The Ghana Football Association (GFA) has confirmed that return of Chinese-owned pay-TV operator StarTimes, as broadcast partners of the Ghana Premier League (GPL), as earlier reported by JoySports.

Nana Oduro Sarfo, a member of the GFA’s Executive Council, told Guide FM, an Accra-based radio station that the broadcast rights of Ghana’s elite football competition will return to StarTimes in February

“The last time I spoke about StarTimes was four weeks ago. StarTimes will come in February. The GFA doesn’t have any contract with a media house at the moment. Since we had no TV rights and our matches were not going public, we decided to engage certain companies to handle it for a specific time and even put it on our GFA app. But that is now gone,” Sarfo stated.

Since the expiration of the previous contract, the two entities - the GFA and StarTimes, have been locked in negotiations over a possible extension.

However, outstanding obligations to Premier League clubs from the previous contract threatened to throw a spanner in the works.

The main issue had to do with outstanding debts owed to the GFA, which, per JoySports checks, sums up to $950,000. Of that amount, up to $180,000 is owed to the clubs.

Per the contract, StarTimes was supposed to pay $30,000 to the clubs for each season. However, after paying the first two tranches, the Chinese-owned company could not fulfill its obligations to the club.

StarTimes proposed a revision of the contract terms and asked for the dollar rate to be changed with the outstanding debts to be calculated with a new, fixed rate.

This is because the original agreement did not include a fixed dollar rate, which meant that as Ghana's cedi depreciated against the United States dollar, StarTimes ended up paying more.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that StarTimes decoders and subscriptions were sold in Ghana cedis and not dollar denominations.

However, sources have since told JoySports that StarTimes will clear the outstanding debt after the two parties agreed on a revised dollar rate for the outstanding debt.

Subsequent to this, a new agreement has been reached for StarTimes to return as broadcast partners of the league.

Oduro Sarfo added that, “If by February, StarTimes comes on board, everything ceases, and nobody will have access to the rights anymore. They will take over completely.”