Mo' money, mo' problems

2026-03-20 - 03:14

“I don’t know what they want from me, it’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.” (Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”, song by Notorious B.I.G.) I love hip-hop, the most powerful transnational musical medium for social commentary. It is a global phenomenon transcending language and culture. And I love “old school” hip hop, in particular. So there I was last weekend surfing YouTube, watching videos – Fat Joe, Tupac, Snoop, Common, like that – when the algorithm kicked up Notorious B.I.G and “Mo’ money, mo’ problems”. The song was a hit from his second studio album, “Life After Death”. It was his second posthumous Number One single, following “Hypnotize”. And then, honestly, in the midst of cascading lyrics – I thought of the T&T Football Association (TTFA). The TTFA is an opaque organisation, an impenetrable dark hole. Securing information from TTFA is much akin to pulling teeth, but recently, I acquired its 2026 budget totalling $34 million dollars. We hear less about its organisational debt these days – $100 million in 2021 – and TTFA now has multi-millions in annual income at its disposal after its emergence from occupation by FIFA’s Normalisation Committee. Nonetheless, B.I.G’s lyrics could have been penned with TTFA in mind. Thirty-four million dollars is no mean sum, significantly higher than the Normalisation Committee’s 2020 income of $20 million. But our domestic and international football are at their lowest ebb today – all national selections but the women eliminated from their World Cup, elite league football mendicant and deteriorating, youth football terminally mismanaged and disoriented. A budget reflects its owner’s objectives, priorities, strengths and limitations. And a look at the TTFA’s budget reveals extreme myopia, skewed priorities and the promise of a dismal future under the current dispensation. Who pays the piper Three organisations contribute the overwhelming majority of TTFA’s annual income – FIFA, Concacaf and the Ministry of Sport and Youth Affairs. FIFA provides an annual grant intended to fortify the Association’s administrative operation, subsidise travel of national teams and Association officials, support the purchase of sporting and administrative equipment, and finance development initiatives such as leagues, youth programmes and capacity building activities. Concacaf provides an annual development grant, which also supports administration and management, and subsidises international travel. The Ministry of Sport contributes funding for the Premier Football League and national teams. Control of the Association’s funding ensures loyalty to its donors and FIFA is unflinching in its use of the lifeblood financing it provides to leverage TTFA politics. For example, in 2024, it forced TTFA members to adopt a FIFA-approved Constitution despite membership rejection of several of its provisions. As former T&T Olympic Committee (TTOC) president Brian Lewis summed it up at the time, “...it is what it is and that is the reality of FIFA when they are dealing with countries like T&T, where it is really about colonisation and re-colonisation.” TTFA’s 2026 budget indicates a “forecasted” income of $34 million dollars, with FIFA contributing $10.2 million (30%), to Concacaf’s $1.8 million (5%) and the Ministry’s $17 million (50%). Curiously, World Cup qualifying gate receipts are entered at $1.2 million (4%) while sponsorship revenue totals $2 million (6%). These figures underline the Association’s almost complete dependence on “political” funding, so to speak, and demonstrate TTFA’s limited ability to independently generate revenue, minimal sponsorship income notwithstanding. Most importantly, the budget entirely lacks any reference to media rights and merchandising, two of the most profitable income streams in modern professional sport. Without funding from government and football authorities, TTFA would implode. Modern money Media rights agreements, both international and local, are a cornerstone of professional sports revenue. These are long-term contracts between sporting bodies and media companies, such as broadcasters and streaming platforms, that provide guaranteed annual payments for the right to broadcast activities organised by said bodies. These contracts ensure a stable and predictable revenue stream, which is critical for financial planning. The global media rights industry is valued at US$3 trillion, with projections indicating growth to US$4 trillion by 2035. TTFA’s projected revenue does not reflect even a remote relationship to this reality. The sale of the Association’s main product – international football matches – is not even a line item in the budget. Does TTFA receive income from the broadcast or streaming of our matches, e.g. against Bolivia? To that, add the issue of licensing and merchandising. The global licensing industry, which includes merchandising rights, is valued at US$334 billion, with projections to reach US$419 billion by 2030. In 2025, US Soccer (USSF) generated US$58 million (22% of its revenue) from media rights and merchandising. The Canadian Soccer Association’s (CSA) media and licensing rights deal (2026-2037) is valued at over US$100 million. The Mexican Football Federation’s (FMF) media and licensing rights deal for its national men’s, women’s, and youth teams for the 2026-2030 and 2030-2034 cycles is worth in excess of US$200 million. Down the food chain, in Panama (which we once ridiculed as “a baseball country” guaranteed for”licks”), the Football Federation (FEPAFUT) is in the final year of its second media rights contract (2022-2026) valued at US$12 million. These are just a few CONCACAF examples that throw the absence of media, licensing and merchandising revenue from TTFA’s budget into sharp relief. Is TTFA thinking about transforming its property rights into serious revenue? Is Colin Murray, TTFA’s first vice president and former sponsorship and events head honcho at Carib, weighing in on this? What are we to conclude when the Association cannot resolve the decade-long “Soca Warriors” naming rights issue? Yet we pretend to run with the “big boys”. Expenditure is not investment Income is one side of the coin. Inevitably, expenditure is the other. And it reveals a spender’s priorities. It is transparently clear that TTFA is concerned, philosophically and in practical terms, only with the top of the football pyramid – national teams and “elite” league football – to which it devotes the lion’s share of its “forecasted” income. Grassroots development, zonal, schools, youth and women’s football do not feature in its plans. Of its $18 million in envisioned Technical Department expenditure, merely $0.15 million (0.8%) is allocated to “technical programmes”, i.e. activities which are intended to grow and develop the game. This is consistent with the Association’s focus on foreign-born, including “Granny Law” players, who it expects will provide a shortcut to international success and minimise the need for hard, unglamorous labour in the vineyards to recruit children into the game and to develop them. For their part, beach football and futsal will receive the grand budgetary allocation of $.01 million each (0.5%). These are variations of the sport, which have no local league or competition. Yet TTFA, instead of investing in their growth and development, continues its comatose attitude towards them and will attempt, undoubtedly without success, to qualify for their respective World Cups in 2027 and 2028. The poverty of ideas Today, TTFA enjoys fatter coffers but suffers from endemic intellectual bankruptcy. The poverty of ideas is a psychological concept that refers to a lack of creativity and depth of thought. It describes the failure of individuals or groups to engage with complex issues and to generate innovative concepts or solutions. TTFA’s budget is damning evidence of the poverty of vision and ideas within the Association’s leadership. It is merely a plan for the immediate consumption of precious financial resources by international and domestic competitions and offers no developmental conception of our football future, nor any idea of a pathway to get us there. I am appalled at the impotence of TTFA’s Technical Committee. While we fiddle, USSF recently launched its “Pathway Strategy” with buy-in from professional leagues (MLS, NWSL, USL), youth organisations, and key sponsors, and strategic input from Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development. The initiative aims to reduce youth football costs, make football USA’s top participation sport, and develop World Cup-winning teams. Our football needs a grand strategic project with sensible long-term investment and development priorities, bedrock grassroots and development programmes, structural changes to all levels of our league football to create a clear player pathway up the pyramid, and independent revenue generation initiatives to reduce reliance on political financing. Mo’ money, mo’ problems? Maybe. And micro-problems in football are never in short supply – coaching failures, poor league management, non-payment of referees, etc. But these are mere symptoms of a deep-lying terminal disease, which are magnified in the absence of a guiding vision and an effective strategic plan. The solutions to our micro-problems reside only in a macro-development project, which TTFA does not have. Fix that, TTFA, or further down the drain pipe we go.