Roger de Sa spent roughly four weeks crisscrossing Europe, visiting approximately 24 cities, just to watch Ghana’s players and monitor them at their clubs. That logistical sprint, conducted alongside video analysis sessions, was the preparation window available to him and head coach Carlos Queiroz before the 2026 World Cup began. It tells you almost everything about the operational reality the Black Stars faced.
Queiroz had been appointed just four months before the tournament kicked off, leaving the coaching staff with around ten days of formal camp time before competitive matches started. The squad they inherited had lost six consecutive matches. Rebuilding cohesion, restoring confidence, and embedding a tactical framework inside that timeline was the actual job, and De Sa’s account of the campaign is framed almost entirely around whether the team delivered given those constraints.
By most measures, it did. Ghana opened with a victory over Panama, then held England to a 0-0 draw in a match De Sa views as one that should have yielded more. A late penalty, which most observers considered clear-cut, was not awarded. De Sa references the incident with pointed frustration, and with reason: a win there would have reshaped the group stage picture entirely. Subsequent defeats to Croatia (2-1) and Colombia (1-0) ended the campaign at the Last 32 stage.
De Sa’s assessment is that reaching the knockout round under these structural conditions represented a meaningful achievement. The team had minimal time to implement tactical adjustments, and the coaching staff had compensated through sheer logistical effort, the kind of intensive pre-tournament scouting operation that rarely gets mentioned when results are discussed.
What De Sa found most striking, though, was not the tactical execution but the character of the players themselves. “One of the things that stood out was the humility of the Ghanaian players,” he tells Forbes Africa. That quality held across the roster, from established professionals to younger players entering the international stage for the first time. The willingness to absorb instruction and commit to the game plan, he notes, did not vary by experience level or reputation.
The England match illustrated this directly. The staff developed a specific tactical approach, communicated it clearly, and watched the players execute it with full buy-in. The draw was the intended outcome; only the denied penalty separated Ghana from a result that would have changed the group’s arithmetic.
De Sa’s contract with the Black Stars concludes this month (his tenure with Queiroz stretches back to the early 2000s, when the two worked together with South Africa’s Bafana Bafana, and has since run through Portugal, Egypt, Iran, and Qatar). He describes the experience as thoroughly rewarding, pointing to the professional environment and player character as its defining features.
The open question now is whether Ghana’s federation will give the next coaching staff more than four months and ten training days to prepare for what comes next.