Kurt Okraku: Talks on standard player contract going well

Kurt Edwin Simeon-Okraku, the president of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), stated that discussions with the Professional Footballers Association of Ghana (PFAG) on standard player contracts for the nation’s professional footballers are progressing extremely well.

According to Kurt Okraku, discussions on plans and procedures to enhance the living circumstances of professional footballers in the nation have taken place with the PFAG.

This comes after the Executive Council decided to adopt standard player contracts in Ghana’s three major Leagues.

At the dinner with the legends event held at the East Legon Event Centre in Accra, President Simeon-Okraku spoke.

‘’The PFAG lives and seeks the welfare of footballers and as a football Association it’s so important for us to be interested in the welfare of players’’ he said.

‘’It’s not every player that would become Prince Tagoe, Odartey Lamptey or John Mensah. Greater percentage of players who have represented our country at various levels do not enjoy the kind of life they will usually want to’’.

‘’A lot more of them are challenged, a case in point is the late Abu Imoro, a player who represented our true colors. What happened to Abu Imoro can happen to anybody so when we have an Association that seeks the welfare of players, it is imperative that the GFA should be interested in the activities of that welfare body that seeks the welfare of players, this is important’’.

‘’So, one of the key things that we have been discussing, just to mention a few, my recent visit to the PFAG office, we discussed the establishment of the standard player contract’’.

‘’I made a firm commitment towards this cause, we would cross the T’s very soon and hopefully in the new season, we would introduce standard player contact that would ultimately protect every signatory (players) to those contacts’’ he added.

A professional sports league and its players often negotiate a Standard Player Contract (SPC) as part of their collective bargaining agreement. These agreements are frequently utilized for all players in the league across all competitions and are prepared in a general, boilerplate style.

Professional player contracts are, at their core, short-term employment agreements in which teams agree to pay a player to train for and participate in a specific number of games during a season in exchange for the player’s special set of skills.