Editorial | Steve McClaren’s mandate

Steve McClaren made a number of sensible observations at his introduction last week as the coach of Jamaica’s national men’s football team.

One of them was that there was a significant amount of footballing talent on the island. Which, of course, didn’t take his 35 years experience in football management at the highest level to divine.

Mr McClaren’s more profound observation, however, is that there “is such a lot” to do to unlock that potential to give Jamaica a real shot at reaching the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada.

That is in part why this newspaper looks forward to further and better particulars on the scope of Mr McClaren’s assignment and why the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) should authorise FIFA, the game’s global governing body, to release the analysis that he undertook for FIFA on the state of the game and presumably, football management in Jamaica.

The point is, insofar as the public is aware, Mr McClaren’s terms of reference, and therefore his sole focus, is to win sufficient of Jamaica’s remaining matches in the qualifying rounds, so that the island can reach the World Cup. Nothing has been said about the broader development of the game on the island.

Mr McClaren may well have the skills to pull it off. At least, Jamaica has never had a bigger name as the coach of its national football team.

René Simões, the Brazilian, may be a cult hero in Jamaica for taking the island to Paris in 1998. But he has never had charge with the status of England, of which Mr McClaren was manager from 2006 until England failed to qualify for the 2008 European championship. Further, he has come to Jamaica from a job as an assistant to Erik ten Hag at Manchester United, probably the world’s most famous football club, where, two decades ago, he was an assistant to the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson. Mr McClaren has also managed English club teams such as Queens Park Rangers and Millsborough as well as coached in Holland and Germany.

ACHIEVABLE

As the Simões era showed, taking Jamaica to the World Cup may be achievable. It is, however, quite another thing to sustain Jamaica at a high level of performance on the international stage, except without a continuous stream of transient so-called legacy players – footballers of Jamaican heritage, especially in Britain, who turn out for the island in an effort to play international football.

Put another way, replicating the Simões-Horace Burrell magic of ‘98 will be, as Mr McClaren has already indicated, no easy feat. Even if it is achieved – which we hope it is – the gains will be fleeting if Jamaica thereafter returns to the inverted riding of the escalator that has marked its national football management in the quarter century since Paris.

First, however, notwithstanding Mr McClaren’s correct statement that access to resources won’t, by itself, take Jamaica to the World Cup, it is an important component. And as this newspaper has pointed out, the current JFF president, Michael Ricketts, is no Horace Burrell. He has neither the charm nor the loquacious energy of the late former army captain that allowed him to entice the State and corporate Jamaica to invest heavily in the ‘98 Paris dream.

And neither has Mr Ricketts, in his six years at the helm of the JFF, demonstrated either management skills or imagination to compensate for the short-termism and project-by-project approach of the previous regimes. The federation remains, it appears, wracked by inefficiency and a clunky approach to management.

It is against this backdrop that The Gleaner previously recommended to the JFF that it disband itself, making way for the constitution, and incorporation, of a new body to oversee domestic football.

VOLUNTARY GUARDIANSHIP

Alternatively, as we proposed, the federation might have subjected itself to a kind of voluntary guardianship, inviting independent stakeholders to have a watchdog role over its activities.

Hubris, unfortunately, didn’t allow the JFF to accept these sensible bits of advice.

These, therefore, are among the reasons why we believe that Mr McClaren’s full report to FIFA on Jamaica – which was part of the global federation’s effort to develop the sport internationally – would be useful. That report, we suspect, contributed to Jamaica being part of FIFA’s Talent Development Scheme (TDS) that involved the training of several domestic soccer coaches. It may have also influenced FIFA’s pressure on the JFF to amend its constitution to make its power base more inclusive.

Mr McClaren has characterised his job as being to make the World Cup “dream come alive” by choosing the best players for the team, whether the domestic league or those of Jamaican heritage who play abroad. But he stressed that there has to be a shared vision and commitment for there to be success.

“We might not have the greatest resources, but it is the people, commitment, standard and behaviour that will make the difference,” he said.

Mr McClaren is right. But that kind of success won’t be sustained, or can’t readily be, in the absence of a strong foundation of domestic football, from the grassroots to the top. Having to import someone like Mr McClaren every World Cup cycle to cobble together a programme just isn’t sensible.

This, hopefully, was among the issues Mr McClaren addressed in the football ecosystem report on Jamaica for FIFA. Stakeholders should know if, and how, he answered that question and, if, and how, he intends to deal with it as the national coach – presuming that is part of his mandate.