$5.4 million in appearance fees. The GFA’s preposterous 2022 World Cup budget proposal revealed
The Ghana Football Association was trumpeting its innocence in the thorny issue of Black Stars budgets and national team expenditure.
The football governing body said its role in national teams’ expenditure was limited to simply drafting budgets.
That was a response to President Mahama’s call for accountability to suggest that they would remain oblivious to the budget’s contents.
Appearance fees
On November 14, 2022, Black Stars coach Otto announced a squad list of twenty-six players to represent Ghana at the World Cup. Beyond the other-worldly experience of playing on the grandest stage of all, each player would earn a whopping $100,000 as an appearance fee.
What Ghanaians did not know was that the GFA had budgeted for an additional twenty-eight people to receive appearance fees, taking the total number of appearance fee beneficiaries to fifty-four. That sums up to $5.4 million.
Otto Addo’s ”Personal Assistant”
The GFA penciled down Otto Addo’s ”Personal Assistant” to receive an honorarium of $20,000.
He or she earned the same amount as Ghana’s scouts and as much as the head of delegation for the tournament.
Plane tickets.
Another curious item on the GFA’s budget was the cost of air tickets to fly the Black Stars players to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
The GFA budgeted to pay $7,000 for each player.
How did the plane tickets cost the same for each player when they flew to the UAE from different parts of the world? For example, Andre Ayew was playing in Qatar at the time. How could his plane ticket cost the same as Daniel Afriyie Barnieh, who joined from Ghana?
Purse holder
If ever there was any doubt about the high-level collusion between the Finance Ministry, Sports and Recreation Ministry, and the GFA, it is the honorarium for the purse holder.
The chief spending officer was still penciled down to earn $10,000 for doing what would essentially have been the same job the Finance Ministry pays him or her for.
The full budget is contained in the document below.
