According to SoccerExpress, defending GHALCA Top Four Champions, Kumasi Asante Kotoko have been ejected from this year’s competition and thus would not be around to defend the title they won shortly before the league kicked off in April last year.

Kotoko’s ejection follows what tournament organisers, the Ghana League Clubs Association, describe as excessive and untenable demands. Ghalca have thus pulled in Berekum Arsenals who finished fifth in the league to replace Kotoko.

Kotoko’s demands as precondition for participating in the tournament reserved for the first four clubs to finish tops of the premier league, include a ?400 million appearance and participation fee, 50 percent gate proceeds should the club play at home and a 100 percent ‘top up’ gate proceeds explained as extra charges the club would put on the official Ghalca rates in their home matches.

Kotoko in a letter dated January 3rd and sent to the Chairman of Ghalca, cut down the demand for ‘Appearance and Participation Fee’ to ?3 million and urged the other clubs to support its demands.

It is this latest insistence on the initial demands as against the organisers proposal for ?120 million appearance and participation fee and a 30 percent in the gates whether a club plays home or away, that finally broke the camel’s back.

Ghalca says they have in recent weeks been engaged in negotiations with Kotoko over their demands and were almost through with a settlement, culminating in a memorandum of understanding between the two parties but Kotoko’s latest letter reneging on all earlier commitments as reached in their discussions, amount to a refusal to honour the tournament.

‘It is with much regret that by your proposal you have opted out of this year’s edition of the Top Four Competition. We hope you will be able to participate in future competitions of Ghalca, an association of which you are a pioneering member.’ That was how Ghalca put the eviction order.

Ghalca officials say the decision to replace Kotoko is final and that they have already notified Arsenals to take up the challenge, an invitation which they obviously grasped wholeheartedly.