Paa Kwesi Nduom bares teeth at GFA over cancellation of football season

Owner of Elmina Sharks Football Club, Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom has lashed out at the Ghana Football Association for not consulting owners of football clubs before canceling the 2019/2020 football season.

A decision to terminate the season which had been on a coronavirus induced break since March 15 was taken after during a meeting of the FA’s Executive Council on June 30.

Prior to arriving at that decision, the FA engaged the representatives of the clubs on the impact of the pandemic on the sector and how football could return.

But in an interview with UK-based Channel 7 TV, Paa Kwesi Nduom expressed anger over the decision.

According to him, instead of dealing with ‘club administrators’, the FA should have rather held talks with the owners before deciding to scrap the season from Ghana’s football history book.

Nduom is of the view since it’s the owners who recruit the administrators and bear the cost of the activities of the clubs, their opinions should have been considered before the decision was made.

" Who is this that is canceling this league, and who is this that is considering the financial and the health impact of all of this. It is not the club owners, and strangely enough in Ghana, it is not the club owners who are calling for the cancellation. Nobody called me a club owner to ask me what is my opinion. We have people they're calling 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 also said, "it should not up to the government to tell a private enterprise what to do, except what the government is telling everybody else to do. It is about time that, the people who have invested in football as private enterprises that we should be the once calling the cancellation for football in Ghana, and the league should be owned, managed, and controlled by those who have invested Ghana football. This is what happens in the UK, and those administrators they're hired, they come and go, but it is the owners who make the decisions."

Dr. Ndoum added, "there's nothing that stops Ghana from doing that, there are financial considerations, it is the owners who should have sat down to decide how we can handle it this way or not, but nobody talked to us”.

Meanwhile, the GFA says it will meet in the coming days to make plans for the 2019/2020 season.