Testifying before the parliamentary Youth and Sports Committee, Kurt Okraku, president of the Ghana Football Association, said a Guinness sponsorship worth more than $5m a year for the Premier League had fallen through for lack of approval from the Food and Drugs Authority.
The news broke before a parliamentary committee, not in a press release. Kurt Okraku, president of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), said Guinness Ghana had approached the association to invest heavily in the Ghana Premier League. According to FootBiz, which reported his remarks before the Youth and Sports Committee, several meetings took place before the project collapsed.
The blockage did not come from football. The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Ghana’s regulator, refused to approve the sponsorship, the official said. The figure mentioned shows the scale of what was at stake: “The deal was, if I’m not mistaken, more than $5 million a year,” Okraku said, as quoted by FootBiz in a translation from English.
Parliament urged to strip the FDA of a power
Before MPs, the GFA chief did not merely recount the failure of the deal. He asked Parliament to work towards scrapping the provision that allows the FDA to approve or reject sponsorship agreements with alcohol companies. A change of regulatory framework, then, rather than a simple negotiation with the brewer.
The request follows the FDA’s refusal, again according to FootBiz.
A Premier League without a headline sponsor
The context helps explain the official’s approach. The Ghanaian Premier League has had no headline sponsor since betPawa withdrew in 2024, FootBiz reports. To keep its competition running, the GFA pays out 1 million cedis per club directly this season, and 3 million to the champion.
Women’s football, for its part, has benefited from a partnership with Malta Guinness, the non-alcoholic brand, since the 2022/23 season: 10 million cedis over three seasons, according to the same source. Two Guinness contracts, then, but two separate regimes: the women’s league is backed by a non-alcoholic brand, while the top flight has no headline sponsor.
A bus dating from 2008
Okraku widened his remarks beyond sponsorship. He said Ghana’s 20 national teams share a single bus bought in 2008, now out of service, which forced the association to hire one during the last international window, again according to FootBiz.
The anecdote gives a sense of the resources available to a federation that funds its own top flight. The parliamentary committee’s work on FDA regulation and alcohol sponsorship is still to come. All the information in this article rests on a single outlet, FootBiz: the figures cited would benefit from confirmation by a second Ghanaian source.