The fundraising to support the 'Soca Princesses' is heartwarming but it should never have had to happen
It was heartening to read this piece in The Guardian about the cry for help for the ‘Soca Princesses’ – the Trinidad & Tobago women’s football team. They arrived in the US for their qualifying campaign for the 2015 Women’s World Cup with just $500.
Their volunteer American coach, Randy Waldrum, sought help via social media and within hours, approximately US$13,300 had poured-in to help pay accommodation, food and transport bills, including long-term offer of help from the Clinton Foundation.
But two things strike you about this plea for help.
The first is that it demonstrates the culture of the game – the model of silence which Andrew Jennings so vividly documents in his latest book, Omerta.
Take note of these two paragraphs in The Guardian article which show that the T&T FA’s concern is that they didn’t want people to know – not that their team had no money and were expected to play in a qualification tournament without the basics in place.
‘Waldrum’s scheme had worked, but his bosses back in Trinidad were not impressed. “It caused such an uproar, the federation got embarrassed by it, the government got embarrassed by it,” he told the Guardian. “That wasn’t my intention, to tweet it out and embarrass people and make them look bad. The fact is there was no money and I had just a couple of hours to figure out how I was going to get them fed.”
Last Friday, Waldrum wrote a letter to Raymond Tim Kee, the federation president, which was published on the organisation’s Facebook page. “The response was overwhelming however in hindsight, the language used to appeal for assistance could have been better and was not meant to cause any embarrassment to the TTFA nor the Trinidad and Tobago public at large. If it did by any chance, I apologize in advance for any embarrassment caused,” Waldrum wrote.’
Not that T&T football are strangers to controversies with players. They had a long-running battle with the ‘Soca Warriors’ (the men’s team) over player payments owed from the 2006 World Cup.
T&T FA’s President, Raymond Tim Kee, served his long ‘apprenticeship’ in T&T football as Vice-President to Jack Warner.
And that leads us to the second issue.
Not only did Jack Warner run T&T football, but he was also President of CONCACAF and a former Senior Vice-President of FIFA. Warner resigned from all his international football roles before his actions could be examined by the former Ethics Committee (the really toothless one), let alone the more recent investigation by Michael Garcia into the conduct of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup Bids.
An independent committee of inquiry into CONCACAF funds reported in April last year that Warner and the then General Secretary, American Chuck Blazer, ‘clipped the ticket’ to the tune of millions and millions of dollars over many years (at least USD$500,000 of it belongs to the Australian taxpayer). Reports in local T&T media earlier this year suggest the amount unaccounted for in respect of Warner alone was TTD$180,000,000 (US$28.4m).
Meanwhile, well-meaning people – including the Haiti FA, yes Haiti – donate money to the ‘Soca Princesses’ so they can compete in their World Cup qualifiers, with a bed to sleep in and some food to eat. And FIFA President, Sepp Blatter, and those he is protecting in world football, continue to swan around the world in five-star luxury telling us how much they’ve done for the game and for the world.
Just who is bringing the game into disrepute?