The Director of Coaching Education for the Ghana Football Association (GFA), Professor Kwame Mintah, has recounted with displeasure how some clubs have reneged on their financial obligations towards their players and coaches and which is having adverse effect on their performance.
He said unlike the expatriate coaches who were given the best of treatment, managers of locals clubs had often given Ghanaian coaches the short end of the stick and sometimes treated them with contempt.
He explained that the Ghanaian coach had the capacity to perform much better than some of the foreign ones who were engaged by the local clubs but often the poor treatment and lack of support from club owners did not make their working environment conducive.
Speaking to the Graphic Sports in an interview last Thursday on the impact of foreign coaches on the local league, Prof. Mintah made reference to how some coaches were allowed to work for several months without salary and wondered how they could perform under such treatment.
According to the GFA director of Coaching Education, who is also an Associate Professor of Physical Education and Sports Psychology at the University of Cape Coast, some of the local coaches had confided in him about the failure of their employers to remunerate them in the last five months.
”I can say that there is not much of a difference; the difference is what support you get from your club. Some of these coaches haven’t even been paid for the past five months but if it’s a foreign coach, maybe that will not be the story. You end up paying the person (foreign coaches) every month and paying what the players are also qualified to receive.
“So, it’s us and it’s our approach and the support that we give to them. I am saying that the Ghanaian coach is equally competent as any other foreigner who comes here,” he said.
He averred that despite the preferential treatment that was often given to the foreign coaches, they ended up not surviving the local terrain and had to be kicked out while their local counterparts continued to win laurels for their clubs.
”We have seen many foreign coaches coming in and they couldn’t survive. They have all been kicked out and the Ghanaian coaches are still here performing, winning medals and trophies for us”, he noted.
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