Online Reporter
Noel Munzambwa in Siteki, Eswatini
THE numbers were always going to sting, yet nothing prepared Zimbabwe’s football faithful for the sight of Dynamos and Highlanders drifting helplessly through a season that will be remembered for its gloom.
Their fall wasn’t sudden. It felt like watching two great ships take on water openly, slipping lower with each passing week while supporters hoped for a miracle that never came.
Both clubs, anchors of the domestic game for decades, reached new depths in the 2025 Castle Lager Premier Soccer League. Since the modern league took shape in 1993, neither had sunk this far.
Their following has lived on a steady diet of glory for generations, so this collapse cut deeper than a bad run.
It rattled the identity of teams whose supporters have talked, walked, eaten and slept success for most of their lives.
This season will be remembered as the year hope thinned out and anger grew louder.
A festive Christmas or a cheerful New Year feels out of reach for their fans spread across the world. The two giants are not walking alone. They look like clubs slipping into a slow, heavy slumber, and there is a growing fear that this might not be an isolated dip.
Relegation flirtations don’t happen in a vacuum. They often signal something rotting in the walls. The bottomless pit that swallowed Zimbabwe Saints, Motor Action, Monomotapa, Gunners and Black Aces is still open. The whispers that Dynamos and Highlanders could be drifting toward the same fate no longer sound dramatic. They sound like warnings.
This is the dead end awaiting thousands, probably millions, of loyal hearts if this free fall isn’t stopped soon. It’s no longer a joke, no longer a meme, no longer something rivals tease about. The future they’re painting is bleak, and for the first time in decades, the fear feels real.
Bosso and DeMbare each finished on 39 points, the lowest totals of their modern era. Worse, the accumulation rate was only 38 percent. Highlanders ended the season in 11th, Dynamos in 13th.
Nothing in their storied past resembles this. Bosso last picked up 39 points in 2008, though that was in a 16-team league and still carried a respectable 43 percent return and an eighth-place finish.
Dynamos’ previous lowest tally was 40 points in 2005. Their worst finish had been 11th in 2018. This year broke all those floors.
The word that fits is mediocrity, and even that feels too soft for a season this poor. No amount of spin from leadership should find an ear among supporters who watched their teams stagger through match after match. It was pathetic, and it came as raw as it reads.
Adding to the misery, CAPS United joined them in a rare collective collapse. For only the third time since 1993, all three members of the Traditional Big Three failed to reach 50 points.
For fans, it felt like being pulled through barbed wire. This wasn’t supposed to happen in their lifetime. During their dominant eras, such figures were unthinkable.
Even in 1993, which some may try to point to, the picture was different. That final year of the two-point win system still gave them points accumulation percentages above 50. The class of 2025 cannot even claim that dignity.
It’s now part of the record that Bernard Marriot, Kenneth Mhlophe and Farai Jere oversaw the worst post-glory phase in the histories of Dynamos, Highlanders and CAPS United. It leaves a smudge on careers otherwise filled with passion and ambition, and it forces a hard question. Are Zimbabwe’s Big Three still big?
That question will follow the off-season wherever it goes. The old aura is fading fast. Their dominance has been reduced to something museum-like, a lion’s head mounted on a wall as a reminder of what once roared.
Moneyed newcomers have arrived without fear, wagging their tails and tossing the old giants aside with ease. Past glory no longer scares anyone. The three lions of Zimbabwean football are asleep, and no one seems ready to shake them awake.
Their refusal to reform, and at times their arrogance, has pushed them toward the edge of the same trash heap where Zimbabwe Saints, Motor Action, Monomotapa, Gunners and Black Aces lie forgotten. That heap is wide enough for more.
Numbers tell the story, too. CAPS United and Dynamos have seen their crowds shrink, sometimes painfully. Highlanders remain the league’s financial engine, still responsible for forty percent of the PSL’s revenue, but even that cannot mask how far the giants have fallen. Meanwhile, mine-owned and sponsor-powered clubs are running the show. MWOS, backed by a betting house, is only the latest reminder that the centre has shifted.
The giants who once defined Zimbabwean football now look like shadows searching for their former selves. If anything, this season wasn’t just a warning. It was an alarm bell ringing loud enough for the whole country to hear.
