Fresh from the crushing defeat at the hands of Hearts of Oak in Sunday’s Super Clash, Kotoko fans are still licking their wounds.
In an attempt to make sense of their listless performance, many have blamed goalkeeper Mohammed Kamara. Others have blamed Prince Owusu, the man who had four days to prepare for the game.
Kamara should have saved Baba Adamu’s looping header.
Owusu deserves some grace. Both statements are true, but the seeds of Kotoko’s defeat were sown long before Martin Karikari channelled the spirit of Dong Bortey, Kotoko’s eternal nemesis, to expertly deliver that free kick.
In the week preceding the Super Clash, Kotoko spent their energy on internal fighting, creating skits, and launching marketing campaigns that were empty on substance and dead on arrival.
Internal fights
The Internal fighting started on Monday, when the Interim Management Committee’s conflict with head coach Karim Zito reached a climax, and he walked away.
His assistant, Prince Owusu, took interim charge of the club. It is not unheard of for an assistant coach to take interim charge of a team.
However, this felt wrong on many levels due to how Owusu arrived at Kotoko in the first place and his subsequent conduct.
Following Prosper Ogum’s sacking, Kotoko hired Prince Owusu as an assistant coach in 2025.
For a club in desperate need of technical direction, a second in command should not have been the priority appointment.
It was not as if Prince Owusu was particularly in demand or was any kind of revolutionary tactical mind who represented a market opportunity Kotoko could not afford to miss.
In fact, in the last 10years, Owusu’s career had taken a nose-dive. Since his sacking by Medeama, Owusu had not coached any team in the Ghana Premier League for 10 years.
Yet, Kwasi Appiah, Kotoko’s Head of Sporting Affairs, appointed the man he hired 12 years ago as his assistant at Al Khartoum, Sudan.
So his appointment felt like a favour for a friend whose coaching career was on life support, rather than one informed by Owusu’s body of work and his capacity to contribute meaningfully to Kotoko.
In his time with Karim Zito, the pair never really got along.
Zito worked more closely with Hamza Obeng, a young coach respected by many of his peers and seniors alike. As a result of that, Owusu felt undermined, and it exposed the cracks in an already brittle relationship with Karim Zito.
The IMC was aware of this and, in the ultimate move of supporting the assistant coach over the Technical Director-turned head coach, reassigned Obeng to the Youth Team, forcing Zito to work with Owusu.
The marriage of convenience with Zito
No one still knows at what point Kotoko convinced themselves that Karim Zito, the man they hired as Technical Director, was the best to coach the club.
Under normal circumstances, a Technical Director would not take charge of the team as head coach at the beginning of the season.
Typically, they would help put together the technical structure and recommend a head coach to be hired.
When Technical Directors have coached teams, it has always been as an emergency measure following the exit of a head coach in the middle of the season.
Even then, it is only done after the club has exhausted all avenues of finding an interim coach and still cannot find one.
If that was not odd enough, the club decided to pull the plug on the experiment, just ten months into it.
That in itself is an admission that Zito should perhaps not have coached the club in the first place.
If that conclusion is fair, then it practically means the Nana Akwasi Awuah Apinkrah-led IMC has gotten both of its coaching appointments wrong.
Pointless skits and “Killer Ntua”
Watching Kwame Opoku, Peter Amidu, and Samba O’Neil in another skit to promote the game was not terrible, but the video of skit maker, “Killer Ntua” at the training grounds was cringe.
By all means, use players to promote matches.
After all, they are the principal actors and the game’s main selling point.
However, last-minute marketing campaigns have a remarkably slim chance of any impact.
Truth is, last-minute marketing rarely builds sufficient awareness to the point of convincing fans to decide in favour of the brand.
For a game that Kotoko were looking to attract fans from across the country, the timing of their marketing campaigns (if you can call it that) means those who may have seen the video would not be able to save money towards flight, bus, hotel, and accommodation arrangements on time.
That also means businesses that could have planned around it to purchase tickets for their employees, clients, or customers would be cut out. The only businesses that attended Sunday’s game would be the club’s existing partners and other businesses that already patronise the game.
In truth, the video, along with the appeals from ex-players Stephen Oduro and Ahmed Toure, and that of actress Nana Ama McBrown, felt very plastic; done to avoid criticism rather than being part of a well-thought-through marketing campaign.
Of their 17 home matches in the league, the Super Clash is the only game Kotoko set out to promote.
But that should not be the case. You cannot go to sleep all year, and only wake up four days before the most important fixture of the season.
The futility of it is the reason Kotoko still relies on the benevolence of the Ashanti Region’s affluent or popular fans to buy tickets for the rest of their fan base.
What needs to stop is the idea of inviting skit makers to shoot content at the club’s training grounds.
Killer Ntua is not the first influencer to be associated with the club. In the past, the late “Appiah Stadium”, Ali Maradona, who later became a board member, were great resources the club could rely on to galvanize their support base.
None of them did it in the manner we have seen lately.
Real Madrid, Manchester United, and Barcelona all have Hollywood actors, musicians, comedians, etc., as fans with massive followings. Very often, these personalities visit their favorite clubs.
Where there are partnerships, they are rolled out in professional, well-thought-through marketing campaigns. Not in the manner we are seeing here.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
