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First there was Letsile Tebogo, who put Botswana on the sporting map when he won gold in the 200m at the Paris Olympics. Now, there is Gaborone United Ladies, who became the country’s first football team to win a regional trophy and will make history when they appear at the CAF Champions League this year.
United claimed the Cosafa Women’s Champions League Cup – a tournament played among southern African clubs – when they defeated the Zambian side Zesco Ndola Girls 4-3 on penalties after a 1-1 draw in August and their victory means they will represent the region at the eight-team CAF Champions League tournament this year.
“It’s a great achievement for the whole country. It is our first major cup. No other team, whether it’s age group or senior, at club or national level, has managed to bring a cup home,” United Ladies’ coach, William Monene, tells Moving the Goalposts.
It is not the club’s first taste of success. United are back-to-back Botswana Women’s Championship winners and their rise has been swift and stunning. They were promoted to the first division in 2023 and finished second that year, claimed the title in 2024 and then challenged themselves to not only win again but better their own statistics in 2025.
“Last year we had one draw in the league and our scoring statistics were not that superb,” Monene says. “This time around, we sat down and said, let’s see how we can improve the statistics. After the end of this league, we found that we broke all the records.”
United won all 14 of their fixtures in this year’s league and scored 61 goals, significantly more than second-placed Double Action (35) and conceded only three. They took that goalscoring form into the CAF Champions League qualifiers, where they found the net 11 times in three group-stage matches (the same number as previous CAF Champions League winners Mamelodi Sundowns) and four times in the knockouts, more than anyone else.
Their attacking efforts were led by the striker Gaonyadiwe Ontlametse, who scored seven times in four matches, including five against Lesotho’s Kick4Life, and is key to their success. “She’s one player whose technical abilities are very, very good so she can score from head to toe,” Monene says. “She has speed, she has aggression and is a good finisher.”
He warns, though, that all that may not be enough when the team gets to the Champions League and faces tougher opposition. At the time of writing, five of the eight teams for the tournament have been confirmed, including the defending champions, TP Mazembe, the Moroccan champions AS FAR, and two teams from the Union of North African football: Mali’s USFAS Bamako from the Western Zone A and Ivory Coast’s ASEC Mimosas from Western Zone B. The teams from the Eastern and Central regions will be determined by a qualifier this month and all of them are expected to test United. “One thing she should improve is that she’s a player that doesn’t want to play without the ball,” Monene says of Ontlametse. “So sometimes when we are against a team where we are forced to defend more, she might struggle.”
Challenge accepted.
Ontlametse says that while it’s true she prefers to play when she is going for goal, she is willing to make the necessary adjustments where required: “I enjoy attacking football but I also understand that at the highest level you must adapt. In the Champions League, games are more tactical and if that means sacrificing a bit of my attacking freedom for the good of the team, I am ready.”
If the record is anything to go by, the rest of the United Ladies squad appear to feel the same way. They are unbeaten in over a year and the last time they lost a match was at the 2024 CAF Champions League Cosafa qualifiers when they lost 9-8 in a penalty shootout against the University of the Western Cape in the final. “We were just so close then,” Monene says. “It would have been so painful to get to another final and lose, especially as it was my third in a row.”
In 2023, Monene took Double Action Ladies to the final of the 2023 CAF Champions League Cosafa qualifiers where they lost against South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns. “It was bound to happen that I would win one.”
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It’s not just the luck of threes. Monene calls himself “a coach that is very determined, who’s very energetic and who’s willing to work with players” and has the record to prove it. Apart from his role at United Ladies, he also runs the Future Stars Academy which caters to young men between the ages of nine and 20 and has provided more than 30 players to the Botswana men’s Premier League. “I like to work in development a lot,” he says.
He also has the support of the structures in the country’s football to help. Though the league as a whole is not professional Gaborone United, owned by the businessman and civil engineer Nicholas Zakhem, have a men’s and women’s team and are stepping up.
“We have moved away from a purely amateur setup to one that provides structured player salaries and incentives,” Owe Mmolawa, the club’s general manager, says. “We are not yet at the level of the continent’s biggest clubs but we are about scaling up sustainably each year.”
They hope others in the country will follow suit as Botswana continues to put itself on the world footballing map. With a population of over 2.5 million people, Botswana is 44th out of 54 countries on the continent in terms of size but it punches well above it weight. The national women’s side have been involved in the last two Afcons and reached the quarter-finals on their first appearance in 2022, while their men’s team will appear at the continental showpiece for the first time since 2012 this year. Now, they also have a club team in the CAF Champions League.
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