KSAFA rejects JFF proposal

KINGSTON AND St Andrew Football Association (KSAFA) general secretary, Dwayne Dillon, confirmed that the organisation has rejected a Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) designed football restructuring proposal, citing it as “impractical”.

The federation recently sent documentation to the respective associations to discuss and evaluate.

The proposal includes increasing the teams in the Premier League from 12 to 14, adding a second-tier professional league with 16 teams, with one from each parish to kick-start the competition in the 2020-2021 season, and reducing the number of clubs in the island by over 50 per cent.

Dillon, who accused the federation of playing politics, demanded that the island’s football authority complete their own reforms, as mandated by Concacaf, before trying to implement their ideas domestically.

“There is a feeling of disrespect, they (JFF) send a document on Saturday and want you meet them Tuesday and make a decision in a week. This mad rush the clubs don’t understand and it’s major cause for concern,” said Dillon. “But the clubs have rejected it (document) in its current form unanimously. It’s not workable, it’s filled with flaws and is not a representative solution to the problems we have.”

The administrator noted that KSAFA is, however, willing to work with the JFF to make adjustments.

“We are actually putting forward our own proposal, which we will send out after we meet with them,” he said.

“If we try to implement some things that won’t work, it’s the clubs that will face the brunt of it. When they (JFF) cannot get sponsorship and cannot run their leagues, the clubs will return to their parish and we (parish FAs) will have to adjust and resolve the issue. So they need to show us the money,” he said.

He also argued that the urgency with which the federation is trying to implement this recently drafted document is centred around political motives.

“They want to do everything one time. Why, because they are restructuring and trying to set up themselves. The new restructure gives professional football organisations a say, and the only professional league we have is the Premier League and the Premier League has seven KSAFA clubs, so naturally KSAFA will have greater representation. So in order to ensure that this is dysfunctional, they come up with this system that gives everybody (Parish) a second-tier team and call it professional. So they would dilute the influence they think KSAFA have.

“The JFF is going through a major restructuring right now and it is being done in secret. But the JFF restructure must come before any football restructuring in the country. So we need to know what is happening and they must not force any restructuring on us,” Dillon added.

Efforts to get comments from Gregory Daley, president of the Western Confederation and Patrick Malcolm, president of the South Central Confederation, as well as representatives from the Eastern Confederation were unsuccessful.