Photo : Amiel Mohammed courtesy Soca Warriors social media page
The Trinidad and Tobago Football Association has been burdened by enormous debts and are seeking avenues to overcome the slow economic growth worldwide. The TTFA joined the CONCACAF members as they looked towards ways to commercialize their associations and become self-sustainable.
The local organization was represented in the Commercialization Workshop held on Zoom on Tuesday by the interim general secretary Amiel Mohammed, head of media and communications Shaun Fuentes and Yuri Chapman. The Caribbean islands had representations from Jamaica, Grenada, Bermuda, Guyana, Barbados, St Lucia among others.
The TTFA will be looking forward to retaining the use of the Home of Football facility as a major income generator. Chapman, sat in on the workshop and has been part of the association as a Marketing Consultant would have found the workshop beneficial as they aim to turn around financial fortunes for the organization.
One of the new mandates by the world governing body, FIFA is to set a new mandate to focus more on female football. FIFA, has also announced an increased in participating teams for 2023Women’s World Cup from 24 teams to 32 teams for the which will be held in Australia and New Zealand
Locally, the Ascension became the first corporate entity to invest in the women`s football by sponsoring $200,000 to the Trinidad & Tobago Women`s League Football (WOLF) a month ago.
The head presenter at the workshop was Heidi Pellerano, CONCACAF’s Chief Commercial Officer who oversees the organization’s Commercial division. The topics that were discussed are brand-building tactics, sponsorship, fan engagement, data and analytics specific to fan engagement and marketing and building strategic alliances with commercial partners.
CONCACAF General Secretary Philippe Moggio, Chief Director of Member Associations Marco Leal, Senior Project Manager Howard McIntosh and CONCACAF Director of Caribbean football Horace Reid were all present.
Moggio said in his address to the participants, “We have heard from many of you that the commercial area is an important area where we all need to strengthen our know-how, so we decided to create this specific commercialization workshop,” Moggio said.
“We have done a lot of work over the past two years in further developing our commercial programme, developing the platforms that target different audiences. You see our women’s competitions coming together under a CONCACAF W brand and our youth competitions and how we are packaging those, our CSR efforts and many other initiatives that target different audiences and help us advance our revenue opportunities. These are the areas we want to focus on that can help you at your local level.”
He concluded, “You will hear from Heidi the importance the understanding who your fan base is, how your audience comes together and how to best position yourselves and programmes to capitalize on the opportunities that may exist on the local level for you.”
