President of the Ghana Football Association Kurt Edwin Simeon-Okraku has mentioned that discussions with the Professional Footballers Association of Ghana (PFAG) on standard player contracts for professional footballers the country is going very well.
According to him there have been meetings with the PFAG on strategies and protocols to improve the living conditions of professional footballers in the country.
This follows the decision of the Executive Council to introduce standard player contracts in the three top tier Leagues in Ghana.
President Simeon-Okraku was speaking at the dinner with the Legends event at the East Legon Event Centre in Accra.
‘’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 Standard Player Contract (SPC) typically is negotiated as part of the collective bargaining agreement between a professional sports league and its players. These contracts typically are written in general, boilerplate form, and are used for all players in the league across competitions.
Professional Player contracts are fundamentally limited duration employment contracts where teams agree to pay the player to train for and play a certain number of games in a season in exchange for the player’s unique skillset.
