GFA to introduce Single Judge System

The Ghana Football Association will introduce a new effective system to deal with disciplinary decisions next season instead of resorting to the disciplinary committee.

The GFA has come under intense criticisms as its body mandated to resolve issues takes a slow pace approach and delays in prescribing sanctions to guilty parties whiles the domestic game continues to be engulfed with unruly and hooligan acts at match venues.

The new Single Judge System which operates in many European countries requires a single individual to sit and adjudicate cases and effectively apply sanctions unlike Ghana's existing committee system which require members to form a quorum before cases can be heard.

“We are all concerned about the pace at which the Disciplinary Committee rules on cases because they will have to get majority of the members around to form a quorum and that really delay the verdicts,” GFA spokesperson Ibrahim Saani Daara told Sunyani-based Suncity Radio.

“All these hooligan acts are going on because we fail to apply the required sanctions as quickly as possible to those who are guilty and this is really having serious consequences,” he said.

"We'll introduce the Single Judge System next season and by that we will task people to monitor and report on these cases so the single judge rule on it without having to meet with any committee member or whatsoever and the judgements will come very quickly.”

Daara added: “That is the same system used by the English and other European countries and you can see that as soon as there is an incident, the next day there is a ruling and that is exactly what we will start next season.”