Asante Kotoko needed enough money to meet the demands of star striker Sogne Yacouba so he renews his contract with the club, and now about two hundred million supporters of the club have agreed to pay for that.
This was disclosed in an with the National Circles Council (NCC) Chairman, Christopher Demenya on FOX FM, where he assured the numerous fans of the club that the leadership of the club’s supporters wing, Circles, have arranged to engage Sogne Yacouba in a dialogue to fish out the plight of their star forward, find solutions and even pay money where needed to convince him to stay at the club.
Several attempts by the club’s officials to convince Yacouba to renew with the club have proved futile, as the club failed to meet the Burkinabe’s $150,000 demand.
Meanwhile, the NCC Chairman is hopeful that the leadership of his outfit will engage Yacouba and this time everything will be solved and the player will renew his contract with the club.
“If the management of the club have tried several times to talk to the player and is yet to succeed, we as supporters also who are happy about his performance will also engage him and see how it will go”, Christopher Demenya told FOX FM. “Every supporter wants Yacouba but just that maybe there is a misunderstanding somewhere which we all don’t know, so management has engaged him, fine, now we also as supporters will engage him and ask him of his problem”, he assured.
According to Demenya, Sogne Yacouba is a crowd puller and lots of the supporters troop to watch the team play because of Yacouba. The NCC is therefore ready to try and solve every problem of the player to convince him to renew his contract with the club.
Asked whether the NCC will be ready to pay any amount as a contribution to assist the club pay Yacouba’s signing fee, Chairman Christopher revealed that there are about two hundred million (200,000,000) Kotoko supporters who are ready to contribute money to pay for Yacouba’s demands.
“If he tells us his problems and we can solve, we will solve it for Kotoko because if he is part of the team, supporters come to the stadium because of him and that gives money to the club, so what we will do for the team (club) to get money to maintain its status to ensure we qualify to Africa, we will. About two million of my supporters (Circles) are ready [to pay], so if we finish the discussions with him and we reach a compromise and the management accepts that they are agree to what we will agree with Yacouba, we will pay”, he assured.
Sogne Yacouba’s current contract with Asante Kotoko expires in April this year and failure to renew means he is on his way out of the club as a free agent.