New challenges for football

The new football executive is in place and the organisation has held one news conference thus far which has essentially skirted around the issues at hand.

Football politics aside, the new executive has many challenges confronting it and the members must now begin to take seriously the matter of management of the organisations and its preparation for what lies ahead.

National Development Plan

There is an urgent need for the production of a national development plan for football that goes well beyond mere participation in the established competitions under the FIFA, CONCACAF and CFU labels. In the absence of such a document the organisation might as well be spinning top in mud as the saying goes.

No national association should be without a national development plan for its sport. Indeed the way most of the international federations, IF, now operate, on four-year cycles, it is critical that national associations engage in a similar arrangement thereby engaging itself in four-year planning and budgeting. In most cases this should be relatively easy since the international and regional calendars are planned along the same four-year cycles and the allocation of funds from IFs, where such a thing obtains, is also done under this arrangement.

The new executive must therefore pull itself together in retreat and invite pertinent, knowledge, qualified and competent people to engage in detailed development planning for the sport for the next four years. The development plan that emerges from such an undertaking must speak to all aspects of the game – popularising the sport, talent identification, coaches development, technical officials, competitions, finance, marketing, branding, sponsorship, accountability, governance, communications, administration and office management, doping control, scholarships, professional contracts, sports medicine, relationships, communications and public relations.