Strip out the grievances and look at the team. Ghana have lost five of the last six matches and are without a win since last October. They have won just nine of their last thirty.
The decline stretches back the best part of a decade, bottoming out in the humiliation of failing to qualify for the 2025 AFCON, when they finished rock bottom of a group containing Angola, Niger and a Sudan side assembled from YouTube discoveries.
From 2008 to 2017 Ghana reached the semi-finals of every AFCON they entered. Now, with the tournament expanded to twenty-four teams, they couldn’t even get in.
The qualifying campaign for this World Cup briefly suggested a team reborn: top of the group, goals flowing, a “different face,” as Addo put it.
But watch those matches closely and the warning signs were everywhere. There was no recognisable philosophy, no clear strategy; players strung things together rather than executing a plan, and in the final third the team looked utterly bereft of ideas.
That Jordan Ayew kept stepping up with important goals felt more like a miracle than a product of coaching.
Then came Vienna. On 27 March, Ghana lost a friendly 5-1 to Austria, and within twenty-four hours Addo, whose win percentage stood at a dismal 36% from 22 games, was gone, sacked barely ten weeks before the tournament at a reported cost of $500,000.
In his place, with around fifty days to prepare, came 73-year-old Carlos Queiroz, a man of genuine pedigree (Real Madrid, Ferguson’s Manchester United, eight national teams) who promptly declared Ghana “the biggest challenge of my entire career.” Given that his CV includes dragging Iran to consecutive World Cups, that is not a compliment.
And here is the heart of it: Ghana cannot score when it matters. Addo’s own post-mortem of the AFCON disaster was telling. Ghana, he insisted, created more big chances than almost anyone in qualifying, “but we couldn’t score a lot of goals… we missed a lot of chances, this is the fact.”
A team that generates chances and doesn’t convert them isn’t unlucky; over thirty games and a winless eight month streak, it is simply a bad team. World Cups are won by sides who put the ball in the net under pressure. Ghana, demonstrably, do not.
The talent, as ever, isn’t the issue, though even here the news is grim, with Mohammed Kudus, the team’s most gifted creator, ruled out through injury. Antoine Semenyo has been devastating in the Premier League. Leicester’s Abdul Fatawu, fast, clever and armed with an explosive shot, could be a candidate to be one of the tournament’s surprise stars. But good individuals do not make a good side, and this collection of players neither looks nor feels like a team.
Rate their impressiveness as a percentage and you would struggle to go beyond 30 or 40. Even Panama, the supposed banker, no longer looks safe, and without Kudus the question of where the goals come from grows only more pointed.
