The trophy has stood in her mother’s house for nineteen years. This week, on the eve of the biggest honour of her life, Portia Modise found herself looking at it again.
“I was visiting my mom’s house and I was looking at the trophy,” says Modise. The engraving reads 2007, the year she became the inaugural winner of the gStar Award, the honour that grew into today’s gsport Athlete of the Year. Before the century of goals, before the world knew her name, gsport wrote it down first.
Today that name becomes permanent. Modise has been announced as the 21st inductee into the gsport Hall of Fame, joining the line that Penny Heyns opened in 2006. She was honoured at a special luncheon in Johannesburg today, and will be celebrated again at the 21st gsport Awards on Saturday, 8 August 2026, on the eve of National Women’s Day, as gsport celebrates 20 years of championing South African women in sport.
Her story begins where she has always said it does, and she sets the record straight with characteristic directness. “I don’t come from Meadowlands, I come from White City, Jabavu,” she says. It was there, in a home full of football-mad brothers, that a small girl picked up the ball while the boys trained.
The brother they called uJomo spotted her first. “I saw her juggling the ball outside while we were busy training,” she remembers him saying, and the backyard duels that followed sealed her fate. “Then I started to fall really in love.”
From dim-dim street football with the neighbourhood boys, who protected her rather than turned her away, the gift carried her to Soweto Ladies, where she scored 51 goals in a single season and won a national championship, to the captaincy of the national under-19 side, and to a Banyana Banyana debut at 16 at the 2000 African Women’s Championship on home soil, where she played every match through to the final.
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What followed made history no African player, woman or man, had touched before her: a century of international goals, a milestone she reached in Windhoek in October 2014. “102 goals, I’m a record breaker,” she says, and then delivers the line that has defined her fight all along. “That soccer ball doesn’t have a gender.”
Among the goals was one the world still replays, struck from inside her own half against Sweden at the 2012 London Olympics in Coventry, a plan hatched in training with coach Shakes Mashaba. “I also remember the voice of Shakes. Then I took my chance and it happened again,” she smiles.
Yet ask Modise about her record and she does not reach for glory. She reaches for a torch. “But I can’t own a record for 15 years. For me, it’s crazy,” she says. In her eyes, the longevity of the mark is not a monument to her greatness but a measure of the investment South African football still owes its daughters. “I want these girls to break the record,” she says, because every broken record would tell the story of a nation rich in talent at last given its chance.
The heart of the woman behind the number is unmistakable. “I embrace myself being a woman. I love myself being a woman. It’s just that I’m a special woman,” she says. That self-possession now anchors a new chapter of life, one she describes with quiet pride. “Yes, I am a mother, because I’m raising a daughter.” The girl from White City who once fought for permission to play now models for her own child, and for a generation of young players, what it means to own who you are.
And she is building. “I want to create a foundation that it will be a voice, a foundation that it will be a home, you know, for women footballers,” she says, describing coaching clinics for young girls and a space where legends return to pass on their wisdom. Her ambition for herself is deliberately close to the grass. “I want to feed the team,” she says of her dream to scout talent for the national side, finding the raw diamonds in the townships the way someone once found her. “I want to die in the game. My knowledge is too big for the game.”
For gsport, honouring Modise closes a circle two decades in the making, and she feels the weight of that shared journey. “Someone was watching, someone remembered, someone didn’t forget,” she says of the platform that has tracked her rise since the beginning, recalling co-founder Kass Naidoo’s founding vision. “Kass, I remember when you told me about this dream, and it came alive.” When the call came, she says, “I laughed, because your loyalty is true.”
On Saturday night in Johannesburg she will stand in a room built to celebrate women like her, two days before National Women’s Day, while the current generation of Banyana Banyana stars she helped make possible defend their continental crown in Morocco. The pioneers laid the foundation. The champions built upon it. And the record she set still waits, gleaming, for the young girl somewhere in a township street who will one day take it down, with Modise cheering loudest of all.
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“These trophies remind us who we are, just because of you, gsport,” she says. From today, one name in that story can never be forgotten. The first name in the line is home for good.
Main Photo Caption: Banyana Banyana legend Portia Modise, the first African footballer to score 100 international goals, has been named the 21st gsport Hall of Fame inductee, honoured at a special luncheon at the Protea Hotel by Marriott Wanderers in Johannesburg on Friday, 7 August 2026, ahead of the 21st gsport Awards on Saturday, 8 August 2026. All Photos: Sachin du Plooy-Naran
Photo 2 Caption: Celebrated for her 102 international goals, Modise now pours her energy into her foundation and grassroots development of women’s football.
Photo 3 Caption: Honoured as a gsport Hall of Famer, the former Banyana Banyana striker wants nothing more than to see her record broken by the next generation.
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