Herbert Mensah, the former board chairman of Asante Kotoko and current president of Rugby Africa, has voiced strong criticism about the state of football management in Ghana. His comments come in the wake of Ghana’s failure to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) for the first time in over two decades.
Mensah highlighted systemic issues in Ghanaian football, drawing from past experiences to illustrate his concerns. Recalling a troubling incident during his tenure at Kotoko, he said, “Kotoko could not field 11 players for a league match. It’s at that point that you have points deducted. People are bringing people from the village to say, can you play them?” This, he suggested, is indicative of deeper structural flaws that have long plagued the sport in the country.
Addressing the decline of the Black Stars, Mensah argued that the issues began long before the current leadership of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) took charge. “I’ve seen this rot in the Black Stars long before, even before the current management of the GFA took over,” he said.
Mensah attributed the struggles in Ghanaian football to a lack of a cohesive development strategy, particularly in integrating the domestic league, school systems, and talent pipelines. “There’s a certain direction in which we started going. Once you separate where you go in terms of the development of the domestic league and what happens in your school system and the pyramid scheme for excellence. Once you separate that, and you just simply think you can cut and paste, you end up where you are,” he explained.
His remarks reflect broader frustrations with how football is managed in Ghana, emphasizing the need for proactive measures to address systemic failures rather than waiting for crises to escalate. “There is something about us Ghanaians, you know. It’s as though you have to reach the point where the club or the nation or the sport is down,” he concluded in an interview with Joy News.
