Twine Phiri: They Smashed His Car. He Kept His Coach.

The coach he went looking for.

To understand how Phiri reached that confrontation, go back to Mbare. As a boy, he carried kit for CAPS United’s Shackman Tauro. Business later gave him a different way into the club: he bought a stake in 1999 and became its full owner and president at the end of 2001.

Owning CAPS meant organising work that supporters would rarely watch. Phiri described appointing people to handle finance, marketing and team management as part of making the club professional. The coach and players would be judged on the pitch; their preparation also depended on the organisation around them.

Mhlauri had coached other clubs before taking charge of CAPS. Phiri helped arrange further training in Germany. The coach’s later account describes rebuilding the squad with recruits from Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. There was preparation behind the appointment, even if it had not persuaded the crowd.

The breaking point came after a 2–0 defeat by Kambuzuma United at Gwanzura in April 2003. In his Sunday Mail recollection, Phiri described finding Mhlauri at a bus stop, shaken and intending to leave for Bulawayo. Phiri had hired a taxi to reach him. The conversation ended with the coach agreeing to stay.

One recruit remembered the persuasion personally. Phiri and Mhlauri came to Cephas Chimedza’s house with a proposal for CAPS United. Chimedza crossed from Dynamos to join them. He later described the project as “too good to turn down.”

At the bus stop, Phiri had persuaded his coach to stay. At Chimedza’s house, owner and coach were persuading someone else to join them. The team that would win the title was still being built.

Nor was the championship season a smooth rise. Three CAPS players died in a road accident in March 2004. Mhlauri later described arranging counselling for teammates after the loss. The people who won that title had endured far more than a difficult run of results.

CAPS United finished 2004 with 79 points, 15 clear of Highlanders. The following season demanded that the team sustain its standard rather than live on the first title. In 2005, Mhlauri and his players were champions again, with Phiri still the club’s president. Two consecutive seasons gave the result a weight that one afternoon’s judgment could not.

His next major role carried him beyond CAPS United. As chairman of the Premier Soccer League, Phiri would face a competition whose problems extended well beyond his own club.

Champions, but no prize money.

Motor Action became Zimbabwean champions in 2010 without receiving championship prize money. The league had no title sponsor. Phiri became its chairman that year, beginning a tenure that lasted until 2016. While still leading CAPS United, he had taken on a competition whose winners could finish the season without that reward.

Sponsors began filling parts of that gap. The Mbada Diamonds knockout tournament, announced in September 2011, carried US$1 million in backing. Its package included a US$75,000 first prize and US$150,000 towards the winners’ participation in African competition. Club leaders welcomed the opportunity; Phiri emphasised what it could mean for players and competition. Castle Lager’s league sponsorship and the BancABC competition were also part of the commercial picture.

A year later came a route to a much larger audience. In September 2012, the PSL and SuperSport agreed rights covering the remainder of that season and the 2013–2017 seasons. League and cup football could reach viewers across sub-Saharan Africa and adjacent islands on television, mobile and internet platforms. The potential audience was no longer limited to the people inside Zimbabwe’s stadiums.

Securing SuperSport had been a management-committee objective. Phiri linked the agreement to attracting more sponsors: wider exposure could make the competition more valuable to a commercial partner. Clubs supplied the football, the broadcaster supplied a way to reach viewers, and sponsors could help support the competition. His task now involved bringing those different interests together.

Years earlier, Phiri had been persuading a player to join CAPS. At league level, he was helping persuade businesses to back a competition. His work now reached clubs, players and audiences beyond the team he owned.

In 2014, Delta Beverages doubled its annual football commitment to US$1.2 million, a US$3.6 million package across three years. The sponsor explicitly praised Phiri and PSL chief executive Kennedy Ndebele. A commercial partner was explaining why it was increasing its commitment, not simply lending its name to a photograph.

By February 2016, Phiri was announcing his departure from league leadership. Coverage identified the Castle Lager and SuperSport partnerships among the achievements of his tenure. He had moved from finding support for one club to helping secure backing for a national competition.

The club’s trophies did not protect the business that had helped fund them. In 2017, Phiri said his refrigeration and air-conditioning business, TwinCon, had downsized from 32 full-time employees to nine. He explained that business income and savings had funded CAPS, while blaming the contraction on the economy, not football.

The man who had helped secure backing for a national league was now explaining why his own company employed nine people. His football record and his business difficulties existed side by side. The trophies did not erase the pressure.

The next chapter began in a village.

By April 2023, the setting was rural Gwanda. Phiri and business partner Rueben Mataka launched Twinmat Sports Academy with a tournament at Bethel Village. Four local teams competed, and junior coaches came to look for talent. Phiri’s belief in rural players had a precedent: the launch report recalled his earlier discovery of goalkeeper Energy Murambadoro in Gokwe.

The Murambadoro story connects this village tournament to Phiri’s earlier football life. Rural talent was not an abstract promise to him: he could point to a player he had already found. Taking the tournament and coaches to Gwanda changed where another player’s first opportunity might happen. The young person did not have to reach a professional club before someone came looking.

In January 2025, Phiri launched his campaign for the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) presidency in Harare. He argued for stronger grassroots development, improved corporate governance and digital administration. Information should be easier to access; the use of funds should be transparent enough to attract sponsorship. Those were campaign proposals for the national game, extending concerns that had occupied him at the club, in the league and in rural development.

The career had changed scale, but the participants remained connected. A young player needed an opening; a club needed a team and the means to support it; a league needed partners and an audience. Phiri had worked at each of those levels. In Gwanda, the next player’s chance was no longer something to discuss only after the professional game had been built.