"The matches are played before they are played." That's not a frustrated fan venting on social media — that's Ghana's President, John Dramani Mahama, saying out loud what many in the Ghana Premier League have whispered for years.
Speaking on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, during a meeting with representatives of Medeama Sporting Club, Nations FC and Ampem Darkoa at the Jubilee House in Accra, Mahama didn't dress it up. He alleged that financial arrangements are being made before matches are even contested — a "way and means budget" for every fixture — and that this culture is making a mockery of competitive football in Ghana.
"For every match there is a way and means budget. It makes the league not competitive because the match has been played already, somebody has won, so what's the need to go to play the match anyway?" he said.
Empty stands, preset results
Mahama connected the dots directly to attendances. Supporters aren't showing up because they don't believe the result is in doubt. When a paying fan thinks the outcome was decided in a back room before kick-off, no amount of ticketing promotions or half-time entertainment fixes that. The product is broken at source.
He called refereeing one of the primary things "destroying" Ghanaian football and urged the Ghana Football Association and the Ghana Referees Association to address it together. Whether either body has the appetite — or independence — to act on a sitting president's public rebuke is a different question entirely.
From a betting standpoint, the implications are uncomfortable. A league where results are allegedly predetermined before a ball is kicked isn't just a sporting problem — it fundamentally undermines the integrity of any market built around it. Bookmakers and bettors alike rely on genuine competition. Where that's absent, the numbers mean nothing.
Who actually fixes this?
Mahama was right to raise it. But presidential speeches at courtesy meetings don't restructure referee appointment processes or root out the financial networks he's describing. The GFA has heard versions of this criticism before. What's different this time is the source — and how publicly, and specifically, it was said.
"For every match there is a way and means budget." If that allegation is accurate, the GPL's credibility problem runs far deeper than any refereeing reform can reach.
