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Will some­one help save our foot­ball?

This is a ques­tion which I have heard asked by nu­mer­ous sup­port­ers of the great sport. Their re­quest though is not de­signed to cas­ti­gate the per­sons who may have been re­spon­si­ble for the com­pli­cat­ed state of the sport and com­pe­ti­tions them­selves.

Be­cause of the lim­it­ed space, I have to work with, it makes no sense for me to start from the be­gin­ning of the fi­as­co and send the game in­to a fur­ther con­fused state for which it is al­ready in.

What I am cer­tain about is that from the com­mence­ment of the As­cen­sion In­vi­ta­tion­al Foot­ball League, which brought at­tach­ment to the Pro League and the Su­per League, re­ports have in­di­cat­ed that it has run in­to fi­nan­cial prob­lems even be­fore its ini­tial match-sched­ule is com­plet­ed.

For those, who have any de­gree of knowl­edge con­cern­ing the of­fi­cial guid­ance which is be­ing fol­lowed and by whom has the au­thor­i­ty to make de­ci­sions re­gard­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, then pro­vide some as­sis­tance, it is need­ed.

Hon­est­ly, I be­lieve that the time is ripe for the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT), the Min­istry of Sports and the clubs, which have been en­gaged with any type of foot­ball tour­na­ment pre­vi­ous­ly con­trolled by the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA), to get in­volved.

All we are hear­ing from mem­bers of the T League is for the gov­ern­ment to fund the League, a league which is un­able to ex­plain what fund­ing has been utilised by the com­mit­tee to date.

The As­cen­sion League match­es are giv­en good me­dia cov­er­age for the ef­fort to ex­pand its in­ter­est that will help lure the fans to match­es. How­ev­er, fans are not flock­ing the var­i­ous venues which means that that fundrais­ing as­pect of the project seems to have failed be­cause the in­for­ma­tion which has been passed to the me­dia has not en­ticed the peo­ple who sup­port foot­ball to trav­el to the var­i­ous match­es in great num­bers.

From a gen­er­al stand­point, the prob­lems of foot­ball and com­pe­ti­tions need a group of cho­sen per­son­nel whose knowl­edge in sports man­age­ment (plan­ning, fundrais­ing, ac­count­ing, mar­ket­ing) and most of all, those who need to ex­press the im­por­tance of in­volv­ing the pres­ence of com­mu­ni­ties as the foun­da­tion for any event to get in­volved to for­mu­late a plan which would change the cur­rent di­rec­tion of foot­ball and foot­ball man­age­ment in the coun­try.

If the present ad­min­is­tra­tors are not ca­pa­ble of do­ing as stat­ed above, please give oth­ers an op­por­tu­ni­ty be­fore our foot­ball reach­es a state where it is un­re­pairable like has been the cas­es in Zim­bab­we and Egypt where they are now lit­er­al­ly beg­ging the FI­FA to in­ter­vene to solve prob­lems which will help their foot­ball change its course of di­rec­tion and im­prove their com­pe­ti­tion blue­print.

Alvin Corneal