Winning the Away Game Podcast: Giving South Africans Abroad a Place to Land

Winning the away game is rarely about winning quickly. More often, it’s about endurance – surviving the dislocation, renegotiating identity, and finding meaning on the far side of leaving home. For South Africans abroad, that process can be deeply isolating, even when the surface narrative suggests success.

The Winning the Away Game Podcast, co-hosted by Justinus Adriaanse and Flip van der Merwe, exists because that gap is real – and because too few platforms speak honestly into it. Not to celebrate status or arrival, but to sit with the discomfort of transition. To normalise the reality behind the highlight reel. The podcast connects South Africans across borders through grounded, unfiltered conversations about reinvention, resilience, and belonging – particularly in the aftermath of sport, migration, and major life shifts.

At its core, this isn’t a platform about achievement: it’s about recognition; about hearing your own internal questions reflected back through someone else’s story.

Born From a Leap, Not a Strategy

The idea for the Winning the Away Game Podcast didn’t emerge from a media plan or a commercial objective. It came out of a moment of personal recalibration – the kind that quietly changes the trajectory of a life.

After leaving his previous business, Justinus and his wife were skiing in France when an off-hand truth surfaced. “I’d always dreamed of spending a season in a ski town and skiing every day,” he recalls. That thought became action with surprising speed: a search for ski instructor courses, a UK-based programme offering training in Fernie, British Columbia, and a decision to lean into uncertainty rather than manage it away.

What followed were two full seasons embedded in a new rhythm of work, community, and place. “Over that time, we built a strong connection to the community and lifestyle,” Justinus says, “and ultimately decided to move to Canada permanently so I could explore opportunities to start a business there.”

Those years matter because they reshaped how transition was understood – not as disruption to be overcome, but as something that needed to be lived through properly. That same philosophy now anchors the podcast.

A Platform Built on Tension, Not Triumph

The Winning the Away Game Podcast is deliberately structured around contrast. Each episode pairs a successful South African living abroad with a retired South African sports star – two lives shaped by endings and beginnings, but from different emotional starting points.

Together, they unpack what’s rarely given airtime: “The realities of moving countries, starting again, and figuring out who you are on the other side of a big transition,” Justinus explains, “especially after sport and moving country.”

The conversations resist neat conclusions. They acknowledge that success abroad often arrives with a quieter underside – loss of proximity to family, erosion of familiar identity, and the unsettling freedom of no longer being known in the same way. Listeners don’t come for answers. They come because the questions feel familiar.

Winning Without the Armour

Where many diaspora stories lean on confidence as proof of courage, Winning the Away Game takes a more honest position. It recognises that fear doesn’t disappear – it’s negotiated.

“I’ve ‘won the away game’ by choosing to lean into change rather than fear it,” Justinus says. “Leaving behind what was familiar, building a new life from the ground up, and creating something that helps South Africans abroad feel a sense of belonging wherever they are.”

That choice – leaning in rather than powering through – defines the tone of the podcast. It’s reflective, unshowy, and quietly resolute. There’s no fixation on hustle, no posturing. Just the understanding that starting again requires humility, patience, and the willingness to be unfinished for a while.

In true Saffa fashion, it’s about making a plan – even while accepting that the plan will evolve.

More Than an Audience

Over time, Winning the Away Game has become more than a media project. It functions as connective tissue – linking South Africans scattered across the UK, Europe, North America, and beyond through shared emotional geography.

Listeners aren’t framed as expatriates or outsiders, but as participants in a wider, values-driven network – one that understands both the opportunity and the tension of building a life elsewhere.

That responsibility is explicit in Justinus’s longer-term vision. “My dream is to build and support more organisations that help create a South Africa that works for everybody,” he says. “South Africans abroad have a unique role to play in making that future possible, through networks, skills, mentorship, and backing great ideas.”

The podcast becomes a form of soft power – not political, but purposeful. A reminder that distance doesn’t equal detachment.

Impact Through Involvement

Importantly, the podcast does not position itself as complete. It invites participation rather than passive consumption.

“The best way to support us is to follow along and listen to the podcast,” Justinus says. “Share it with other Saffas in your community, send us your suggestions on how we can improve, and let us know which guests you’d love to hear from next.”

That openness keeps the platform alive. The stories evolve because the community does. 

“Together,” Justinus adds, “the South African diaspora can have a truly monumental impact.”

Still Playing for Something That Matters

Winning the Away Game Podcast doesn’t offer formulas or false certainty. What it offers is something rarer: permission. Permission to acknowledge that success abroad is uneven. That reinvention carries grief. That belonging is rebuilt slowly, through language, shared memory, and story.

In a world obsessed with winning loudly, this podcast wins quietly – by giving South Africans abroad a place to land, reflect, and recognise themselves in others.

Because sometimes, winning the away game isn’t about how far you go. It’s about who you help feel less alone while you are there.