page_title: Ghana national football team
section_title: 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: Ghana national football team / History / 21st century
caption_attribution_description: English: Ghana nation football team members line-up before a 2010 FIFA World Cup Qualification match.
context_page_description: The Ghana national football team represents Ghana in men's international football and has done so since the 1950s. The team consists of twenty players including the technical team. The team is nicknamed the Black Stars after the Black Star of Africa in the flag of Ghana. It is governed by the Ghana Football Association, the governing body for football in Ghana and the oldest football association in Africa. Prior to 1957, the team played as the Gold Coast. The team represents both FIFA and CAF.
  Although the team qualified for the senior FIFA World Cup for the first time in 2006, they had qualified for four Olympic Games Football Tournaments when the tournament was still a full senior national team competition; their best achievement was the third position at the 1992 Summer Olympics. The team has won the Africa Cup of Nations four times and has been runner-up five times. After going through 2005 unbeaten, the Ghana national football team won the FIFA Best Mover of the Year Award and reached the second round of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
context_section_description: Prior to the year 2000, disharmony among the squad which eventually led to parliamentary and executive intervention to settle issues between two squad members, Abedi Pele and Anthony Yeboah in the late 1990s, may have played some part in the failure of the team to build on the successes of the national underage teams in the late 1990s, but a new generation of Black Stars players who went to the 2001 FIFA World Youth Championship final became the core of the team at the 2002 African Cup of Nations, and were undefeated for a year in 2005 and reached the finals of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the first time the team had reached the global stage of the tournament. The Black Stars started by succumbing to a 2–0 defeat to eventual champions Italy, but wins over the Czech Republic (2–0) and the United States (2–1) saw them through to the second round, where they lost 3–0 to Brazil.
  In 2008, Ghana reached a high ranking of 14 according to the FIFA World Rankings. The Black Stars went on to secure a 100 percent record in their qualification campaign, winning the group and becoming the first African team to qualify for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In the final tournament, the team competed in Group D with Germany, Serbia and Australia. Ghana reached the round of 16 where they played the United States, winning 2–1 in extra time to become the third African nation to reach the World Cup quarter-finals. The team then lost to Uruguay in a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals, having missed a penalty kick in extra time after a certain goal was prevented by Luis Suárez's deliberate handball, who was then shown a red card for his actions.
  In 2013 Ghana became the only team in Africa to reach four consecutive semi-finals of the CAF Africa Cup of Nations twice, from 1963 and 1970 and from 2008 and 2013.
  Ghana was sufficiently highly ranked by FIFA to start their qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in the Second round. They won the group, and in the following round qualified for the 2014 World Cup finals in November 2013, beating Egypt  7–3 on aggregate in a two-legged play-off. Ghana was drawn in Group G for the finals, where they faced Germany, Portugal, and the United States. The World Cup finals ended up in disappointment as Ghana exited in the group stages with issues of poor planning and payment bonuses being blamed for the poor performance, although they did manage a 2–2 draw with Germany, who ended up winning the competition. They would be the only team to not lose to Germany in that tournament.
caption: Black Stars squad line-up prior to match
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