Switching Play:

Switching Play Towards a New, Elite, Pan-Caribbean Club Football League

Switching Play

or handle night landings, could result in some territories having their air service curtailed or worse, cancelled.

Despite almost universal acknowledgment that a unified air transport system is an important bedrock for the establishment of a single Caribbean market and that greater air policy integration could contribute greatly to improving the region’s dynamism and competitiveness, policy makers have been unable to find a satisfactory compromise to implement the necessary reforms to make it happen. Therefore, it would appear that the region will continue to sputter along with the current inefficient air network for the foreseeable future.

Due to the Caribbean’s wide-spread geography, reliable and affordable air transport is also critical to the success of any new professional football league. During the course of the study we heard from a number of people that a new league should consider buying its own aircraft to overcome the challenges posed by intra-Caribbean travel. Analyzing the economic benefits of purchasing an airplane to transport teams of footballers across the Caribbean to play matches is outside the scope of our brief; however, taken at the first blush we believe the idea is not without merit. Where it could work, however, is not at the professional club level, where a new fledgling competition can ill afford to have its precious capital tied up in a depreciating asset, unavailable for more pressing needs, but rather at the CONCACAF level.

Additionally, this type of detailed analysis needs to be done by a qualified aviation expert, who can take into account factors like geography, capacity, payload and other mission requirements, and then make an informed recommendation as to the economic sense of such an acquisition and the type of aircraft best fit for the purpose. For the time being at least, a new Caribbean football competition, irrespective of its structure, will likely have to resign itself to operating within the confines of the region’s current transportation system.

Climate Change and Natural Disasters The effects of human activity on climate change are widely believed by climate scientists to contribute to the intensity and frequency of weather-related natural disasters, which endanger lives, property and livelihoods. The UN and IMF are two of a number of nongovernmental organizations who have identified the Caribbean, a region comprised mostly of small developing states, as being particularly vulnerable to weather related natural disasters.

Indeed, the IMF has found the Caribbean to be one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, especially for hurricanes. While the frequency of hurricanes varies from island to island, with Jamaica and The Bahamas being particularly susceptible, for most countries in the Caribbean, the probability of being struck by a hurricane is greater than ten percent per year.

Whenever a hurricane comes ashore, it has the potential to inflict massive damage to homes and commercial facilities, as well as to transportation and other infrastructure including football stadiums. In an area like the Caribbean, where almost all of the region’s major cities, residents and essential infrastructure are located within one mile of the coast, a hurricane can have a particularly devastating effect. When Hurricane Ivan struck the Caribbean in 2004, for example, The National Hurricane Centre estimated that over 60,000 homes were destroyed,

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Switching Play

while the U.S. Center for Disease Control calculated the total damages to the region to be US $3 billion, an amount only slightly less than Grenada’s entire GDP in that year.

Given the Caribbean’s particular vulnerability to weather related disasters, together with the fact that many of the island’s economies are heavily dependent on tourism and to a lesser degree agriculture — two industries which are especially vulnerable to natural disasters — a hurricane strike is likely to have an immediate negative effect on the economic output and public finances of the affected territory. This will include a drop in revenue from taxes and fees paid by tourists, which the country will not collect as it recovers, and from the loss of earnings as a result of a fall in crop productivity. There will also be a corresponding decrease in employment and income from those working in the two respective industries, resulting in a further loss in the tax revenues that support education, social services, and infrastructure, including stadia; and a reduction in spending that local individual citizens have to purchase discretionary goods and services, such as tickets for football matches.

As was rightly pointed out by one member of the Caribbean Professional League Task Force, the Caribbean does not hold a monopoly on natural disasters. To one degree or another all countries within CONCACAF, including the U.S., are susceptible to being struck by hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and the like. However, many of the small island developing states of the Caribbean have less capacity to respond and recover from the devastation caused by a natural disaster, which in the context of this study, is likely to be a factor that investors consider when assessing the risk involved in investing in a new Caribbean football league.

Functional Cooperation The countries of the Caribbean are some of the smallest independent nations in the world.

From the earliest days of their sovereignty, many have sought to counter the disadvantages of their size by seeking alliances with other nations to create scale economies, respond to external challenges and exert influence when negotiating with larger third countries.

Illustrative of this fact is the line of organizations that have embodied the regional integration ethos that stretches back to 1958, with the formation of the short-lived West Indies Federation, and which lives most notably today in CARICOM. While the region’s commitment to the integrationist ideal stands unquestioned, progressing from an integration vision to enacting agreed upon treaty commitments has been bedeviled with challenges, prompting one group to characterize implementation as the “Achilles heel of the regional integration movement.”

Owing to the region’s geography and the omnipresence of the sea, fashioning instruments of close cooperation is always likely to be a challenge in the Caribbean. At the same time, the significant asymmetry in socioeconomic conditions among the region’s countries, the inherent complexities of the process itself, the failure of previous integration efforts, perceptions of unequal distribution of the benefits and costs, along with a persistent existential fear that subordinating national interest to the higher interest of the Caribbean community could undermine national sovereignty, have also contributed to the slow and uneven implementation of integration and cooperation efforts.

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