Fiifi Anaman (born 31 December 1993) is a Ghanaian sports writer, author and broadcaster.

Known for his long-form, narrative-driven approach to football writing, he has been described by many as a prodigious writer, having received continental and global acclaim very early in his career.

Ken Bediako, a doyen of sports writing in Ghana, has hailed Anaman as Ghana’s leading sports writers of his generation, while former Ghana president John Agyekum Kufuor has described Anaman’s work “word-class storytelling from a writer Ghana should be proud of.” Kwabena Yeboah, the president of the Sports Writers Association of Ghana (SWAG), has described Anaman as “a source of pride to SWAG”.

Early Life and Education

Fiifi Anaman was born in Mmrom, Kumasi, Ghana, to Kwaw Anaman, a former lecturer in mechanical engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and Theresah Anaman (née Osei), a former teacher at KNUST Junior High School.

He is the youngest of four siblings. He attended the KNUST Basic Schools for his early education and later enrolled at Achimota School in Accra in 2008, where he studied General Arts with concentrations in Government, History, Literature, and Economics. In 2012, Anaman entered the University of Ghana, Legon, to study Political Science, minoring in Archaeology and Philosophy.

Career

Anaman began his career as a blogger on fiifianaman.blogspot.com in 2012, where he wrote early essays combining his twin interests in football and narrative writing.

Later that year, he reached out to Ghanaian journalist Kent Mensah, then editor of the Ghana edition of Goal.com, who offered him a freelance role. His first article for Goal.com appeared in August 2012, when he was 18 years old, kickstarting his professional journey even before enrolling at the University. Shortly afterwards, Anaman gained recognition with "From Bawku to Buenos Aires", a piece telling story of a young Ghanaian footballer named Bayan Mahmud. The groundbreaking feature, originally appearing on Goal.com's Ghana edition, was immediately published on the main international edition and was subsequently syndicated across at least 15 of Goal.com's 37 editions. It was also translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian.

Specializing in Ghanaian football, Anaman soon gained a reputation as a reliable authority on the country’s game, and went on to contribute to outlets such as the BBC, SuperSport, The Blizzard and Africa Is A Country. His coverage of Ghana during the 2014 FIFA World Cup led to assignments with FIFA, ESPN and The Telegraph (UK).

After publishing a profile Ghanaian football legend C. K. Gyamfi on Goal.com to rave reviews, Anaman, then only 20 years old, was invited by Gyamfi’s family to write the coach’s official autobiography.

The resulting book, “The Black Star” (published in 2022), took seven years to complete and has been described as a seminal work in Ghana’s sports historiography. Revered Ghanaian writer Cameron Duodu, in writing the foreword to the book, described it as “unputdownable”.

From 2013 to 2016, Anaman worked with Allsports.com.gh, part of the global media conglomerate Ringier AG, later rebranded as Pulse Ghana. He completed his mandatory national service there in 2016, during which time he began producing long-form sports features. His Medium blog, fiifianaman.medium.com, has since become a repository of deeply-researched essays on Ghanaian football history, earning him recognition as the country’s leading long-form writer across all genres.

In 2017, he joined AE Mediacom, an award-winning Ghanaian television production house, as a sports anchor. There, he hosted shows such SportsXtra and Football 360, which aired on Kwese Free Sports and Joy Prime respectively. He was part of a flagship team of anchors that hosted matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup on Kwese TV, which had the competition’s exclusive free-to-air rights for Sub-Saharan Africa. His work on TV saw him named as one of the “10 Best Ghanaian TV anchors” by Business Insider Africa.

Anaman also co-founded the Ghana Football Awards in 2018, serving as project lead for its first two editions. He also worked as an editorial consultant on the BBC and Tiger Eye PI documentary Number 12 (2018), which exposed corruption within Ghanaian football: a groundbreaking investigation by undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas.

Between 2020 and 2024, he worked on a MacArthur Foundation-funded project that trained investigative journalists in Nigeria under the Tiger Eye Foundation. In 2024, Anaman joined The Fourth Estate, a project of the Media Foundation for West Africa, for a brief stint before departing later that year to pursue a PhD in African History at Michigan State University. His proposed dissertation, supervised by respected football historian Professor Peter Alegi, will focus on the evolution of Ghanaian football from 1950 to 1970.

Anaman’s next book, Goals and Glory, a collection of his best sports essays over the past decade, will be published in December 2025.

Awards and Recognition

Anaman is one of a few Ghanaian journalists to have ever been nominated for African Journalist of the Year at the defunct CNN Multichoice African Journalist Awards, then widely regarded as the most prestigious journalism awards on the continent.

This was in 2015, where he was nominated with a piece titled “Ghana’s Neglected Football Stars”. He eventually emerged as runner-up in the sport reporting category at a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya, At 21, Anaman became the youngest nominee in the awards’ 20-year history.

In December 2015, Anaman was awarded the “Best Writing – Column” award at the inaugural AIPS Sports Media Awards (then called Sports Media Pearl Awards), the highest sports journalism honour in the world, organized by the International Sports Press Association (AIPS). His winning piece was titled “How the Black Stars stabbed the Nation in Cold Blood”, an emotional examination of the controversial events that characterized Ghana’s participation in the 2014 World Cup.

Then 21 years old, Anaman was and still remains the youngest recipient of a senior award in the history of the AIPS Sports Media awards. Four of his articles have subsequently ranked among the top ten in both worldwide and continental rankings of the awards since 2017.

At the 50th Sports Writers Association of Ghana (SWAG) Awards in November 2025 – and almost 10 years after winning the AIPS Sports Media Award in Abu Dhabi – Anaman was praised by AIPS President Gianni Merlo as the first Ghanaian (and African) to win sports journalism’s most coveted prize.

CNN–Multichoice African Journalist Awards: Runner-Up, Sport Reporting (2015) AIPS Sport Media Pearl Awards: Winner, Best Writing: Column (2015) SWAG Sports Journalist of the Year Nominee: 2024, 2025.

Writing Style and Themes

Anaman’s writing combines in-depth reporting and literary flair. He describes his work as occupying “the intersection of journalism and artistic expression” taking the reader on a journey of “discovery and delight'.

A pioneer of long-form sports writing in Ghana, his essays often focus on history, blending archival research and oral history to create informative and immersive storytelling experience. He has cited Kofi Badu and Hugh McIlvanney as his role models in sports journalism and acknowledges the mentorship of Ken Bediako, Ghana’s longest-serving sports journalist. He has credited two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Gene Weingarten as having the biggest influence on his writing style.

Anaman’s writing is also deeply influenced by cinema, He has expressed admiration for the storytelling artistry of directors such as Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Personal Life

Anaman is a baptized Catholic. According to his father, he displayed a talent for writing early in his life, starting with short fiction stories. He still has an unpublished manuscript for a novella called “Evil Sequence”, written when he was 10 years old.

He is known to be an afficionado of art and history, spending most of his time reading about celebrated artists across various art forms, studying their works and philosophies.

He cites his favourite hobby as watching comedies, and is a big fan of the American hit-sitcom Friends, having watched all 10 seasons multiple times. He is a fan of football and supports Liverpool Football Club.

He currently resides in East Lansing, Michigan, where he is pursuing his doctoral studies.