.”

---

When Berg was a Chelsea scout, Portugal was under his gaze. He got to know the country well and now lives in South Africa with his Portuguese wife, working with a Portuguese head coach, having had a key role in the appointment of Miguel Cardoso at the end of 2024.

Berg used a recruitment company that specialises in leaders in sport to hire Cardoso. It was important to him that the company did not have anything to do with players. “The minute you bring in a coach from a company that also has a lot of players, there will come a lot pressure to bring those players into the club as well, and maybe those players don’t fit us,” says Berg, who considered as many as 50 candidates before whittling a list down to 20, 10 and, finally, three.

The recruitment company initially held a meeting with Cardoso to gauge his appetite for the move. This led to a summit somewhere in Europe. It helped Cardoso enormously that Sundowns had suffered at the hands of his work. During the 2023-24 season, he helped Tunisian side Esperance knock them out of the CAF Champions League. “We could see a team that was well structured in a clear 4-3-3,” Berg remembered. “Everyone knew exactly what they needed to do.”

The last word was ultimately with the board, but Berg knew exactly what he was getting. “Portuguese coaches are focused on the defensive part of the game, but we needed that,” admits Berg, who was impressed with how quickly Cardoso inspired a change in Sundowns’ play, despite criticism coming his way.

“Everyone, except Sundowns fans, are tired of the dominance of Sundowns,” says Berg. “The minute it seems there are issues, they are very fast criticising it. ‘Oh, Sundowns is not playing shoeshine and piano (the phrase used to describe their style of football) anymore’, and things like that. But we knew that we needed this change going into the Champions League and going into the Club World Cup because our ambition is not the South African league. Our ambition is the continent.”

(Top photos: Phil Magaoke/Getty; design: Kelsea Petersen)