Elmina Sharks owner Paa Kwesi Nduom criticises GFA decision to cancel season

Owner of Ghanaian top-flight side Elmina Sharks, Paa Kwesi Nduom has criticised the Ghana Football Association (GFA) for cancelling the 2019/20 season as a result of the coronavirus.

After months of uncertainty, the GFA took the decision to cancel the season which had been suspended for more than four months due to the outbreak of the virus in Ghana. The decision was taken after a reported seven-hour meeting by the Executive Council.

But the business consultant, who on three occasions contested the Ghana presidency, claims the local football governing had no locus to cancel the season without consulting the club owners, who are the ones investing in the football.

He wondered why such a unilateral decision could be taken when the GFA was merely an administrative body.

“Who is this that is cancelling this league, and who is this that is considering the financial and the health impact of all of this?” he inquired during an interview with UK-based GN Radio and Channel 7 TV.

Nduom condemned the GFA for snubbing him and other club owners before taking the decision last week.

“It is not the club owners, and strange enough in Ghana, it is not the club owners who are calling for the cancellation, and nobody called me as a club owner to ask me what my opinion to be done is."

“We have people they're calling as football administrators; a football administrator doesn't have a penny or a pesewa in the game. Somebody who is elected by people we have employed to work for us cannot tell me, and shouldn't be put in a position to tell me what I should and should not do," he said.

"It should not be up to the government to tell a private enterprise what to do, except what the government is telling everybody else what to do.

"It is about time that the people who have invested in football as private enterprises that we are should be the ones calling for the cancellation of football in Ghana and that a league should be there that is owned, managed and controlled by those who have invested in football in Ghana.

“This is what happens in the UK and those administrators they've hired, they come and go, but it is the owners who make the decisions," he noted.

“Owners of the big clubs in the English Premier League get together and they have a strong affiliation to help each other in terms of commercial, there's nothing that stops Ghana from doing that same financial consideration.

“It is the owners who should have sat down to decide [whether] we can handle it this way or not, but nobody talked to us. I hear that there was a call among the managers of the teams but the managers that I have recruited and I pay cannot go and make decisions for me", he stated.