Former Hearts of Oak Chief Executive Officer Vincent Sowah Odotei has attributed the decline of Ghanaian football to decades of poor leadership and ineffective administration.

Ghana football has struggled in recent years, with the national teams and domestic leagues failing to maintain the country’s traditional standards of competitiveness on the continental and global stages.

Odotei, who currently serves as the Lead Administrator of Hearts of Oak’s Interim Management Committee (IMC), believes the problems are deeply rooted in the failure to establish effective structures and attract capable individuals into football administration.

Speaking to Joy Sports, he described the deterioration of the game as alarming, insisting that years of poor leadership have left Ghana without the necessary foundations for sustainable development.

“The level of deterioration is so high. It’s been decades of bad leadership. We were not able to attract good people to the administration,” he said.

“We don’t have the facilities; we don’t have tactical and physical infrastructure. We don’t have well-structured teams that are driven by a strategy, who are looking at the long term. We are where we are because of decades of bad leadership.”

The former Hearts of Oak chief executive called for a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s football administration, arguing that Ghana must address its structural weaknesses to compete with leading football nations in North, East and Southern Africa.

He identified effective regulations, proper organisation, improved fixture scheduling and better coaching standards as some of the key areas requiring urgent attention.

Odotei stressed that Ghana must first get the fundamentals right before it can embark on a sustainable transformation of the game.

“To turn around a system where we will be able to compete with the North Africans and East Africans and the Southern African countries, we will need the transformation of hygienic transformation to deliver a strategic transformation.

“We need to get the basics right. The basics that will make us competitive: the basics about regulation, order, proper organisation, proper scheduling. Make sure we inject [improve] the way we train our local coaches,” he added.