A post has surfaced on Facebook claiming that the Ghana Football Association (Ghana FA) has appointed the former interim head coach of Nigeria’s national team, Super Eagles, Austin Eguavoen as the head coach of the Black Stars.
The post which was made on January 8, 2025 on the page, Stanley fans (Stanley Nwabali Official) has the image of Eguavoen in the background with a purported letter from the letterhead of the Ghana Football Association on it.
The caption reads, “Ghana has so much confidence in Eguavon as a coach, his salary will paid in dollars not in cidis, he will be gifted an official car and house, everything he requested for to enable him perform well in coaching the black 🖤 Stars Ghana senior Team will be provided🔥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥🔥🇳🇬 In. Every disappointment there’s a blessing attached.”
This post has already generated over 7,700 reactions with over 2,100 comments and shares. A brief search about Eguavoen’s appointment led to news stories published here, here, here, and here.
VERIFICATION
Augustine Owen Eguavoen is a Nigerian football manager and former player who has served as manager of the Nigeria national team, Super Eagles at multiple periods. Eguavoen served as Super Eagles’ caretaker manager between December 2021 and March 2022 and is currently the Technical Director of the team.
The fact-checker took a screenshot of the letter and put it through Google reverse image search and related matches revealed that there is a lot of discrepancy in the purported letter to Eguavoen and authentic letters from the Ghana FA found online. All the letters from Ghana FA are printed on a cream letterhead as seen here, here and here.
Secondly, all the letters from the Ghana FA have an address, contact details under its logo as seen here, here and all the letters referenced before this. Also, their letter usually contains a reference number as seen in all the letters referenced including this and this. Finally, all letters from Ghana FA are signed by its General Secretary, Prosper Harrison Addo, not the President, Kurt Okraku as seen in the purported letter to Eguavoen.
To verify the alleged new coach role mentioned in the letter, we conducted keywords search which revealed that SCORE Nigeria has dismissed the rumor, stating that “a top Black Stars official has now told SCORENigeria there is no truth is these speculations.”
We also searched the official verified Facebook and X page of the Ghana Football Association and there were no announcements to support the claim.
NV-A further visited the official website of the Ghanaian Football Association to check if a press release of the appointment was posted there but there has been no announcement, as of the time this report was published.
CONCLUSION
The claim that Austin Eguavoen has been appointed by the Ghana FA is FALSE. Findings show that the country’s football association has not made such confirmation and the letter posted to support the claim is forged.
