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The Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) elections have been held and the incumbents have been returned to office. This has not been a shock. Our JFF administration mimics the FIFA model which makes it always an uphill task to replace the incumbent officers and an administration. Additionally, our Michael Ricketts JFF administration went further and created and resurrected nonexistent and inactive voting bodies respectively that secured additional votes designed to keep it in office.
Full disclosure; I had hoped that the challengers would have prevailed. I wished for new blood as I hoped for new approaches to addressing the long-standing deficiencies exhibited by successive JFF administrations and replicated by Michael Ricketts’ Administration.
What were and are still present faults, omissions and failures?
- Lack of transparency in matters financial.
- Ineffective or bungled management of National teams - age-group through national senior teams of both our male and female teams.
- Inefficient and poorly coordinated ‘grassroots’ development programs.
- Lack of sufficient funding to support annual operations, administration and capital investment in physical plants - fields and Centers of Excellence.
- Failure to efficiently manage “The Football” and the development of a local Football Industry.
Lack of transparency in matters financial.
Past Jamaica Football Federation administrations and Michael Ricketts’ administration have often made statements carried in print and electronic media that it has never been successful in fully funding its annual budgets. Concurrent with those pronouncements each administration has never publicly shared its annual budgets or presented annual total inflows of funds or total expenditures. One would be hard pressed to recall a report on a JFF national team’s budget or inflow of funds and expenditures. It is no wonder the public has less than full confidence in the JFF’s management of its financial affairs. The Jamaica public deserves no less than openness and full transparency of the JFF’s finances.
Ineffective or bungled management of National teams - age-group through national senior teams of both our male and female teams.
The many often repeated public foul ups in putting together national teams, proper preparations of the teams, travel arrangements for players and late or non-payment of players are a recurring example of inability to efficiently manage those essential functions. This area of managing requires review and policies put in place to prevent reoccurrence. The results of a review and creation of policies to strengthen management in these areas must be shared with each Parish Football Association as part of sharing knowledge, strengthening affiliates ability to manage their responsibilities to their affiliates as those affiliates look towards qualifying and participation in local and international tournaments.
Inefficient and poorly coordinated ‘grassroots’ development programs.
There is failure within the JFF’s management team to recognise that the Jamaica football situation is a unique one. We are a small country without easy access to adequate funding and there is the inability of our young footballers to access football academies. That failure to fully comprehend and appreciate the unique ‘Jamaica reality’ has had the JFF ignoring or unable to bring within reach of all our children an efficient development program alongside needed appropriate policies. There is not an appreciation of the gift of the ‘school system(s)’ with its numerous physical plants and its teachers with the captive tens of thousands of children within the ‘schools’. Naturally, this leads to the question of how to exploit that bounty?
Lack of sufficient funding to support annual operations of administrative responsibilities, technical programs and capital investment in physical plants - Playing Fields and Centers of Excellence.
These three areas require individual committees tasked with sourcing and garnering the necessary adequate funding. Efficient execution of tasks cannot be accomplished if there is not the funding to underwrite them.
Even a cursory overview of needs within the organization tells there must be coordinated effort of the Managing entities, the Financial Department and an expert, efficiently functioning Marketing Department.
The Managing entities are:
a) the President Michael Ricketts led Board of Directors and Officers and,
b) the General Secretary, Denis Chung led Secretariat.
The first determines Aims and Objects and provides policy directives. The second is responsible for execution of the policy directives and attainment of associated targets.
The General Secretary as head of the Secretariat is responsible for the two-way flow of information between the Board of Directors and the Officers with the Secretariat’s various committees and subcommittees being the bedrock around which its daily functioning operations exist.
Failure to efficiently manage “The Football” and the development of a local Football Industry.
If it is agreed that an efficiently managed JFF is reflected in the quality of our national teams then it is observed that our on field products have not been up to the highest of standards. Our teams are not consistently attending the highest tournaments, the FIFA World Final tournaments. Also on display are national teams with local player participants most often displaying less than stellar technical skills and tactical nous. The passing and movement is visibly below best teams standards and far below that of top national team standards.
The on field result? Jamaica’s club teams do not regularly participate in CONCACAF club team finals. Fact is, Jamaica’s club teams have never appeared in a CONCACAF Final Club match..
The Ricketts administration acknowledges that our local on field teams are not of desired standard. Technical Director Speid and coach of Cavalier Football Club expressed surprise and lamented the shortcomings of his Cavalier team in a post match interview as he reviewed his team’s meeting with the USA’s MLS club FC Cincinnati in the CONCACAF Champions Cup tournament. It must be noted that FC Cincinnati is not a top club team.
The administration also does not put forward policies that address the problem of all-island raising of on field standards, that of improving the standards of the individual player and teamplay.
It is obvious the administration does not understand or value the concept of “perpetual renewal” that year over succeeding year, season over succeeding season smooth upwards transitioning through succeeding age-group players and teams. That can be seen in the frequent rebuilding of national senior teams. It has never been a continual process of replacing individual pieces of the team while retaining a core set of players. In place of that concept there has been too often wholesale changes such as that exemplified by the destruction, abandonment of our historic Women 2023 World Cup team and their wholesale replacement with inferior players. One can but hope that the results gained from cratering our Inaugural Concacaf Women 2024 Gold Cup hopes has taught the Ricketts administered JFF that the “stop-restart-stop-restart building of national teams” must be replaced by the “perpetual renewal model of continuously building on, and of national teams”.
The JFF’s technical director, Rudolph Speid, has spoken of Spain’s 2023 Women squad of new players as an example of wholesale changes in a national team bearing the greatest success of winning that year’s FIFA Women World Cup. What Speid fails to mention is that wholesale replacement of players was never part of the Spanish Football Federation’s plan. It was a situation brought on by the Spanish Football Federation’s plans going awry. The wholesale change was a last minute stop-gap measure. An outlier. An occurrence that it was hoped would not be repeated. The Spanish Football Federation’s long standing modus operandi and preferred method of building its teams, age-group through male and female teams, is the “perpetual renewal” method; a seamless changing out of players that keeps the national senior teams perpetually strong and stable with the aim of teams being always on the path of steady improvement. “Perpetual renewal” must be the new mindset of our Jamaica Football Federation.
It is important here to once again recall, a) the replacement of the 2023 Women's World Cup high achieving Reggae Girlz coach and players as in effect stopping vibrant successful growth of quality play. In its tracks there has been a restart with many inferior players and a new coach. To be fair it has been announced that the 2023 World Cup Reggae Girlz will be again considered for selection. If and when the 2023 World Cup Reggae Girlz are once again reintroduced in the program it will be, as fact, another example of the Jamaica Football Federation’s past practice of a stop and then a restart of a national program. b) The Jamaica National Men Senior team, Reggae Boyz program has had a new restart with the hiring of coach Hallgrimsson in September 2022.
Hallgrimsson has been on the job for only one year and five months. In his time incharge he has had a rebuilding of the Reggae Boyz squad. It is hoped that for the first time at last the JFF will allow “perpetual renewal” and the halting of the Reggae Boyz program building exercises will never recur. The hope is that from here on forward it shall be “perpetual renewal” through the ages.
The task
The task as referenced in the Jamaica Football Federation’s Constitution Article 2, Objectives, states and here I paraphrase, the JFF is responsible for our entire football, that is, the buck always stops with the JFF. The JFF oversees and authorizes all.
The JFF’s first order of business must be wholesale reengineering, the radical redesign of work processes to achieve significant improvements of, and at each and every department and area of our football. That reengineering should be within a concept of laying a foundation for ensuring a perpetually strong and stable JFF. One that is always on a path of steady improvement. Only then can “The Football '' become a successful growing entity. An entity that can lend itself to development of a viable Football Industry.