Editorial | The Girlz despite the JFF

When Dennis Chung left a corporate job last October to become general secretary of the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF), the expectation was that he would bring competence to the JFF, halting its frequent lurches from one crisis to the other.

Eight months may be too little time for Mr Chung to have turned around a plodding hulk of ineptitude, especially since the general secretary remains accountable to elected bosses who were wrangled into acknowledgement of a crisis and forced by external parties into reform.

So, perhaps it should not be surprising that as Jamaica’s women football team, the Reggae Girlz, prepare to depart for the FIFA World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, there are echoes of the controversies that have come to define the JFF.

The Girlz believe they have had insufficient match preparation ahead of the tournament. A planned series of friendly games fell through.

But that is not, or was not, the entirety of their concerns. They complained of inadequate training facilities and haphazard training schedules, and accused the JFF of poor communication, including, apparently, in its failure to meet payment obligations to some members of the team.

These are distractions that a team should not have to entertain entering a major tournament. Which, apparently, is what Mr Chung intended to rectify when he recently met with the group. Hopefully, his effort did not unwittingly further irritate wounds, which his public remarks after the discussions could well have done. They may well be interpreted as a claim that the Girlz went off half-cocked and were forced to back down when confronted with the facts and truth. If that were true, there was no room offered to the Girlz to save face.

“We had a meeting with the Girlz … and when you look at the letter that was written, it is far from factual,” Mr Chung said. “They have admitted that much, because between the president (Michael Ricketts) and myself, everything that the Girlz have requested we have provided.”

PREDICAMENT

A major reason for the Reggae Girlz’s predicament ahead of the game’s biggest tournament – for which they have qualified back-to-back – is that the JFF is broke. It does not have the money to adequately prepare this or any of its teams for major tournaments. The current situation is most probably exacerbated by a prejudice faced by female sports in respect to corporate sponsorship. Corporations more readily put their money behind men’s sports.

Further, the JFF, in its current iteration, seemingly lacks the wherewithal to convince big donors to trust it with their money. Not even for a team that has accomplished what the Girlz have – going to a second straight World Cup.

The explanation for this, in part, is the JFF’s failure to put in place the systems and structures to robustly support all forms of football in Jamaica. So everything is, it appears, stitched on the go.

In the years before the men’s team, the Reggae Boyz, reached the 1998 World Cup, domestic football may not have been very well organised in Jamaica. But the JFF had a secret weapon in its president, a charismatic former army officer named Captain Horace Burrell.

Captain Burrell convinced the island’s government and businesses to pour hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and kind into his ‘Road to France’ campaign. He did not achieve quite the same level of fundraising success for the ultimately failed campaign to take Jamaica to the 2004 World Cup, and lost his job in 2003. He returned four years later.

SET DOWN TEMPLATE

But Captain Burrell, who died in office in 2017, set down a template that has been slavishly followed by his successors, including Mr Ricketts. Except they lacked a key ingredient of the Burrell template: Captain Burrell. His charisma, energy and infectious enthusiasm. People bought, and bought into, his dreams.

For Jamaica’s football to be domestically sustainable and command consistent corporate support, it demands something Captain Burrell did not achieve – robust systems and structures that are professionally managed.

That has not happened. The quality of domestic play and organisation is, at best, mediocre. The local women’s tournament is sporadic.

It is little wonder that the women’s team – which relies significantly on women who play in foreign leagues and/or Jamaican parentage – depends for consistent support on a benefactor like Cedella Marley, of the Bob Marley clan. She has become indispensable to the team – and, thereby, to the JFF. She, fundamentally, is the powerbroker in Jamaica’s women’s football – the go-to person when the team is in a bind.

The Marleys apart, the team’s preparation for the World Cup is being primarily financed by a J$20-million grant from the Government and a J$7-million sponsorship deal with Restaurants of Jamaica/KFC. Other agencies and firms have offered small dollops.

It is not too late for others to come to the table to help the Girlz to, insofar as they can, add to the glory they have already brought to Jamaica.

At the same time, for any of the teams it oversees to have sustained success, the JFF has to abandon its current treadmill to a more systemic and systematic model of team building and management that is rooted in the local leagues. For that, the JFF has to radically remodel itself, or preferably, abandon the existing organisation and start anew.

Having declined our previous suggestions to do the latter, the JFF is obliged to work tirelessly to build the competencies for which it presumably engaged Mr Chung.