Money and national teams - the curious case of motivation

Let’s not beat about the bush and lets not disguise the fact as it is now. No Black Stars player will come out and tell you that they are playing for anything but national pride when representing the national team, but the shambles during the 2014 World Cup clearly showed that the opposite is very much the case.

Of course so much has been made of how the players rebelled until they received $100,000 as appearance fees. I will come to that in detail, but this piece is about how things have been allowed to get to this level.

For starters, it is wrong to pay bonuses to players in the Under 17 national team, the Black Starlets. Surprised? Read on. Players of that age are supposed to be of school going age, at Senior High School level.

It is at the Black Starlets level that the right or wrong values are instilled in the players.

The ideal situation would be to invest whatever is due the players in treasury bills and other policies that would benefit the players in future because, to all intents and purposes, they are juvenile players.

Instead, the Ghana Football Association pays match winning bonuses to these young players and the money is also paid to them in cash. What then happens is that the players become wasteful when it comes to spending money and very few of such players end up doing something useful with the money.

Thus players grow and develop, expecting to be paid match winning bonuses in cash all the time. The value of having a working bank account is lost on the players and for me, that leaves the GFA acting with irresponsibility in terms of paying the players.

One of the after effects is that selection into such teams is sometimes not on merit, with several ‘four wheel drives’ present at Black Starlets training sessions, with many waiting to ensure that their wards stay in the national team.

We are all aware of when a player, who was not good enough, travelled with the Black Starlets to Morocco for the 2013 African Under 17 Natiions Cup simply because is similar outside pressures. The player was not even listed among the official contingent that went there, but he stayed there throughout the tournament, despite the fact that he was not deemed good enough.

I have already mentioned in an earlier article about meeting a friend who was telling me of how happy he was that his younger brother had been called up to the Black Starlets.

He then asked me how much I thought he should take to the coach of the team and I was shocked to the core.

These are harsh realities and these days, many people are prepared to do everything to ensure that their wards are selected for various national teams.

This has given rise to a group of middlemen who are subtly advertising themselves as facilitators for making selection possible for players, taking the money and not delivering.

There is a case of a German-based defender whose guardian paid $15,000 to ensure that he was selected into the Black Satellites.

Eventually the person who took the money turned out to be a middleman and as a result, the players never got selected. This happened a couple of years ago. For obvious reasons I will not mention names, but this is just a microcosm of what goes on these days.

The end result is that players go through the various national teams expecting that they would receive their per diems and match winning bonuses in cash and despite the fact that these carry security concerns, until the 2014 World Cup, this has remained a practice.

For example, Awal Mohammed lost $12,500 during the 2013 African Nations Cup in South Africa, whilst Asamoah Gyan and Sulley Muntari have had their hotel rooms broken into during certain qualifying matches.

The top hierarchy has encouraged the payment of such monies in cash and this is led to increased speculation that some of the members have been benefitting from the money as well.

Indeed, there are reports that only seven members of the squad that travelled to Brazil actually received the entire $100,000 each in appearance fees and revelations that the Black Stars Management team took appearance fees themselves of $82,500 each for seven members; two of which are unavailable only show how money-focused our football leaders are.

Personally, I don’t care if the $577,500 was shared amongst 20 people who are said to have ‘helped’ the team and besides, the so-called help resulted in only one point from three games. Even worse is the fact that those who received the money did not even sign for the money.

What sickens me is that the Black Stars in particular is seen as a money making machine, rather than a source of national pride and now, any coach who takes charge of the team; whether indigenous or expatriate, would even risk being denied credit for wins because now, there is always provision for ‘protocol’ which simply means ‘oiling the wheels’ to win games.

If amounts like $100,000 can be allocated to each qualifying match, then I ask, what on earth are we doing and where are we headed?

It gets even worse when officials openly boast that even if a new head coach is not appointed in time, there are ‘ways’ of getting Ghana through the qualifiers. In effect, what is happening in the Black Stars is a clear case of ‘the love of money being the root of all evil.’

Thankfully, the Black Stars players are now being paid with cheques and I am told that the players and the GFA hierarchy are not very happy with the new arrangement, but the public outcry against the team following the Brazil ‘cashgate’ has severely limited options of payment.

Again, it is so sad that because the Black Stars is seen as a money making machine, the other national teams suffer as a result and sometimes, qualification bonuses are not paid before tournaments take place.

The Black Queens and Black Satellites have been victims in recent times and so have the Black Maidens and Black Princesses. Are they not also equally important?

My thinking is that $10,000 per match win for the Black Stars is not sustainable and indeed it is only helping transform some of the players into mercenaries, whose only interest is to play for Ghana for money.

I can only hope that there is a drastic paradigm shift in the way people think with regards to selection of players for various national teams, especially the Black Stars, and gradually, we see acceptable levels of meritocracy restored, otherwise a day will come when selection into the national teams is less about ability and more about ability to pay.

That leaves our national teams less endowed for action and Ghana suffers as a result.

No one is saying that monies should not be paid at all, but there must be discipline in the way that this is done so that it is just a part of the process and not the be all and end all.