Referees manager for the Ghana Football Association (GFA), Alex Kotey says it will take the country a long time to get Ghanaian referees to officiate on the big stage.

This comes after no Ghanaian was included in FIFA's pre-selection list for Africa to officiate in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

FIFA's pre-selection list for the continent includes referees from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Egypt, Congo and Ethiopia.

And Kotey believes a lot of work needs to be done to erase the effects Anas' number 12 exposé has had on the country.

"Whilst you are working towards achieving that purpose, don't forget that other countries are also doing same," Kotey said in an interview with Citi Sports.

"So if from Africa they are picking only five, you should not expect for now, looking at the challenges that we have been through, a Ghanaian referee to be selected, because we haven't gotten there yet.

"And so we need to prepare our referees, we need to work on them, we need to put a lot of things in place and this will not even take two years, it can take us three to four years to actually get there, he concluded.

Only one Ghanaian referee in the person of the late Benjamin Dwomoh has officiated at the World Cup in 1982 in Spain in the match between Kuwait and Czechoslovakia.