The senior men’s national soccer team, the Black Stars of Ghana, has dropped 6 places in the latest FIFA world rankings released on Thursday.
Prior to the recently released rankings, the Black Stars had occupied the 61st position.
Currently, Ghana sits on the 67th position. This is as a result of the team’s abysmal performance at the just-ended 2023 Africa Cup of Nations held in Ivory Coast, where the Black Stars failed to win a single match in the competition.
Ghana has also moved downwards from the 11th to 14th position in the CAF ranking.
FIFA first published a listing in rank order of its men’s member associations to provide a basis for comparison of the relative strengths of these teams.
In 1992, Fifa introduced the ranking system. Let’s take a look at how the ranking impacts football nations and how this will affect the Black stars going forward.
The rankings are used by FIFA to rank the progression and ability of the national football teams of its member nations, and claims that they create “a reliable measure for comparing national A-teams”.
If a country improves in the ranking, it is believed that the said country has put in the necessary measures which would aid the growth of the game, which is the desire of the mother body, FIFA. FIFA desires to create reliable grounds for the development of the game. In this vain, one would say the development of the game in Ghana has had a relatively low level of growth.
Fifa ranking is more often than not used as part of the calculation or the entire grounds to seed competitions. In October 2009, the ranking was used to determine the seed for the 2010 FIFA World Cup draw. The March 2011 ranking was also used to seed teams for the draw for the 2012 CAF men’s Pre-Olympics Tournament qualifying round.
Now that the Black Stars have fallen out of the top 10 in the CAF ranking, it will affect Ghana in the 2025 AFCON qualifiers group stage draw.
Teams in the Top 10 are relatively going to meet teams that are a bit weaker.
Teams with higher rankings have negotiation power, especially in friendly games where money is involved.
This could affect Black Stars in securing a huge part of the money in their next friendly games where money is involved.
Finally, the Football Association (FA) uses the average of the last 24 months ranking as one of the criteria for player work permits.
If Ghana is not placed well in the ranking, the fear is that players who will have the chance to ply their trade in England will be rejected due to the bad results chalked by the Black Stars.
Ghana’s highest ranking has been 14th, chalked in April-May 2007 and repeated in February 2008.
The country’s lowest was in 2004, when it was ranked 89th in the world.
By Isaac Ansah Apagya
The writer is a sports broadcast journalist for Onua FM/TV.
