A newspaper column arguing that government should stop bankrolling the national team has reopened a long-running argument about who pays for Ghana’s football and what the country gets back.
A commentary published by the Ghanaian Times has called on President John Mahama to halt government funding for the Black Stars, Ghana's senior national football team, for the rest of his administration's term.
The piece was written by Emmanuel Amponsah, a former Editor of The Spectator newspaper, who describes himself in the article as a concerned citizen. It is an opinion column, not a report of a government decision, and no official has announced any change to how the national team is financed.
The argument
Amponsah's central claim is that Ghanaian taxpayers are paying heavily for results that do not justify the cost. He points to the team's failure to qualify for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), the continent's biggest national-team tournament, as evidence that the money is not working.
He argues that the Ghana Football Association (GFA), the body that runs the game in the country, should be seen as a caretaker rather than an owner of the national team. In his view the Black Stars belong to the state and, by extension, to ordinary Ghanaians who fund them.
The column also anticipates the standard objection to any government involvement in football administration. FIFA, world football's governing body, can suspend member associations where it judges that a government has interfered in their affairs. Amponsah's response is blunt: he writes that Ghana should "embrace the ban with open arms and smiling faces" if it comes to that, while stressing that he is not calling for the GFA to be dissolved.
The local league angle
One of the more practical points in the piece concerns the Ghana Premier League, the domestic top flight. Amponsah suggests that cutting off foreign-currency bonuses tied to international tournaments would push administrators to pay closer attention to the local game, naming football centres such as Dormaa, Berekum and Accra.
He frames a funding freeze as a pause for planning rather than an abandonment of the sport, arguing it would allow Ghana to hand a cleaner structure to the next administration.
Why it lands now
The column notes that the President has previously blamed the former administration for the AFCON 2025 qualification failure, which Amponsah says makes football governance a political matter the current government cannot simply pass back to the GFA.
The same outlet reported on the same day that head coach Carlos Queiroz and the GFA had mutually agreed to end his contract, with Queiroz quoted as saying Ghanaian football faces wider problems that his exit will not fix.
For Ghanaians abroad who organise their weekends around national-team fixtures, the debate is familiar: whether the problem is the players, the administrators, or the way the whole thing is paid for.
