Two referees officiated Betway Premiership matches last season at 2.08 and 5.11 yellow cards a game, under the same laws in the same months. Cards and penalties for all 25 officials across two seasons — and an equally specific account of the three things about South African refereeing that no public source can currently answer.
By Noma Dora, Senior Regulatory & Sports Journalist · Published · Last updated
More than four years covering sport for the regional South African press.
Two referees officiated Betway Premiership matches last season at 2.08 and 5.11 yellow cards a game. Both were working the same league, under the same laws, in the same months.
South African football argues about refereeing every season, almost always without a number attached. Some of the numbers do exist. This page publishes them, and is equally specific about the ones that do not — because three of the things most often asserted about PSL refereeing cannot currently be checked by anybody.
| Season | Matches attributed | Referees | Yellow cards | Yellows per match | Second yellows | Straight reds | Penalties | Penalties per match |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 200 of 210 | 25 | 743 | 3.71 | 16 | 14 | 29 | 0.14 |
| 2025/26 | 237 of 240 | 25 | 781 | 3.30 | 15 | 18 | 46 | 0.19 |
Cards fell and penalties rose between the two seasons. Yellows per match dropped 11%, from 3.71 to 3.30, while penalties per match rose by a third, from 0.14 to 0.19.
For international context, the 2025/26 penalty rate of 0.19 a match sits almost exactly on the English Premier League's 0.20 and above Serie A's 0.14 and the Bundesliga's 0.16. On this measure the PSL is unremarkable.
All 25 referees who took charge of at least one Premiership match, ordered by matches. Rates are computed from each referee's own matches.
| Referee | Matches | Yellows | Yellows per match | Second yellows | Reds | Penalties |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thando Ndzandzeka | 20 | 60 | 3.00 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| Jelly Chavani | 16 | 46 | 2.88 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Moreki Lekwape | 16 | 42 | 2.62 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| Luxolo Badi | 14 | 47 | 3.36 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
| Abongile Tom | 14 | 46 | 3.29 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| Sikhumbuzo Gasa | 14 | 60 | 4.29 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Moses Kheswa | 13 | 36 | 2.77 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Olani Jethro Kwinda | 12 | 25 | 2.08 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Eugene Mdluli | 12 | 41 | 3.42 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Philangenkosi Khumalo | 12 | 44 | 3.67 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Christopher Kistoor | 12 | 37 | 3.08 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Masixole Bambiso | 11 | 36 | 3.27 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Tshidiso Mkwanazi | 10 | 39 | 3.90 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Siyabulela Qunta | 10 | 29 | 2.90 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Xola Sitela | 9 | 46 | 5.11 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Akhona Makhalima | 8 | 40 | 5.00 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Cedrick Muvhali | 5 | 22 | 4.40 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Michael Mosemeng | 5 | 13 | 2.60 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Siyabonga Nkomo | 4 | 14 | 3.50 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Msimeleli Mabuto | 4 | 7 | 1.75 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Buhlebendawo Jobela | 4 | 12 | 3.00 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Mokhele Thulo | 4 | 13 | 3.25 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Thokozani Mkhize | 3 | 11 | 3.67 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Joseph Makhubo | 3 | 7 | 2.33 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sicelo Velapi | 2 | 8 | 4.00 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Among referees with ten or more matches, the range runs from Olani Jethro Kwinda's 2.08 yellows a game to Sikhumbuzo Gasa's 4.29 — a spread of better than two to one across samples large enough to take seriously. Xola Sitela's 5.11 and Akhona Makhalima's 5.00 are higher still, from nine and eight matches respectively.
Kwinda's figure is the one worth pausing on. Twenty-five yellow cards in twelve matches is 1.2 fewer per game than the league average, sustained over a quarter of a season.
Philangenkosi Khumalo awarded six penalties in twelve matches — 0.50 a game, against a league rate of 0.19. Three referees who worked ten or more matches awarded none or one.
Three of the things most commonly claimed about PSL refereeing cannot be checked from any public source. We looked for each of them specifically before writing this page.
There is no public register of appointments. Neither the PSL nor SAFA publishes which referee was appointed to which match. The dataset above is a per-referee aggregate; it does not say who refereed Kaizer Chiefs against Orlando Pirates on a given weekend. Every claim of the form "this referee always gets the big games" is, at present, unfalsifiable in public.
The home/away penalty split does not exist in aggregate anywhere. This is the single most-asserted claim in South African football — that penalties favour the home side, or favour particular clubs — and it is the one we most wanted to test. Building it would mean scraping roughly 240 individual match pages from a proprietary database, which we have not done. So we cannot tell you whether PSL penalties skew home or away, and neither can anyone else quoting a figure without showing where it came from.
Added time is not published at all. No source we checked records it at match level for this league. The recurring complaint that added time is applied inconsistently in South African football has, as far as the public record goes, no data behind it in either direction.
Referee appearances sum to 237 of the 240 matches played in 2025/26 and 200 of the 210 played in 2024/25 — 98.8% and 95.2%.
This matters and we have not smoothed it over. The three and ten unattributed matches are not identified in the source, so they cannot be assigned. Every per-referee rate above is computed from that referee's own attributed matches and is therefore internally sound. The league-wide totals — 781 yellows, 46 penalties — are floors, not complete counts.
2024/25's 210 rather than 240 matches is a separate matter and is correct: Royal AM were suspended that season and their thirty fixtures were voided.
We publish the coverage figure because a referee dataset that quietly claims to be complete is exactly the kind of PR asset that falls apart when someone checks it.
One change would settle all three of the missing measures at once, and it is not a difficult one.
The PSL already knows every answer on this page. Match commissioner reports record the appointed officials, every card, every penalty and the added time played in each half. That information is collected for every match and is not published.
Adding the appointed referee to each match's entry on the league's own Match Centre would create a complete, public appointments register within a single season — and with it, the home/away penalty split, the per-club card record and the added-time series, none of which currently exist. It is the same ask our attendance page makes about crowd figures, for the same reason: the league is sitting on data that would end an annual argument.
Which PSL referee shows the most cards?
In 2025/26, among referees with a meaningful sample, Sikhumbuzo Gasa at 4.29 yellow cards per match across fourteen matches. Xola Sitela averaged 5.11 from nine matches and Akhona Makhalima 5.00 from eight.
How many penalties are awarded in the PSL?
0.19 per match in 2025/26 and 0.14 in 2024/25 — 46 and 29 penalties in the attributed matches. The 2025/26 rate is close to the English Premier League's 0.20.
Do PSL referees favour home teams with penalty decisions?
Nobody can currently say, and this page does not claim to. The home/away split of penalty awards is not published in aggregate by any source, and reconstructing it would require match-by-match data from a proprietary database. Any figure quoted without an itemised source behind it should be treated with suspicion.
Who refereed a particular PSL match?
There is no public register of referee appointments in South African football. The league does not publish them, and this dataset is aggregated by referee rather than by match.
Period covered: Two South African Premiership seasons — 2024/25 and 2025/26 — covering 437 attributed matches and 50 referee-seasons across 25 named officials.
Every figure on this page is in the files below, so you can check the arithmetic yourself. Released under CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution.
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use this data. Please credit Bet AFR and link to this page — that link is the only thing we ask for in return.
Bet AFR, "PSL referee card and penalty record, 2024/25–2025/26", last updated 3 August 2026. https://betafr.co.za/statistics/psl-referee-record
Licensed CC BY 4.0 (licence terms). Spotted an error, or have a better source? Tell us — corrections are published with the date they were made.
This page makes the same ask of the league as our PSL attendance page — that data already collected in match commissioner reports be published. For the matches these officials took charge of, see PSL home and away form and PSL goals.