It’s rather unfortunate, pathetic and unscientific looking at the way and manner some Ghanaian football fans, Sports administrators, as well as Sports presenters look unconcerned about our local league in recent times, in terms of promoting it to become more attractive.
Sixteen years ago, the English Premiership was no-where near the German Bundesliga, the Italian Serie A and the Spanish La Liga, but now it is arguably the most exciting league across the World.
I have always been itching to ask what is wrong with the Ghanaian local league. Any time I watch other leagues in the world and see how it is packaged, I wonder what we are doing wrong with our local league.
In terms of the monetarily aspect, it would be suicidal to compete with the European leagues, but at least we can ensure that the enthusiasm in it is maintained.
If majority of Ghanaian football- loving fans who follow all the above-mentioned leagues in Europe can devote some time to watch the Ghanaian league, I strongly believe our local players will be encouraged to stay in the country and give their best. If you are fortunate to watch the South African League and you look at the spectators’ aspect of it and how it is packaged, you will marvel.
In terms of football records in Africa and the world at large, South Africa comes nowhere near Ghana. We are blessed with a lot of football talents and yet our local league is not attractive, because instead of our sports journalists promoting our league, they have devoted all their time promoting European leagues, and our local league is gradually dying to a point of no revival.
No European media will write in their newspapers or sit on their radio programs (like it is done here by our Ghanaian media personnel) and starts promoting the Ghanaian local league for us. Our media must also make our local league attractive like what media person’s in the 80’s and 90’s did to make our local league very attractive and exciting to the extent that football loving-fans travel from their regions to other regions to watch a league match. Today fans are not watching our local league matches. We should not forget the fact that the European leagues which is taking over our local league started from somewhere, and if their media personnel’s sat down unconcerned and keep promoting other people’s leagues, it is unfortunate that their country’s leagues will not get to its peak.
It is about time the Ghanaian media personnel’s in both print and electronic try their possible best and come up with strategies that would help repackage our local league to be attractive for the Ghanaian football loving- fans to take the delight in watching our local leagues at the various stadia. Our local league may not have the likes of Christiano Ronaldo, Yahaya Toure, Kwadwo Asamoah, Diego Costa, Lionel Messi, Schwanstaiger, David Silva and John Terry, but we can- through the media- create our big stars here too.
It will never happen elsewhere in Europe that their media will leave their own players and hype players from other countries like our sports journalist do for the European leagues. It’s about time our Sports journalists started promoting our players rather than focusing on the players from the European leagues.
Let us learn to appreciate the players we have in our local league and promote them as the European Sports journalist do for their players on radio, television and in newspapers. It saddens my heart anytime I see a whole local team newspapers waste most of their pages to promote foreign football news instead of using these pages to profile their past and current players; or to talk about the past records of their Clubs.
It’s rather unfortunate these same Sports journalists in both the print and electronic media have been complaining our local league is not attractive at all; having forgotten the fact that they have not been fair to our local league. Let us look at the time they devote to foreign news on sports and compare it to the time they give to news about issues in the Ghanaian Sports. When you monitor a two (2) hour Sports programme hardly would you see a scenario where 45 minutes is giving to talk about our local league or Ghanaian sports as a whole. The earlier our media change their attitude towards our local league the better.
Long live Ghana Football league
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