It’s a dying, not a dead Ghana Premier League (GPL) that’s seriously bleeding for deep thinking into its administration.
The GPL needs that else it has no real future. And it’s better the bitter truth is accepted so an end is found to the institutionalised corruption in our league.
Otherwise, we’ll continue to sink into nothingness when calls for the continent’s club competition are made. What’s sad, it doesn't seem to me that, the Ghana Football Association (GFA) has a voracious appetite to address the fundamental problems with discipline, management and organisation regarding the GPL.
It’s why I weep for the GPL. I’ve no GPL investment aside my emotion which unlike financial investment, could easily be withdrawn anytime I so wish. This explains why club owners and administrators making various investments in the GPL ought to be deeply concerned about how the competition is managed.
Anything is possible in the GPL. This creates integrity problems. If you’ve got money, time or valuable resources in the GPL, you’ve to rethink. There’s sanctioned corruption emanating from careless management of the competition, and because the FA, whose members are mostly in a conflict of interest position benefits from the embarrassing, substandard decisions of the GPL managers, no one wants the problems fixed.
It’s why I weep for the GPL. If not, how does a player of a club, demoted as a result of match-fixing, ends up as goal king? In which league does this happen? Again, this is why I weep for the GPL, and I’ll cry out, because Ashantigold had no business being allowed to play to the end of the competition if the GPL has serious managers.
We like cosmetic approaches to dealing with problems otherwise, it should’ve been known that, fairness and the competitiveness of the league were shot and fatally wounded when Ashgold were sent to Division Two for match-fixing yet permitted to compete in the GPL to the end. Which serious league is run like that?
We wail over lack sponsorship but conveniently forget that corporate entities we seek financial and logistical support from, see the mismanagement of issues and events in the GPL and would thus drag their feet when it comes to sponsoring the competition for the simple reason that they handle their business well and wouldn’t want to associate with a competition whose integrity the people in it wouldn’t vouch for.
This is why I weep for the GPL. How does anyone justify Ashantigold’s stay in the league till the end with Yaw Annor crowned as goal king? Wherein lies fairness? Where’s the genuineness of competition? This is why I weep for the GPL.
We can remain deluded but there's a competitions management problem. The GPL will continue to lose its attractiveness to the inherently corrupt management systems if those investing in the competition stay asleep. That’s if they don’t wake up to the façade and deal with the deluge of deceit brought upon themselves through incompetent, substandard management.
Source: Jerome Otchere