THE EDITOR: On April 16, Concacaf’s president, Canada’s Victor Montagliani, announced the setting up of a “working group” to discuss a totally dead issue, a cross-border Caribbean Professional Football League. That was first introduced by his predecessors, Jack Warner in the 1990s and Jeffrey Webb in 2013, which produced a 74-page summary by the Rethink Management Group, and which probably the president and his working group haven’t read. Yet here we go again.
In Montagliani’s release, he said, “This is not about the Caribbean. This is about professional football first. It will benefit the Caribbean, but it will put football first.” Really?
Putting football first is exactly what FIFA’s best confederation, UEFA, did in rejecting a similar proposal to establish a European Super League, and UEFA’s president, Aleksande Ceferin, shared his vision and leadership while addressing the UEFA congress on February 2018, when he said, “Let’s us dare to aim high,” and last month, “Purpose over profit. That is the key.”
So follow me here for a moment. UEFA is FIFA and world football’s best confederation, with the best leagues, promotion and relegation, the best clubs, the best players, and world football’s premier and most lucrative club competition, the European Champions League.
In addition, UEFA has established programmes, UEFA Assist, UEFA GROW, UEFA Academy, UEFA Foundation, and its strategy is “Together for the Future of Football,” which it shares with the football world. It has also established working relationships with the European Leagues Association (ELA), the European Clubs Association (ECA), and have signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Commission and with other established European administrative and policy institutions.
Which brings us to what our strategy for the future of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) and Caribbean football should be, and the Concacaf-Montaglian vision of a cross-border Caribbean Professional League, with 12-16 clubs that may not even currently exist today.
For the past 42 years, the CFU has represented 31 member associations, 31 leagues, clubs and players throughout the region, and most of our failures/setbacks can be easily traced/attributed to two football-ignorant Concacaf presidents, Jack Warner and Jeffrey Webb, and today by its current president, who was 13 years old when the CFU was inaugurated in 1978, and is obviously not a student of the game’s 120-year history in the region, as evidenced by his comments in the announcement of his working group.
Putting football first, Montagliani and his working group should instead discuss the all-important and amicable separation of the CFU from Concacaf, and submit its recommendation to Concacaf, the CFU and the FIFA congress for ratification, with the CFU becoming FIFA’s fourth largest confederation and the remaining Concacaf member associations, Canada, Mexico, US, and the seven Central-American member associations becoming, like Conmebol, the new ten-member FIFA confederation.
And instead of some lame, second-tier, innocuous and provincial Caribbean club shield competition, and now this so-called Caribbean Professional League, the future of the CFU and Caribbean football can re-emerge with the launch of a Caribbean Champions League competition – men and women – and patterned and structured as per the successful Europeans.
They who introduced the game to the region and which, with the knowledge and support of UEFA through its programmes, the ELA and the ECA, can finally build, grow, and achieve success for every and all 31 member associations, leagues, clubs, and players of the CFU – from the FIFA bottom-ranked Anguilla and up to the top Caribbean-ranked Jamaica.
This then is one Caribbean, the future of the CFU and Caribbean football, that should be the inspiration for the entire regional family when/as we recommit to a changed post-covid19 world.
PATRICK RAYMOND
via e-mail
SOURCE: T&T Newsday