In our Friday, January 26, 2024 edition, we expressed concern over a series of allegations that have rocked the senior national soccer team, the Black Stars, after their painful exit from the AFCON 2023 currently underway in Ivory Coast.
The Chronicle, for instance, picked information that because of the bad relationship between some of the FA officials and agents of some of the players, the latter is not being invited into the team and in cases where they are even invited, their services are not properly utilised.
In view of this, we suggested a total overhaul of the team, which is owned by the state to ensure that they perform well in their next international assignments. Indeed, a lot have happened since we made these suggestions. In fact we are being told that the manager of the national team does not allegedly have full control over who to invite and which player to use.
We are also being told that some of the FA members have teams across all football divisions in the country. Coaches selected to handle these national teams allegedly call the bulk of the players from these teams, owned by the FA officials. To make matters worse, management members of the Black Stars are being paid huge sums of money for the role they are playing.
If we all agree that the national teams, and most especially the Black Stars, is owned and funded by the state, then the government of the day should play a crucial role in the selection and appointment of coaches to handle the national teams, but unfortunately, this is not happening.
As we speak, the GFA after the abysmal performance of the team in Ivory Coast has set up a committee to search for a new coach. This is like putting the cart before the horse, because how does the FA go hunting for a new coach when they have not done any technical assessment and come up with a comprehensive report on why we failed abysmally at the tournament.
If for anything at all, since we all know that the team belongs to the state, one would have expected the government to take the initiative to search and appoint its own coach, but for fear of being accused of interfering in football administration by FIFA, we are allowing the FA to do the selection again.
Nevertheless, to avoid the dissipation of state resources without corresponding results, as we are experiencing now, The Chronicle expects the government to sit down with the new Black Stars coach, when selected, and charge him to do an independent work.
As a matter of fact, a clause should be inserted in his contract to assure the coach that the government of Ghana will not support his dismissal if he decides to invite his own players without any interference from the football people. We believe that if the coach is given this assurance, he would defy any FA member that may try to influence his selection of players.
We insist that the Black Stars is owned by the state and must, therefore, have crucial role to play as to who manages the team. Whilst we admit that football is a big time business, it does not mean that we should allow private individuals to turn the national soccer teams into their private business venture at the expense of the state.
This also brings us to the issue of fat bonuses that are allegedly paid to management members of the Black Stars. According to various media reports, each member of the management team allegedly pocketed a whopping $100,000 after the 2022 World Cup. We hope this is not true, but if the opposite is the case, then The Chronicle will be surprised that the government also sanctioned such payments.
Medical doctors who help save lives in Ghana and university lecturers who impact knowledge to the next generation do not earn even a quarter of the package as their retirement benefits. The big question is: can the government look at the faces of the agitating workers and tell them there is no money, when it has signed off such a huge sums of money to individuals for playing roles that
do not even bring us success?
Certainly, there is no justification for such huge payments even if the money is coming from FIFA. If the national team had not qualified for the World Cup, FIFA wouldn’t have paid any appearance fee to the Ghana FA. Again, if this is the case, why should we allow people to use the name of Black Stars to make money and yet Ghanaians cannot question them because the money is from FIFA?
The last time we checked, the only product GFA has is the local league, which is almost dead, as Ghanaian teams have failed to perform well in Africa in recent years. All the cash cows – Starlets, Satellite, Black Meteors and Black Stars – are owned by the state of Ghana. This is the reason why we should be concerned about how football money is being dissipated.
We pause here and shall be back.
