West African Football Academy Sporting Club, better known as WAFA SC, has withdrawn from Division One, the second tier of Ghana. They will now function primarily as an academy.
Not that long ago, WAFA looked like they could challenge Ghana’s traditional elites. In 2016, the club finished sixth in the league despite having one of the youngest teams in the league. The following year, they finished second in the league, just six points behind Aduana Stars FC.
It was all downhill from there, though. In 2018, WAFA was seventh when the league was canceled after a corruption scandal for the Ghanaian Football Association which included match-fixing. Because of this, the league took a different format the following year, with WAFA finishing fifth in Group B. In 2020, the normal format resumed — but coronavirus canceled the season, with WAFA sitting in tenth place.
In 2021, WAFA bounced back, finishing third thanks to the goalscoring of Augustine Boakye. However, some key figures left the club in a perilous position, and they were relegated to the second tier. In their first season in the second tier, they failed to earn promotion, finishing eighth in Division One, Zone Two. As a result, the club withdrew from the league ahead of the upcoming season.
WAFA has always been very interested in developing young players. The likes of Majeed Ashimeru, Gideon Mensah, Samuel Tetteh, Augustine Boakye, and Lawrence Agyekum all developed with the club before moving on to European clubs. Now, they are completely focused on their academy and working with promising players in the Volta Region.
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Image Courtesy of Macabe5387, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
