A new study of Ghana’s most followed footballers shows how a big club move, a trophy-winning season and a World Cup campaign can reshape a player’s fan base.
The study, by the football results website and sports data experts from Flashscore, analysed the number of times each Ghana international has been added to users’ Favourites through Flashscore’s player-follow feature.
The data covers the 50 most followed Ghanaian players, who together have 217,055 follows. The average across the 50 is 4,341.
This piece focuses on the top 20, who account for 167,152 follows (77.0%) of the total. The top 10 alone hold 57.5%. Beyond 20th place the numbers settle into a long tail: positions 21 to 50 average just 1,663 follows each. The full 50 are listed at the end.
The 20 most followed Ghanaian players
Semenyo’s lead is the headline as his 40,834 follows are 18.8% of the entire 50-player total and almost five times the average for a top-20 player (8,358).
Below him, the next seven places are separated by fewer than 11,000 follows between Kudus in second and Sibo in eighth, and from 11th to 20th the gaps are measured in hundreds.
The Manchester City effect for Semenyo
No player in the data is closer to a single explanation than Semenyo. His 40,834 follows put him more than 22,000 clear of anyone else, and the timeline of his 2026 helps explain why.
The London-born winger left Bournemouth for Manchester City in January 2026, signing a five and a half year contract in a deal reported at an initial £62.5 million, rising to around £65 million with add-ons.
It was the largest sale in Bournemouth’s history, and he had been wanted by Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham too. His final act for Bournemouth was a stoppage-time winner against Tottenham.
The move to a club contesting every trophy put him in front of a far bigger audience almost immediately. He scored on his City debut in the FA Cup third round against Exeter.
In March he played the full 90 minutes as City beat Arsenal 2-0 in the League Cup final, making him the first Ghanaian to win the competition since Michael Essien with Chelsea in 2007.
On 16 May he scored the only goal of the FA Cup final against Chelsea at Wembley with an audacious back-flick, becoming the first Ghanaian to score in a men’s FA Cup final. City completed the domestic cup double.
That goal was his 20th of the season in all competitions (10 for Bournemouth, 10 for City), which, which was the most managed by a Ghanaian in single season in England.
At the World Cup he was a fixture in Ghana’s attack, featuring in all four games at the competition. Essentially, joining a Premier League title-chasing club, winning two trophies in five months and a Wembley final goal is a combination no other Ghanaian had this year.
Kudus in second place without a World Cup
Mohammed Kudus is the data’s most striking outlier. He has 18,035 follows (8.3%), second overall and more than any player who actually went to the World Cup other than Semenyo.
He joined Tottenham from West Ham in July 2025 in a deal reported at around £55 million, but his first season in north London was disrupted.
A serious quadriceps injury against Sunderland on in January 2026 began a lay-off that turned into a season-ending absence after a setback in April.
Spurs survived relegation only on the final day of the Premier League season with a 1-0 win over Everton, and Kudus, who scored twice for Ghana at the 2022 World Cup and has twice been named Ghana Footballer of the Year, was ruled out of the 2026 tournament. He returned to action in late August 2026.
The lesson is that star power in follow data is not purely a function of minutes played. Kudus was absent from the pitch for most of the period covered, yet he remains Ghana’s clear number two.
The World Cup effect: 26 players, 76% of the follows
Ghana’s route to North America was turbulent. The Black Stars topped their qualifying group, losing just one of ten matches, but missed the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations.
Coach Otto Addo was dismissed on 31 March 2026 after heavy friendly defeats to Austria (5-1) and Germany (2-1), and Carlos Queiroz was appointed on 13 April, less than two months before the tournament.
At the Mundial, Ghana beat Panama 1-0 in Toronto, drew 0-0 with England in Foxborough, and lost 2-1 to Croatia in Philadelphia. Four points were enough to finish third in Group L and to advance as one of the eight best third-placed teams.
Ghana then lost 1-0 to Colombia in the round of 32 in Kansas City, ending a run that was nonetheless the country’s first World Cup knockout-stage appearance since the 2010 quarter-final.
The effect on the follow data is clear:
• All 26 players from the final World Cup squad appear in the top 50.
• Together they hold 165,484 follows, or 76.2% of the total.
• The average squad member has 6,365 follows, against 2,149 for the 24 non-squad players in the list, nearly three times as many.
• 19 of the top 20 were in the squad. The only exception is Kudus.
The players who missed out through injury or selection still show up, but lower down: Mohammed Salisu (23rd, 2,633, anterior cruciate ligament injury), Andre Ayew (25th, 2,526, left out of the squad), Alexander Djiku (27th, 2,185, injured in the Cardiff camp), Tariq Lamptey (34th, 1,477, ACL injury) and Francis Abu (46th, 1,097). Djiku’s replacement, Derrick Luckassen, scored against Croatia and sits 30th with 1,993.
Asare: from the Ghana Premier League to ninth
Benjamin Asare’s place in the top 10 is one of the most striking results in the data. The 33-year-old Hearts of Oak goalkeeper has 6,372 follows (2.9%), which puts him ahead of three high-profile attackers (Thomas-Asante, Sulemana and Nuamah) and 24% ahead of Ati-Zigi (5,148), the St. Gallen goalkeeper who began the tournament as Ghana’s number one.
His rise was gradual and then sudden. A broken leg in 2021 kept him out for around 18 months. In 2025 he won the Ghana Football Awards Goalkeeper of the Year and the SWAG Male Home-Based Footballer of the Year awards, earned his first Ghana call-up and kept consecutive clean sheets in World Cup qualifiers. He was the only home-based player in the 26-man squad.
Then came history. In Toronto, Ati-Zigi was forced off at half-time against Panama with a groin injury and Asare came on, becoming the first home-based goalkeeper to play for Ghana at a World Cup.
Six days later Asare started against England and kept a clean sheet in the 0-0 draw. Ati-Zigi, back from injury, returned against Colombia in the final game.
The afterglow has been tangible as Asare was named best local player of the Black Stars’ squad and awarded a $38,000 vehicle by JAC Motors.
It is also worth noting what the two goalkeepers show together. Asare and Ati-Zigi account for 11,520 follows, 6.9% of the top-20 total, from only two of the 20 places.
Forwards and English clubs dominate
By position, forwards and wingers fill 10 of the top 20 places and hold 110,846 follows, 66.3% of the top-20 total, helped enormously by Semenyo. Midfielders (three players) hold 26,780 follows (16.0%), defenders (five players) hold 18,006 (10.8%), and goalkeepers (two players) hold 11,520 (6.9%). The highest-ranked defender, Gideon Mensah, is 14th.
By club country, England-based players hold 89,831 follows, or 53.7% of the top-20 total, from six players (Semenyo, Kudus, Ayew, Fatawu, Yirenkyi and Thomas-Asante).
Players in Saudi Arabia hold 15,196 (9.1%) from two, and French-based players hold 11,727 (7.0%) from three.
Spain’s Inaki Williams accounts for 10,053 (6.0%), and Libya-based Kwasi Sibo, who has joined Al-Swehly, for 7,259 (4.3%). Asare, the only Ghana-based player in the list, accounts for 3.8%.
Follow Your Player feature on Flashscore
The follow data comes from the Favourites feature that Flashscore introduced for football players, described at the time as one of the most requested features on the platform.
Get all the news about your favourite players and teams!
Transfers, news, interviews: Turn on notifications for articles about your favourite players and teams.
How to turn on these notifications?
Following the pattern already used for teams and matches, fans can add footballers to their Favourites and receive notifications about key events.
Because following a player is a deliberate action, the totals in this study reflect fans who actively chose to track an individual, rather than passive page views.
