Soccer in Ghana

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The Black Stars at the Africa Cup 2008

Football is probably the most popular sport in Ghana and can look back on more than a hundred years of tradition. The Ghana national football team of men ( Black Stars ) several times African champions have become, has in the 2006 FIFA World Cup , the eighth and during the 2010 FIFA World Cup reaches the quarter-finals. The Ghanaian team is currently world champion at the junior soccer world championship. The Ghanaian national soccer team for women ( Black Queens ) is also one of the most successful national soccer teams in Africa . She has already reached the preliminary round of the women's soccer World Cup three times and she came second in three African Championships. The top division in the country is the Ghana Premier League . The Ghanaian football clubs were organized in the Ghana Football Association , which was dissolved by government orders in June 2018 after allegations of corruption. At the Ghanaian FA Cup , the country's league clubs have been playing against each other according to the knock-out system since 1958.

History of football in Ghana

The beginnings in colonial times

As in other African countries, what was to become Ghana came into contact with football for the first time in the 19th century through Europeans who lived or stopped in the trading cities of the Ghanaian coast. It then spread parallel to the territorial expansion of British colonial rule in the Crown Colony of Gold Coast . Since until the end of the 19th century only the extreme south of the country was directly ruled by the British as a crown colony , the football wave reached the center and north of the country much later and the first clubs emerged in the large coastal cities: the Invincibles in Accra were the first club, the Hearts of Oaks founded in the same place in 1910, followed by the Cape Coast Venomous Vipers and the Cape Coast Mysterious Dwards in Cape Coast and Sekondi Hasaacas and Sekondi Eleven Wise FC in the large port city of Sekondi . In contrast to the Invincibles, the Hearts of Oaks still exist today, making them the oldest and one of the two most important clubs in the country.

It was not until 1935 that the first clubs were founded in the Ashanti area, which was now completely subject to British rule, and there in Kumasi, the capital of the former Ashanti kingdom : Asante Kotoko , to this day the great opponent of the Hearts of Oaks, and Kumasi Corner Stones .

In 1952 the colonial government decreed the establishment of the Gold Coast Amateur Sports Council , to which all amateur clubs in the colony were subordinate.

Independent Ghana

The Black Stars at their greatest success so far: Soccer World Cup 2010

Ghana, which was independent in 1957, also dropped the colonial name in football and founded the Ghana Football Association, which in 1958 joined the Confederation Africaine de Football and FIFA . Kwame Nkrumah , the country's first president, was one of the leading figures of pan-Africanism and saw football as an opportunity to bring the cultures of Africa together in play. Unfortunately, this has not worked well within the country of Ghana. The rivalry between the two big soccer clubs of Ghana, Asante Kotoku and the Hearts of Oaks is also an occasionally bloody rivalry between the great ethnic groups of the Ashanti Kumasis and the Andangme or Ga , who make up the majority of the population in Accra. In 2001, the so-called Accra Sports Stadium Disaster occurred when violence broke out after a game between the two clubs that claimed the lives of 126 people.

In June 2018, Ghana's government ordered the dissolution of the Ghana Football Association with immediate effect after a documentary made public allegations of corruption against association president Kwesi Nyantakyi and other officials as well as against several Ghanaian referees.

See also

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  1. ↑ The mysterious dwarfs of welfare football, taz article from July 2, 2010 by Amos Safo
  2. ↑ The mysterious dwarfs of welfare football, taz article from July 2, 2010 by Amos Safo
  3. ^ Ghana mourns after football tragedy
  4. ↑ Corruption allegations: Ghana dissolves national football association. In: www.zeit.de. June 8, 2018, accessed June 8, 2018 .