Editorial | Disband JFF

It is doubtful that even if burdened with a significant handicap, any other Jamaican institution is as incompetently managed as the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF). Indeed, the ineptitude of the Federation’s bosses is so egregious that they are likely to be blissfully ignorant of their failures. It won’t occur to them to go. Which is what they should do – en masse.

In fact, the JFF should go further. As we have recommended before, the Federation should disband itself, opening the way for a creation of a new, transparent and accountable organisation for overseeing football in Jamaica. All current JFF officials and managers should, at least for a decade, be ineligible for leadership positions in the new organisation, and its officers should be subject to fit-and-proper and psychometric tests to determine their suitability for posts.

We make these recommendations, convinced that the JFF, as currently constituted, is incapable of reform. Its culture of permissiveness and unaccountability is too deep.

The latest episode in the JFF’s orgy of missteps and incompetence occurred last weekend in Suriname, where Jamaica’s team drew 1-1 with Suriname in the first leg of their opening fixture of Concacaf Nations League tournament. The result was disappointing. What, however, was unacceptable was the arrangements the JFF made, or perhaps more accurately, did not make, for the team to travel.

The Federation got the team to Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital. For this, they probably should be applauded. But that was as good as it got. Apparently, the JFF expected the team to share a return flight aboard a charter airline with the Surinamese team, who were coming to Jamaica for the fixture’s return leg. But the Jamaicans could not board the flight.

The JFF, it seemed, did not keep its payment obligation to the charter operator.

SCROUNGED ABOUT IN UNCERTAINTY

As the Federation scrambled to make alternative arrangements, including attempting to find someone in Jamaica to foot the airline bill, the Jamaican players scrounged about for hours in uncertainty, the team noted in a statement, in which they lamented the ignominy of having the Surinamese arriving in Jamaica “before us, the Jamaican national team”.

But it was not only the flight arrangements out of Suriname about which the team complained. At least two players failed to make the trip to Suriname, it was reported, because of bungled arrangements by the JFF. The quality of accommodations was also a matter of concern for the players.

What happened in Suriname, the players reminded, was not an isolated incident. The JFF’s failure to hold up its end of its contractual arrangements with players was perennial, the team suggested. “There were several instances where players arrive at the airport and to their surprise, no flight had been booked,” the statement from the team said.

In the past, too, players, male and female, have threatened to strike for not being paid. And there was an instance of a benefactor of the women’s team, during the preparation of the last Women’s World Cup, threatening to withdraw support because of the JFF’s failure to transparently account for money provided for the team.

More recently, there was its ham-fisted response to a declaration by almost the entirety of the women’s squad that they had lost confidence in their coach, Vin Blaine, and his staff. Before that was the matter of the world governing body of football, FIFA, throwing out Jamaica’s protest of a goal against it in a World Cup-qualifying match against the United States. The reason: the JFF’s failure to follow simple, procedural rules.

Not only did the JFF fail to pay the 1,000 Swiss francs that should have accompanied its complaint, it offered no evidence of having filed a protest with the match referee within the stipulated time.

If the JFF cannot get these simple things right, what ought people to expect with the more complex ones?

The Federation will no doubt blame its lurch from crisis to crisis on a lack of resources – that it does not have the money which was available when the country was caught up in a nationalistic fervour that helped to propel Jamaica to the 1998 World Cup in France.

NO HORACE BURRELL

That is only part of the explanation. The bigger problem is the JFF’s failure to adjust and adapt. It has followed the template of 1998, seemingly unaware of a missing ingredient. Its current president, Michael Ricketts, is no Horace Burrell, the late former army captain whose ability to sell an outsized vision of Jamaica’s football caused the Government and corporate Jamaica to open their pocketbooks to international campaigns.

The post-Burrell period required organisation and structure – and a plan for a sustainable national football programme, which the JFF has not been able to articulate, much more implement. And the Federation has not been transparent. The organisation lacks the public’s trust.

The players, in the face of the Suriname fiasco, called for the resignation of the Federation’s general secretary, Dalton Wint, the organisation’s chief administrative officer, who they blamed for the JFF’s shambolic operations.

In his conversation with one player, captured in a voice note that became public, Mr Ricketts was clearly ready to throw Mr Wint under the bus. Indeed, Mr Wint has since resigned.

Mr Wint’s competence may indeed be questionable. But the problem of the JFF is not merely Dalton Wint. It is leadership and institutional. The rot is too pervasive for the structure to be saved by replacing a single beam.