Why One of South Africa’s Top Soccer Teams Traces Origins to Atlanta

At the Kaizer Chiefs training ground in Soweto, one unmistakable emblem flies from flags, marks fields and adorns gear. 

South Africa boasts its own rich tribal history, but this chief, depicted in black relief against the team’s signature creamsicle orange, wears a Native American headdress. 

Far from indigenous to the township around the training ground, his origin is Atlanta — a city now linked to Johannesburg by a 17-hour nonstop flight — and traces his lineage to the city’s first brush with professional soccer success. 

Soon after it wooed the Braves baseball team in 1966, the same ownership group incorporated the Atlanta Chiefs of the North American Soccer League, which debuted exactly 50 years before Atlanta United would win a title during its first season in Major League Soccer. 

The Atlanta Chiefs too won a title in their second season in 1968, the first professional sports championship in the city’s history. 

Perhaps more significantly, the cup came at the hands (feet?) of an international, multi-racial team of 21 players from nine countries, including three in Africa, creating an enduring local link between soccer and cosmopolitanism, even in the still-segregated South. 

Upon joining the team, Kaizer “Boy Boy” Motaung found himself in a city awash in activism, facing a fraught moment as its native son, Martin Luther King Jr., sought to lead the civil rights movement into its next phase: a campaign against poverty. 

Dr. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed; the Voting Rights Act followed in 1965. The 1968 season was just a week old when the nation was rocked by Dr. King’s assassination.  

Over two seasons on the field, Mr. Motaung distinguished himself, debuting in the first of two friendlies against Manchester City in 1968, both of which resulted in unexpected Chiefs victories. That same year, Atlanta hosted Brazilian legend Pele, who scored three goals for Santos in its 6-2 rout of the Chiefs. Attendance at that match reached a record 26,000-plus, about half of the normal showing at Atlanta United matches today but five times the average Chiefs attendance that year. 

Kaizer finished as rookie of the year, scoring 11 goals including one in the second leg of the finals victory in 1968; the speedy striker added 16 more goals the following year. 

The Chiefs fizzled after their runner-up campaign in 1971, returning briefly for a three-season stint from 1979-81, but soccer historians say the team’s tenure was nonetheless a turning point for the city, driving exponential growth in youth soccer adoption. 

With just a handful of local clubs tied to universities or companies, and “essentially no soccer infrastructure in the Southeast,” many wondered why Atlanta was even fielding a team. 

“It just didn’t make any sense. But Atlanta was incredibly receptive to the growth of the sport in the city,” Patrick Sullivan, a soccer historian and associate director of history at preservation firm New South Associates, said at the SoccerCon conference at Georgia Tech in 2023. 

Jason Longshore, the radio broadcast voice of Atlanta United and founder of media platform Soccer Down Here, told Global Atlanta that this wasn’t an accident: player/coach Phil Woosnam and Braves executive Richard “Dick” Cecil designed the team’s outreach to educate the community quickly about the sport. 

Mr. Woosnam was described in local papers at the time as having a “missionary” zeal for growing the game, Mr. Longshore said. Players’ yearlong deals required them to put on clinics and trainings during the offseason for “anyone who asked.”

Those early efforts paid off, with high school programs growing from the single digits in 1967, the year after soccer was recognized by the Georgia High School Association, to more than 100 by the early 1980s, Mr. Longshore said. 

A generation later, the city was once again thirsting for its own team when the MLS came calling. 

“It wouldn’t have been as successful if you didn’t have all of that groundwork, and especially the first groundwork, because that was beyond grassroots work,” Mr. Longshore said. “That was everything to get the ball rolling for all those organizations that were able to flourish and have hundreds and thousands of youth and adult players playing by the time ATL United launched,” Mr. Longshore said. 

In that respect, Dr. Motaung was one of the most important athletes in Atlanta during that period, Mr. Longshore added. 

Andrew Young, a deputy of Dr. King in the civil rights movement who would go on to become Atlanta’s mayor and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, watched in bewilderment as Kaizer turned down a $1 million deal in Atlanta.

“When he returned to South Africa, I asked myself, ‘What is the matter with him? Is this boy crazy?’ It took a lot of genius and courage to return home despite this immense offer,” Mr. Young told the team’s communication staff in a 2016 interview. 

During a visit to the Chiefs village in Soweto that year, a then-84-year-old Mr. Young was amazed to see that vision come to life in the form of state-of-the-art player dormitories, clubhouses, workout rooms, and sprawling practice fields.

“(Mr. Young) spoke about the fact that he now understood what my dad was doing,” Jessica Motaung, Kaizer’s daughter and marketing and commercial director for the team, told Global Atlanta. “When he had to renew his contract he decided he wanted to come back to South Africa and really build something here.” 

Kaizer credits his time with the Atlanta Chiefs and the foresight of Mr. Cecil with inspiring his own ambition to start a team back home. 

“Atlanta Chiefs is the reason there is a Kaizer Chiefs today in South Africa. When I left Atlanta, it was with the inspiration of your father that I decided to pursue this journey of forming a club in South Africa,” Dr. Motaung wrote in a 2023 note of condolence to Mr. Cecil’s son Terry, after his father’s death. 

The Kaizer Chiefs are now the most decorated and one of the most followed teams in South Africa’s Premier Soccer League, with a massive social media presence and tens of millions of registered fans. Some Chiefs players have scored key World Cup goals. Others have been sold to MLS or English Premier League teams. Because of that, a famous Leeds, England, rock band even named itself after the Chiefs. Dr. Motaung was instrumental in bringing the World Cup to South Africa in 2010, the tournament’s first (and to-date only) instance on the continent.  

Now, the team has ambitions to grow its already sizable global following through international friendlies and deeper digital outreach. 

Digitally, Ms. Motaung said, the fan experience now extends far beyond the confines of FNB Stadium, a venue built for the World Cup and known locally as the Calabash, and well past the 90 minutes of each match, enabling near-constant engagement and opportunities for brands to tap into teams’ unrivaled reach. 

With this in view, Atlanta, now a bona fide soccer city set to host eight matches of the 2026 World Cup, could soon be in for a full-circle moment in which the Kaizer Chiefs engage anew with the city that inspired their creation. 

“I would be all over that; it would be such a cool moment,” said Mr. Longshore, who says international friendlies and exhibitions like the English Premier League Summer Series and the upcoming FIFA Club World Cup have served to enrich the sport in Atlanta.

Kaizer, whom Ms. Motaung and her brother, Kaizer Jr., call “the chairman,” was unavailable for an interview when Global Atlanta toured the complex in August 2024, but Ms. Motaung reflected on his legacy and the team’s trajectory in an interview. 

“Certainly we want to come back to Atlanta and share our story and also play in Atlanta,” Ms. Motaung said. “We want to work with the right partners.”

Her dad always told stories of his time in the United States, not only about great American activists like Dr. King, but also the South African artists and entertainers like trumpeter Hugh Masekala, who saw their own struggle reflected in the plight of Black Americans. 

Athletics and activism in South Africa go hand in hand, exemplified by stadiums named after African National Congress leaders Moses Madhiba and Peter Mokaba.

Among Kaizer’s proudest moments was his decision to cancel a series of matches with an international team trying to break an apartheid-era boycott in the 1980s, he said in accepting an honorary doctorate from the University of Cape Town. 

“I think they were more conscious than our generation, so they understood the importance of activism,” Ms. Motaung said of her father’s cohort. 

The Chiefs were one of the first teams to host white players, and the pitch over time became a neutral ground for dialogue across racial and political factions in South Africa. 

“Football actually created the platform where our political leaders could go meet,” Ms. Motaung said. 

With its community origins has come a deep sense of responsibility, said Ms. Motaung.

“We wouldn’t be really who we are without our supporters, and that is something that’s been inculcated by the chairman all the time,” she said. 

Kaizer’s time in Atlanta, she said, laid the foundation for this approach, as he learned from the Atlanta Chiefs about building community connections, developing players and growing a fan base — all interlinked factors in soccer success. 

Melding these objectives together, the team worked with the nonprofit Pink Codrs to help women grow STEM and programming skills by using real data on the fan experience, e-commerce and more, said Mbali Hlongwane, the nonprofit’s founder. 

Ms. Hlongwane presented about the partnership during SoccerCon, the Atlanta conference on soccer and innovation, spearheaded by faculty and students at Georgia Tech. 

“One of the biggest questions that we wanted to answer was how do we get more women into football. Even though we grew up in homes watching football with our dads, most of us had no idea how we could get involved with the sport,” she said. 

Pink Codrs’ collaboration with the Chiefs led to 20 women becoming full-fledged data scientists, offering yet more evidence of how soccer changes lives through economic empowerment as well as social activism, she said. 

The stars may be aligning for the Kaizer Chiefs to return to Atlanta, bringing a feel-good story of people-to-people connection and civil rights progress at a time of testy relations between South Africa and the United States. 

In 2024, the U.S. Embassy in South Africa made Atlanta the focal point of its efforts to drive productive engagement, launching the Atlanta Phambili initiative with a mission attended by top bankers and investors, educators and entrepreneurs. 

It’s unclear whether that official focus will continue, as the two sides have been engaged in diplomatic rows over South African policy on Gaza and President Donald Trump‘s allegations of a “genocide” against minority white farmers, raised again in an Oval Office meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa this week.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens reciprocated the Phambili visit in December, after Mr. Trump’s election but before he took office, and even in the tumult that has followed, the City of Atlanta has expressed an interest in keeping Phambili alive, perhaps driven by the business community with input from subnational government actors. 

While Mr. Dickens didn’t visit the training ground in Soweto directly, the team sent a representative to meet with the mayor in Cape Town and deliver some merchandise emblazoned with the Chiefs logo as he visited another company with an Atlanta presence: Veldskoen Shoes. 

Back at the complex last August, Global Atlanta’s tour inevitably led to the team shop, where Jack Rabede, who leads the Kaizer Chiefs supporters group, espoused a sentiment that every soccer fan, regardless of their club, can get behind: 

“This is the only team that matters.” 

On May 14, fans like Mr. Rabede rejoiced as the Chiefs ended a 10-year trophy drought with a victory in the Nedbank Cup final over their cross-township rival, the Orlando Pirates.