Ghana's broken football dreams: why an African nation will never win the World Cup

2026 World Cup qualifying concludes across Africa this week, and with Ghana as a case study, a new investigation says economics and exploitation hold Africa back

By Howard Akumiah and James Corbett

Ghana face the Central African Republic in their penultimate World Cup qualifier today (Wednesday) before concluding their campaign at home against Comoros in Accra on Sunday.

Three points across those two fixtures will almost certainly see them qualify directly for next year’s World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada, a group winners of CAF’s Group I.

After the humiliation of finishing rock bottom of their AFCON qualifying group – losing at home to Angola, drawing with Niger, defeated by a Sudan team cobbled together from YouTube discoveries – it would offer something approaching redemption. The Black Stars won’t play in the forthcoming tournament in December and January in Morocco, but they should make football’s biggest stage for the fifth time.

They have previously played in the World Cups of 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2022.

Yet whatever the relative success of reaching the World Cup finals, that’s all it will ever be: relative. Because Ghana, like every African nation, plays a sport that is rigged against them.

In 1977, Pelé made a prophecy: an African country would win the World Cup before the year 2000. It was a bold claim from the game’s greatest player, one that reflected the explosion of African talent entering European football.

Nearly half a century later, no African team has really come near. Morocco came closest in 2022, reaching the semi-finals before losing to France – a team built substantially on African talent, including Kylian Mbappé, whose father Wilfried is from Cameroon.

Pelé’s prophecy won’t come true by 2050 either. Not because African nations lack talent – they produce it in abundance. But because the economic fundamentals, the institutional structures, and the extractive systems that govern global football make African success at the highest level virtually impossible. This isn’t pessimism. It’s mathematics.

Ghana’s football struggle is West Africa’s struggle. Across the region, the same patterns repeat: extraordinary talent haemorrhaging to Europe, domestic leagues starved of resources, youth players treated as commodities, national teams that never quite fulfil their potential.

Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast – they all face versions of the same malaise. Understanding Ghana means understanding the forces shaping football across an entire continent.

But for me (Howard), understanding this struggle is also personal.

My father emigrated from Ghana to the United States in the 1970s to study at Harvard. There he met my mother, also Ghanaian. I grew up as a first-generation American with expat family scattered between the US and London. The Black Stars are the ribbon that connects us all – the one thing that brings uncles and cousins and aunts together, whether they’re in Accra or New Jersey or Bermondsey. When the Black Stars play, we all watch. When they disappoint, we all feel it.

Last year, a conversation with my uncle about yet another disappointing Black Stars performance left us with a question neither of us could properly answer: Why are Ghana’s national team, individually so talented and successful at their clubs, so often unsuccessful when they come together?

We spitballed theories over the phone. Corruption. Poor coaching. Bad luck. But none of it felt sufficient. My uncle, who’d followed the Black Stars since the glory days of the early 1980s, encouraged me to look deeper. And I thought: why not commission a proper investigation?

That decision became the first project of my production company, Divicage.

Over the following year, we sent a team of journalists to Ghana, Scandinavia, the United States and beyond. My team, including my co-author of this piece, James Corbett, interviewed the former president of Ghana, John Kufuor, national team legends like Stephen Appiah and Sammy Kuffour, the masked investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas who brought down Ghana’s football association, European scouts working the academies, and economists who study African development. The result is a six-part documentary podcast series produced in partnership with Goal.com.

What we discovered wasn’t a simple story of underperformance. It was something far more uncomfortable: a tale of extraction and exploitation, of economics and neo-colonialism, of a system designed to benefit everyone except Ghana itself.

From left, Grace Boateng with James Corbett, Howard Akumiah and Anas Aremeyaw Anas, one of Africa’s most important investigative journalists

Ghana shouldn’t be a footballing minnow. Millions play every weekend across dusty pitches and cracked concrete courts. The country has produced Abedi Pele, Michael Essien, Asamoah Gyan, Mohammed Kudus. The talent keeps coming, generation after generation, an apparently inexhaustible supply.

Yet the Black Stars haven’t won the Africa Cup of Nations since 1982. They’ve qualified for four World Cups but never progressed beyond the quarter-finals. In 2024, they finished rock bottom of their AFCON qualifying group in humiliating circumstances.

Everyone in Ghana knows something is wrong. They just can’t agree on what, or why, or how to fix it. But after examining the social and economic fundamentals and following the money through Ghana’s academy system, a pattern emerges that suggests the Black Stars were never really underperforming at all. Perhaps expecting more was itself the problem.

The disaster that changed everything

On 9 May 2001, Hearts of Oak met Asante Kotoko at Accra Sports Stadium. Hearts scored twice in the dying minutes. Kotoko fans erupted. Police fired tear gas into packed terraces. Thousands surged toward exits. Many gates were locked. In the crush, 126 people died.

President John Kufuor rushed to the hospital that night. “I saw stacks upon stacks of dead bodies,” he recalled to us. “I didn’t see anything like it. Very shocking. It traumatized me.”

A commission of inquiry followed. Six officers faced manslaughter charges. None were convicted. Promised police training never materialised. Structural reforms came slowly, if at all.

More than 20 years later, Kufuor offered a stunning piece of revisionism: he blamed the referee. Not the police who fired tear gas. Not officials who locked gates. Not administrators who allowed dangerous overcrowding. The referee who made bad calls.

From left, Grace Boateng, former Ghana president John Kufour, Fiifi Anaman, James Corbett and Howard Akumiah,

The disaster killed more than 126 people. It killed the culture of stadium-going that had sustained Ghanaian football for generations.

“People were just scared of the stadium,” says Gary Al-Smith, one of Ghana’s leading sports journalists. “There were no guarantees that they were safe. The culture of stadium attendance died with May 9, 2001 and has not fully resurrected.”

Empty terraces meant less revenue. Less revenue meant lower wages and poorer infrastructure. Into that void, other problems metastasised.

The exodus

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just as domestic football haemorrhaged fans and revenue, Ghana’s best players began their mass exodus to Europe.

In 1984, only two Black Stars squad members played overseas. By 2002, thirteen were based abroad. By 2010, only two players in Ghana’s AFCON squad played domestic football.

The Ghana Premier League became a footnote. Quality plummeted. Wages collapsed to between 200 and 500 dollars per month. The best players weren’t even leaving for Europe’s elite competitions anymore. Ethiopia, Nepal, Burkina Faso, Libya, Sudan became destinations for desperate escapes.

“It’s become a conveyor belt of talent for outside,” Al-Smith observes. “The people whose eyes they attract come from North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, the Gulf, Asia.”

Stephen Appiah, who joined the Hearts of Oak junior side in the mid-1990s, remembers when domestic football still functioned. “They had all their best players. They had Laryea Kingston, they had Gordon Duah, they had Dan Quaye and the rest. These are guys who played for the national team.”

By the 2000s, that system had collapsed. “Even the young ones were being discovered at say under-17 level and they were being shipped off to Europe,” explains football historian Fiifi Amanam. “So they never get to play in a local league. So you wouldn’t have the best talent playing in a local league.”

The model that works elsewhere – develop young talent, showcase them domestically, sell at a premium, reinvest – broke completely. Instead, Ghana gave away its future for free, one desperate teenager at a time.

Venture capital in human form

The academy system that emerged into this void didn’t fix the problem. It institutionalised extraction.

First, understand what these academies are. They’re privately-run football training centres, often funded by European clubs or wealthy individuals, that operate outside Ghana’s traditional club structure.

Unlike youth systems in Europe – where clubs develop players as part of their league operations – Ghanaian academies exist primarily to identify talent, provide basic training and sell players abroad. They’re businesses first, football clubs second.

The model is simple: scout talented children as young as twelve or thirteen, house them at the academy, provide education and coaching, then broker moves to European clubs when they turn eighteen. Revenue comes from transfer fees (although these are usually nominal), solidarity payments (up to 10 percent of future transfers distributed to clubs who developed players), and sell-on percentages. It’s talent arbitrage – buy speculatively and low in Ghana, sell high in Europe.

Ghana’s best known academy is Right To Dream, and its alumni includes Atalanta’s Kamaldeen Sulemana, Lyon’s Ernest Nuamah and Tottenham’s Muhmmed Kudus.

Yet when Manchester City, freshly backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, signed a ten-year deal with Right to Dream academy in 2010, the terms were stark: £850,000 per year, rising with inflation. In return, City got the right to acquire any Right to Dream player for free once they turned eighteen. According to leaked documents, City referred to money invested in these young players as “venture capital.”

None of the eleven players who went from Right to Dream to Manchester City made a first-team appearance. The pattern repeated: Ghana to City, immediate loan elsewhere in Europe, often multiple times, then release. The most any achieved was itinerant careers in Finland, Cyprus, Romania, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia.

Collins Tanor was the great hope of Ghanaian football. Captain of the Black Starlets. At fourteen, he joined Tom Vernon, Right to Dream’s founder, at Downing Street to meet Prime Minister David Cameron. Three years later, he joined Manchester City. By 2020, aged twenty-two, the brightest young Ghanaian player of his generation was without a club. In August 2024, he signed for Hinckley in the ninth tier of English football. His last appearance was as a fifty-eighth-minute substitute in a 2-1 defeat. Seventy-one spectators attended.

The Manchester City partnership’s failures didn’t deter Right to Dream. In late 2015, Vernon bought Danish club FC Nordsjælland for €10 million and immediately signed a new agreement with City. This one was even more brazen: City could sign any Nordsjælland player up to age twenty-one, with buyback clauses on any the Danish club sold elsewhere. Control of Nordsjælland’s transfer policy had effectively been ceded to Manchester City – a deal that appeared to breach FIFA rules prohibiting third-party ownership or control of players.

The arrangement was secret until Danish journalist Jeppe Laursen exposed it through the Football Leaks investigation in 2018. Vernon claimed the agreement had changed by late 2018 but never elaborated. Crucially, City and Nordsjælland never acted on it. Whether shame, legal concerns, or simple dysfunction prevented them remains unclear.

What is clear: since Nordsjælland replaced Manchester City as Right to Dream’s primary partner, outcomes have improved. Kudus, Sulemana and Nuamah – all developed well in Denmark before moving to bigger clubs. The model can work when the intermediary club actually plays the players rather than treating them as speculative assets to be warehoused on loan.

Peter Alegi, a football historian at Michigan State University, connects this pattern to Ghana’s colonial past. “With colonialism also came economic exploitation, very clearly. I mean, one can look at the history of cocoa, among other things. But I think it’s important to remember that the British did not foster the growth of an internal market economy in Ghana. Everything was externally oriented, right? Through export and then consumption of British manufactured goods. And so that went with football too.”

The academy system perpetuates that extractive logic. Of the nearly €10 billion spent globally on transfers in 2023, just 76 cents of every $1,000 made its way back to African clubs. Of the €162 million spent on 607 Ghanaian player transfers in 2023, perhaps €20 million filtered back to Ghanaian clubs and academies via FIFA solidarity mechanisms.

“The proliferation of academies is also a sign of things not getting done properly within the soccer system,” Alegi argues. “Because if you look around the world, who runs the youth systems? It’s the clubs. But it’s something that private individuals are running as a business more often than not.”

Most importantly, academies operating outside league competitions undermine domestic football, which should generate local interest, provide an economic base, and give players a platform to develop cohesion before supporting the national team.

“If you want to win a World Cup, you’ve got to have a real domestic league,” Alegi says.

The vicious cycle

The Black Stars’ success – qualification for three consecutive World Cups, the 2010 quarter-final near-miss – came at the expense of domestic football. And that ultimately undermined the national team itself.

“If you have a vibrant local league, you have a lot of attention on your country,” Amanam explains. “You’re able to create premium entertainment for your own people. You’re able to create talent for the national team. And it works because once they all play locally, they know each other, they know their style of play.”

When Ghana won AFCON in 1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982, squads were built on domestic football’s foundation. Players who trained together, understood each other’s movements, shared tactical languages developed in the same system.

“But if you just plug players from Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, South Africa, here and there, you put them together. You expect them to play together from different footballing cultures. It never really works.”

The mathematics are brutal. Ghana produces enormous talent, but obstacles to developing that talent are so great that fewer players reach the top level. Selection pools remain small. When Thomas Partey was Arsenal’s midfield mainstay, his understudies played for lower Turkish or MLS teams. Compare that with the depth England or France possess in every position.

Fighting with one hand tied

The uncomfortable truth: Ghana is fighting an economic battle it cannot win.

During my team’s ten-day visit to Accra in 2024, the Cedi dropped 8 percent. The currency now sits at roughly 6 percent of its pre-2008 financial crisis value. Since the turn of the century, Ghana’s per capita GDP has also grown by a factor of six. Yet amidst this instability the gap with the rest of the world keeps widening.

Dr. Erlend Berg, a development economist at the University of Bristol, conducted modelling that plotted GDP per capita against FIFA rankings. The relationship exists but it’s weak. What matters more is how resources are deployed.

Morocco, with similar GDP per capita and population to Ghana, reached the 2022 World Cup semi-finals and will co-host the 2030 tournament. The difference isn’t money. It’s institutional commitment, sustained investment in academies and coaching, aggressive diaspora recruitment, and royal family backing that never wavered.

Ghana made different choices. Or rather, Ghana chose not to choose at all.

Professional football operates like an arms race. The more you spend, the more successful you become. Better facilities, logistics, nutrition, trained players, managers, coaches. Even when Argentina – economically a mid-ranking nation – won the 2022 World Cup, its GDP per capita still outstripped Ghana’s by five to one. The countries succeeding on the world stage have economic resources that dwarf Ghana’s.

Even on a most basic level, being a poor country impacts players in many different ways. Rory O’Ferrall, head of the Africa Department at Berlin Sports-Bridge For Talents, is blunt about physical disadvantages rooted in economic inequality. “The general population is shorter and thinner than we have over here. And there are a lot of malnourished people and that translates onto the pitch as well. A lot of young players don’t reach their full physical capacity because they’ve not had the right nutrition growing up.”

The unanswerable question

Perhaps there isn’t one single answer to why the Black Stars underperform. Perhaps it’s all of these things, layered and reinforcing and impossible to disentangle.

It’s 126 people dying in a stampede and the culture of stadium-going dying with them. It’s domestic league players earning 200 dollars monthly and leaving for Nepal or Ethiopia. It’s promising teenagers vanishing to European academies, treated as venture capital, never playing together long enough to develop understanding. It’s a currency losing 94 percent of its value in less than two decades while football infrastructure crumbles.

Ghana isn’t unique in this. Across West Africa, the same patterns repeat. Talent haemorrhaging to Europe. Domestic leagues starved of resources. Youth players treated as commodities. The England and France squads that performed so strongly in recent tournaments were built substantially on African talent – Saka, Eze, Pogba, Mbappé – players whose parents or grandparents fled the very conditions that make it impossible to build sustainable football at home.

The Black Stars are, in a very real sense, fighting above their weight just by qualifying for tournaments. Expecting them to win when fundamental economics and infrastructure are so stacked against them may be unrealistic.

If global football wants to benefit from African talent – and it does, desperately – then it has an obligation to invest in the systems that produce that talent, rather than simply extracting it and leaving behind wreckage. Until then, Ghana – like other African countries – will keep producing extraordinary players who make other nations great, while the Black Stars remain trapped in a cycle of malaise that no amount of talent alone can break.

Pelé’s prophecy won’t come true until the sport itself changes. An African nation won’t win the World Cup while academies treat children as venture capital, while domestic leagues collapse under economic pressure, while European clubs extract talent for pennies and sell it for millions, while the best African players build their understanding of the game in Madrid and Manchester rather than Accra and Abidjan.

The talent is there. It’s always been there. But talent without systems, without investment, without honest governance, is just potential waiting to be exploited. And exploitation, as Ghana knows too well, never leads to glory.

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The Black Stars Podcast, a six part documentary series on the state of Ghanaian football co-produced by Divicage Productions and Goal.com, is available on all major platforms.

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