South African Football Association (Safa) president Danny Jordaan has outlined the framework for how the ruling body’s Vision 2030 plan will take the sport in the country forward. The seven-year plan includes targets for the national teams and plans for professionalising women’s football, strengthening junior national teams and a national academy. Reflecting on Safa’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting last week, Jordaan said the association has agreed on a raft of resolutions aimed at taking the sport out of the doldrums. “The World Cup brings an end to cycles of football, all national associations develop their plans in the context of a four-year World Cup cycle,” Jordaan said. “We had Vision 2022, which started in 2014 through to 2018 and 2022. That cycle ended with the World Cup in Qatar and we are developing Vision 2030 that will have the plan for South African football for the next eight years. “We started by having an engagement with Fifa on February 6 and 7, I was there with the CEO [Tebogo Motlanthe] and we went through it to develop the strategic and operational plan for Vision 2030. “We then had engagements with Fifa and Uefa, and towards the end of March we are going to have a national conference with all of our members, regions, associate members, the league and everybody to finalise that Vision 2030 plan. ” Vision 2030 has already met criticism for an apparent scaling back of the targets for Safa’s headline national team, Bafana Bafana, and apparent lack of ambition setting a goal of a top 10 place in Africa and top 50 in the world. The targets for Vision 2022, which the men’s national team fell well short of, were for a top three place on the continent and top 20 globally. Jordaan said a number of appointments will be made to key positions to drive Vision 2030. “One of those key appointments is of referees. We are also going to make appointments of people in key positions, and one is the chair of the referees committee which is retired former Fifa referee Victor Gomes. “Another important appointment we are going to make is the head of women’s football at Safa. We have a national league for women, the next step is it must be fully professional. “What will help in this regard is Caf club licensing that stipulates before any of our current PSL teams can play in the Champions League and Confederations Cup, they must have a women’s team. “We have Sundowns, TS Galaxy and Royal AM with women’s teams and over the next few years the focus of women’s football is going to change. “We want to strengthen the high performance centre for women at University of Pretoria [Tuks], at the national technical centre. We are going to have 26 players between the ages of 12 and 16 years who are going to be at the academy full-time. “You have already seen the launch of the under-15 programme, we [are restoring] U-17 and U-19 boys’ and girls’ inter-provincials that stopped during Covid-19. “We have a [permanent ] national schools league we are going to form and we are hosting a pan-African schools tournament in Durban on behalf of Caf. ” Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times . Just R20 for the first month. .