National football teams operations manager William Wallace says plans are moving ahead to ensure that budgets are covered and preparations are in place for each of the national teams scheduled to take part in international competition this year.
As challenging as it remains, Wallace said with the senior men’s team heading the list of major activities, the men’s Under-20 team and the women’s senior team are also gearing towards the Pan American Games in Canada in July while the national youth men and women teams also have CONCACAF Championships to look forward to.
“Everything we do this year is geared towards our preparations for the Gold Cup in July and the World Cup qualifiers in November. The coach is actually trying to widen his pool of players and will be looking at more towards local-based players from the Pro League. The concentration now is on the local players for the upcoming Panama match with the inclusion of a few overseas-based players,” Wallace said.
He mentioned that there have been two meetings with Sports Minister Brent Sancho and there is continued dialogue.
“The discussions been going pretty well. We have had two meetings already with the Sports Minister and he has indicated his willingness and the Ministry’s willingness to support the national teams. As a former player he knows that it takes to prepare national teams. He has asked that we also try to help ourselves and I think that’s a fair suggestion. They have indicated what they will help with and what we need to help ourselves with. I think going forward we can say that the Minister and his ministry is on board to support national football,” he said.
Regarding the preparations for the Pan American Games, Wallace added: “I have been making my rounds of meetings. We have met with the Olympic committee which will take care of the major expense.”
Wallace emphasised that there would have to be greater effort to source funding for national teams.
“We will need to find additional financial support for the CONCACAF Gold Cup. We have sent those budgets in for all our national teams to the Ministry. We have a busy year ahead of us and trying to really prepare properly for tournaments. We have to take some decisions. It doesn’t make sense spending a whole lot of money to prepare a team but yet not going the full distance and it shows when we actually play in the tournament.
“For instance if it costs $150,000 to prepare a team for the tournament, then do not provide $100,00 and expect that everything will be taken care of and expect the team to come out successful. Overall, we also have to find other resources to meet the budget requirements."