Former Minister of Youth and Sports, Edwin Nii Lante Vanderpuye, has expressed his belief that the current structure of Ghanaian football is a recipe for failure. He highlights the consistent underperformance of national teams in recent tournaments and the struggle to attract both audience and corporate sponsorship to the domestic league.
Vanderpuye, who served as the Minister for Sport from 2015 to 2017, suggests that the root of these failures can be traced back to the way Ghanaian football is organized. He contrasts it with the system implemented by top English Premier League clubs, where there are junior levels such as U21 and U19 teams that compete in a league, ensuring a continuous influx of young talent into the national setup.
In Ghana, according to Vanderpuye, the approach is different. Players are only assembled for tournaments, leading to a fragmented and disjointed system. He states, “We wait until we have a tournament; we invite somebody here, we call somebody from here, put them together and play. We can never achieve results when we continue to do that. It’s like we plan to fail.”
To illustrate his point, Vanderpuye mentions the success of England’s Young Lions at the U21 championship, where new talents emerge while previous players move on to higher levels. He emphasizes the importance of nurturing young players from the U17 level, as they will be the ones representing the country in the coming years.
Vanderpuye highlights the need for Ghanaian football to adopt a similar structural approach, with junior levels playing in a league to ensure a continuous supply of new, young faces into the national sphere. He argues that waiting until tournaments to assemble players is not conducive to achieving positive results.
In conclusion, Vanderpuye advocates for a structural overhaul of Ghanaian football, stressing the importance of developing young talent at different levels to establish a sustainable pipeline of players for the national teams.