Betway Premiership — Post-Season | 24-26 May 2026
Orbit College’s first Premiership season ended at Mbombela Stadium on 23 May with a 2-0 defeat to Orlando Pirates that handed the Buccaneers a long-awaited title and confirmed Orbit’s automatic relegation. A week later, head coach Pogiso Makhoye has begun answering the question every relegated coach faces: what now, and whose fault was it?
“We had already come to terms with it”
Makhoye has not hidden behind the goals. Both of Pirates’ strikes at Mbombela were own goals — Orbit goalkeeper Nkomo for the opener before half-time, and Ngiba five minutes into the second half. The scoreline flattered Pirates in that sense, but it did not flatter Orbit either.
“We had already come to terms with the possibility of relegation before this match,” Makhoye told reporters in the immediate aftermath, in comments carried by The Post and TimesLIVE on 24 May. He went out of his way not to blame his players, and in particular not the young players he had spent the season backing through one of the most uneven schedules in the league.
The numbers Orbit have to live with
Orbit finished bottom on 24 points, level with Magesi but separated by a goal difference of -26 against Magesi’s -19. They lost 18 matches and conceded 47 goals — more than any other side in the Premiership. They used multiple under-23 players as a deliberate project, sometimes starting four at once. That choice came at a cost, but Makhoye has been clear it is not one he regrets.
“As a young coach, I was told that I needed to beef up the team with experience,” he told TimesLIVE. He framed the relegation as a lesson he has now absorbed: that when Orbit do return — and he has pledged that they will — he will return calmer and more experienced for it.
Where the club goes from here
The Rustenburg side drop back to the Motsepe Foundation Championship after a single Premiership campaign. The second tier is a familiar context — Orbit won promotion from it twelve months ago — and the question is whether the spine that lifted them up survives this round of decisions about contracts and trials.
Makhoye’s pledge is that the comeback will not be a hollow one. He has talked about a “stronger” return rather than a quicker one, and in a market where many ex-Premiership sides have spent five and six years stuck below the line, that is the more honest target.
