There is a particular kind of optimism that Ghanaian football inspires. Anyone who has watched the Black Stars cycle through five head coaches in seven years, miss the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time in two decades, and sack our manager less than three months before a World Cup cannot reasonably be called naive. It is something more stubborn than that: a belief, rooted in history and occasionally rewarded by flashes of genuine brilliance, that Ghana is capable of so much more than it consistently produces.
That tension between what Ghana’s football could be and what the current Ghana Football Association (GFA), led by Kurt Okraku, has delivered defines the past seven years of the current administration’s existence. It is a story worth telling carefully, because it is more complicated than either its defenders or its harshest critics tend to admit.
Starting from the Ruins
To understand where the GFA is today, you have to go back to June 2018, when investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas released a documentary that shook Ghanaian football to its foundations. The film captured top GFA officials and referees on hidden camera taking bribes. The evidence was damning. Within days, FIFA and the Ghanaian government dissolved the association entirely. The Ghana Premier League season was cancelled mid-stream and Ghana was banned from international competitions.
The new GFA administration that emerged from the elections in October 2019 was starting from scratch, no functioning executive, no national team coaching staff, no domestic league season, and a football reputation in tatters. The task was enormous; rebuild institutional credibility, restore relations with FIFA and CAF, restart the domestic league, appoint technical staff for the various national teams, and make Ghana competitive again internationally.
A Revolving Door in the Technical Department
If there is one area where the current GFA administration’s failings have been most visible, it is in the handling of the Black Stars’ coaching setup. C.K. Akonnor, a former Black Stars captain, was the first appointment of the new era. He qualified the team for the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations, but performances were unconvincing and he was gone after fourteen months.
What followed was one of the more puzzling decisions of the administration’s tenure, the second coming of Milovan Rajevac, the Serbian who had guided Ghana to the quarter-finals of the 2010 World Cup. At the 2021 AFCON in Cameroon, Ghana failed to win a single group game, losing 3–2 to Comoros, a country making their tournament debut. Rajevac was dismissed four months after his reappointment.
Otto Addo then walked into one of the more thankless briefs in Ghanaian football history, fix a team in crisis, with a World Cup playoff against Nigeria just weeks away, on an interim basis. He did it. Ghana drew 0–0 in Accra and 1–1 in Abuja, qualifying on away goals. At the tournament itself in Qatar, Ghana beat South Korea 3–2 in a game of real quality before exiting at the group stage. Addo, honouring his prior agreement, stepped down. Chris Hughton arrived next, carrying the credibility of a long Premier League management career. Another AFCON group-stage exit ended his tenure, and the GFA turned once again to Addo.
The AFCON Humiliation and the World Cup Revival
Otto Addo’s second spell produced the sharpest contradiction of the GFA’s recent history. The AFCON campaign was catastrophic. Across six qualifying matches, Ghana failed to win a single game and finished bottom of the group. It was the first time since 2004 that Ghana had missed the Africa Cup of Nations, ending a two-decade streak of continental participation. For a country that has won AFCON four times, it felt like something closer to institutional decay.
And then, almost defiantly, the World Cup qualification campaign told a completely different story. The same squad, the same coach, the same association and suddenly Ghana were clinical, organised, and dominant. They topped their group with 25 points from nine games, winning six and losing none. Addo became the first coach in Ghanaian history to qualify the national team for two separate World Cups. And then, inexplicably, the GFA sacked the man who had got them there.
72 Days, No Coach and Then, Queiroz
On 31 March 2026, following a 2–1 defeat to Germany in a friendly in Stuttgart, the GFA confirmed that Otto Addo had been dismissed with immediate effect. The World Cup group stage was 72 days away. Ghana had been drawn alongside England, Croatia and Panama. The decision was not entirely without logic, as Addo’s overall win rate in his second spell was a modest 36 per cent, and the team had been criticised for lacking a clear identity. But sacking a coach ten weeks before the opening match of a World Cup raises serious questions about how the GFA makes its decisions.
The scramble to find a replacement was frenetic, with over 600 applicants. The answer arrived on 14 April 2026, just 58 days before the tournament’s opening match. Carlos Queiroz, 73 years old, former assistant to Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and a coach with five World Cup campaigns across four different nations, was appointed on a short-term contract. World Cup appearances with South Africa, Portugal, and Iran, and a run to the 2021 AFCON final with Egypt. The GFA created a crisis, then resolved it in the most last-minute fashion possible.
The Wider Reckoning
Ghana is a country that has won the Africa Cup of Nations four times, reached the quarter-final of a World Cup, and produced the first African nation to win the FIFA U-20 World Cup in 2009. The raw material is not the problem. The talent exists. The passion of Ghanaian football supporters at home and in the diaspora is not in question. What is in question is whether the GFA has the institutional capacity to build on that legacy rather than merely coast on it. Ghana fell from 51st in the world and 7th in Africa when the current administration took over in 2019, to 74th in the world and 14th in Africa in the latest rankings. In the same period, Senegal have won the Africa Cup of Nations twice, Morocco reached the semi-finals of a World Cup, and Ivory Coast won AFCON on home soil. The continent has not stood still.
The pattern of reactive coaching decisions, governance lapses, and persistent questions about domestic league integrity suggests an association that is still managing crises rather than building for the future.
A World Cup and a Question
Ghana will compete at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, that is real, and it matters. We will arrive with a coach chosen at the last possible moment, a pragmatic and experienced hand brought in to steady a ship that the GFA itself had destabilised. Whether Queiroz can build enough cohesion in a matter of weeks to mount a serious challenge in the group stage is a question nobody can answer yet. What is clear is that the question should never have needed asking. The GFA created a crisis, then resolved it in the most last-minute fashion possible.
Ghana’s football history says the 2026 World Cup should be the beginning of something new. The GFA’s recent record gives us reason to wonder. And Carlos Queiroz, for better or worse, is the man they have chosen to find out. The entire nation waits and watches.
