Football's Comfort With Selecting Accused Men Goes Global as Partey Faces England

Thomas Partey is set to line up for Ghana against England in Boston on Tuesday, facing former Arsenal teammates Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka while awaiting trial on eight counts of rape and one of sexual assault. He denies all of them.

The pre-match handshake, a standard ritual at every fixture, has become the visible flashpoint. But the handshake is a symptom, not the story. The story is the systemic ease with which national federations are selecting players facing the most serious criminal allegations and parading them on the sport's biggest stage.

The handshake the FA won't decide on

The Football Association has stayed deliberately silent on what England's players will do when the two sides line up on Tuesday. Rather than take a position, it will leave each individual to decide whether to shake Partey's hand.

Offloading the decision onto players

That is an abdication. The handshake is not a private gesture. It is broadcast to a global audience, and the optics of England's captain or its most marketable star greeting an accused man are precisely the kind of institutional question a governing body exists to answer.

Instead, the FA has handed the dilemma to Rice and Saka, who played alongside Partey at Arsenal, and to the rest of a squad with no say in the fixture.

Partey is scheduled to go on trial next year at Southwark crown court after being charged with five counts of rape and one of sexual assault last year, with two further counts of rape added later. He denies all of them.

His lawyer has said he welcomes the chance to clear his name. The presumption of innocence is real and it matters. But the presumption of innocence does not oblige a federation to platform an accused man, and it certainly does not require the FA to make 26 footballers improvise a response to a question it should have settled itself.

Why Partey missed Panama and the Ghana visa storm

Partey did not feature in Ghana's opening match against Panama on Thursday. The reason had nothing to do with any reluctance from the Ghana Football Association to select him.

A visa, not a conscience

The opener was played in Toronto, and Canadian officials refused him entry. He is available against England only because the United States granted him a visa for the Boston fixture. Coach Carlos Queiroz, once Sir Alex Ferguson's assistant at Manchester United, has framed the matter around the presumption of innocence.

"Let events run their normal course, let the river flow and one day, when the river meets the ocean, we will find the truth."

When the visa was refused, much of Ghana's anger pointed at Canada. The ministry of foreign affairs condemned what it called "the high-handed and extremely unfair decision" to refuse entry, arguing that reliance on "unproven charges in the absence of a judicial determination raises fundamental questions of fairness and proportionality."

The outrage that missed the point

Then the Ghana FA challenged the refusal in court, and the real reason emerged. Partey had misled Canadian officials in his application. The ruling recorded that he answered "No" to having ever "committed, been arrested for, charged with or convicted of any criminal offence in any country."

That answer was extraordinary given his high-profile case. His appeal failed, and a political storm erupted in Ghana. Crucially, the fury was not about whether an accused man should represent the country. It was about the botched paperwork.

• Fiifi Boafo, an opposition New Patriotic party politician, wrote: "All this while, we were being fed lies and inaccurate information... Heads must roll."
• Dr Joshua Jebuntie Zaato of the University of Ghana called it "an 'amateur hour' at the GFA" and said "someone must be held responsible for this error."

The GFA said its role had been "mischaracterised," insisting it had a duty to facilitate visas for all accredited members of the delegation and that the court made no finding of fault against it. That misdirected national outrage, over a visa form rather than over selection, is itself the story.

Not just Partey: Sano, Hakimi and a World Cup pattern

Partey is not an isolated case at this tournament. He is one of three players competing under the shadow of rape allegations, which makes this a pattern rather than a one-off.

Japan's Kaishu Sano

Japan midfielder Kaishu Sano was arrested in 2024 over an alleged gang-rape in Tokyo, when it was claimed he and two friends sexually assaulted a female companion after a meal celebrating his transfer from Kashima Antlers to Mainz. The woman called police immediately and the three men were arrested nearby.

Prosecutors dropped the charges after Sano reportedly apologised to the complainant and made a large payment to her. He returned to the national team, having said: "I am truly sorry for causing trouble to so many people with my actions."

Morocco's Achraf Hakimi

As Achraf Hakimi prepared to face Scotland on Friday, a French court confirmed he will stand trial for the alleged rape of a woman in 2023, which he denies. The complainant, then 24, told police she met the two-time Champions League winner on Instagram and went to his home in a taxi he ordered, where she says he raped her.

After the Versailles court of appeal ruling, Hakimi wrote on X that he had been "waiting for this trial since day one. At last, I'll be able to speak." No trial date has been set.

Three players, three federations, the same institutional shrug. The presumption of innocence is being invoked not as a legal principle confined to the courtroom but as a blanket justification for selection, with broadcasters and governing bodies left to manage the optics.

What happens next

Partey is expected to take the field in Boston on Tuesday, and the cameras will linger on the handshake line. Whatever Rice, Saka and their teammates choose to do will be replayed and dissected worldwide.

Partey's trial at Southwark crown court is scheduled for next year, and Hakimi's French trial has no date. Both cases will run long after this tournament ends, keeping the question of how football handles accused players alive well into the next club season.

The pressure now falls on FIFA and the national federations to articulate a consistent position. Until they do, the responsibility will keep landing where it does not belong, on individual players asked to make moral choices in front of a global audience their employers would rather not address.