HexagonalBlog

CONCACAF Congress in Budapest: Not as bizarre as it sounds

CONCACAF's announcement that the new confederation president would be selected at their Congress in Budapest -- Hungary! -- raised eyebrows and drew considerable derision from the media and the Twitterverse.  The Congress will meet on 23 May to select a president who will complete the remaining four years of Jack Warner's term.

I know that I have been critical of bizarre CONCACAF decisionmaking in the past, but I don't believe the decision to host the CONCACAF Congress in Europe is as odd as it sounds.  The CONCACAF delegates will be in Budapest for the FIFA Congress, and it would be very bad for a FIFA Ordinary Congress to meet without a permanent CONCACAF president in place.  This CONCACAF Congress is an Extraordinary Congress (i.e. not regularly scheduled) for the express purpose of selecting a new president.  If all of the CONCACAF national association delegates will be in Budapest anyway, why not have them meet the day before to select a new president?  From the confederation's point of view, co-locating its Congress with FIFA's saves them money and logistical headaches.

CONCACAF's ExCo has started the countdown to the candidate nomination process, with national associations having until 25 March to nominate someone.  I would imagine that Alfredo Hawit, the interim president, will run for the permanent position.  The Caribbean associations will almost certainly try to put forward a common candidate, which may prove difficult in the post-Warner era but will be forced upon them as an act of self-preservation.  And it remains to be seen whether the North American associations will stand in the background or finally take an interest in the region's highest soccer leadership position. With closer integration if not an outright merger with CONMEBOL under consideration, this could be a consequential presidential election.

Is CONCACAF moving into CONMEBOL's orbit?

On Wednesday of this week, interim CONCACAF president Alfredo Hawit gave the clearest signal yet that the confederation will collaborate much more closely with CONMEBOL than they have in the past.  Will it be a merger in everything but name?  Not yet, but significant factions within both groups are considering the possibilities.

In recent years Mexican and some other select North and Central American clubs have participated in South American club competitions.  Mexico is practically a half-member of CONMEBOL given their clubs' participation in both Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana and the national team's consistent participation in Copa América.  Other CONCACAF clubs have been limited to participate in the Copa Sudamericana with some limited national team participation in Copa América. 

Hawit's proposal for a 16-team Copa América (in the truest sense of the word)  to celebrate CONMEBOL's centenary is an intriguing one that could serve as a proving ground for such a competition in a merged American confederation.  Such a competition would give CONMEBOL a figleaf for hosting the tournament in either USA or Mexico.  It's not known how the eight CONCACAF representatives would be selected -- rankings? qualification tournament? -- but what is known is that the USA would be a participant in an expanded event.  And if rankings are used, it's possible that one or two Caribbean countries would be in the group of eight.

Beyond an expanded Copa Libertadores and Copa América, full integration and then a full merger of CONCACAF with CONMEBOL would be much more difficult.  Hawit did not propose any changes to the World Cup qualification process, which would require CONCACAF Congress approval and then FIFA approval.  While Mexican teams have CONCACAF's blessing to participate in Copa Libertadores, no other domestic league in the region has the financial ability to carry out a Libertadores program or the television market to interest CONMEBOL, with the exception of MLS.  But even then, CONMEBOL already has access to the US market through Mexican teams and MLS teams haven't shown much interest in Copa Libertadores anyway.

At the end of the Medio Tiempo article was Hawit's call for a 4-year rotating presidency between the Caribbean, Central American, and North American subregions.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist like me to notice that such a proposal is dead on arrival in the Caribbean.  As far as the Caribbean nations are concerned, it would be like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Such a presidency would force the other ten nations of CONCACAF to take a more assertive role in the leadership of the confederation as opposed to their more subservient role.  My impression is that the events of last year have awoken them from their disinterest, but the confederation has not yet found the right vehicle to get the North and Central Americans "in" and keep the Caribbeans reasonably happy.

The bottom line here is that Hawit is proposing some significant changes in the direction of CONCACAF, changes that need to be ratified by a new Congress and election.  The next four months will be important ones in the history of the confederation.

T&T federation assets seized

The long, long, long dispute between a group of players from Trinidad & Tobago's 2006 World Cup squad and their national football federation reached a new but not yet final phase today when many of the physical assets of the federation were seized by order of the Trinidadian High Court.  (The original article is located here.) Court-appointed personnel confiscated assets that were removable and thought to be valuable, such as furniture, match memorabilia and trophies, uniforms, computers, and appliances. 

Crates containing unsold copies of Jack Warner's autobiography were left behind.

The seized assets will be auctioned off, but the chances that the proceeds will cancel out the US$700,000 still owed to the players are very small.  The next course of action for the players would then be to liquidate the remaining assets of the T&TFF, which would include their building and other land holdings, and then go after the principals themselves such as former T&TFF president Oliver Camps. 

Of course no further discussion of this saga can proceed without mentioning Jack Warner.  In hindsight, his appointment as a Special Advisor to the T&T Football Federation was a clever move.  The players would like to add him as a party to the case, but it not certain that a judge will grant such a motion.  The federation in a statement today recognizes that there is a debt owed to the players but they are unable to pay it, and besides, Jack Warner was the person in charge of those World Cup accounts.

So the focus in this case will shift to Warner.  Will he be made a party to the proceedings by the courts?  Will he reveal what happened to the money from T&T's World Cup campaign?  The answer to the first question will determine if the second question will ever be resolved.