‘K’ is the Constant: The steady decline of Ghana football is a result of poor leadership

Ghana Football Association president, Kurt Okraku, stole the headlines after his 17 minute chastisement of the Black Stars for their poor run of form, before their AFCON qualifying double header against Sudan.

The senior national team has been on a steady decline for the past six years, with every passing year finding a way to be worse than the previous one.

After back-to-back group stage exits in the two previous AFCON editions, 2024 sees Ghana on the verge of missing out on the AFCON for the first time in 20 years.

Ghana need maximum points from their final two games while hoping Sudan fails to pick up a single point – a scenario that seems very unlikely.

For Okraku, his 17-minute long rant offers a good idea of what he thinks the issue is – the players, but for most outside the Ghana Football Association, the root cause of the issues lies with his leadership.

During his five-year reign as Ghana Football Association president, the Black Stars have not played a single knockout game at a major competition, a feat that has never occurred in the country’s rich football history.

Over 80 players have featured for the national team during that period, under five different technical heads, yet the results have stayed poor.
These poor results have come at a point where Ghana is seeing a rise in players featuring regularly for teams in the top European leagues.

Basically, as Ghanaian players are increasing in quality, the national team suffers.

How then does it still make sense to pin this massive decline simply on the issue of poor player quality or technical direction?

When one assesses the various variables that have been involved in this decline, there is only one constant that is observed – Kurt Okraku.

The Black Stars are not failing in isolation.

Ghana’s juvenile teams have not been at a World Cup since 2017. The senior women’s national team have not featured at an AWCON since 2018. The under-17 women’s national team has been banned by CAF/FIFA due to age cheating, which was facilitated by a GFA administrative error.

The Ghana Premier League continues to struggle, and is now losing quality talents to top flight leagues in Tanzania and Libya, something that was unheard of years ago.

Simply put, every facet of football in Ghana is concurrently suffering its worst period in history.

Are we now saying every player and coach across the board lacks quality? It’s simply impossible to reach such a conclusion.

Everything is pointing to the failure of the Ghana Football leadership, and the sooner they decide to tackle the issues from the roots, the better.

Mathematics teaches us about the constant of proportionality. When two variables are directly or indirectly proportional to each other, then their relationship can be described as y = kx or y = k/x, where k determines how the two variables are related to one another. This k is known as the constant of proportionality.

K (Kurt) is the constant in the decline of Ghana football.