When Trinidad and To­ba­go qual­i­fied for the 2006 World Cup fi­nals in Ger­many, it looked like there would be no turn­ing back for foot­ball in this coun­try. A bright fu­ture seemed cer­tain.

That mem­o­rable mo­ment when the So­ca War­riors beat Bahrain 2-1 on ag­gre­gate to book a spot in the fi­nals came af­ter two heart­break­ing ex­pe­ri­ences when this na­tion came tan­ta­lis­ing­ly close to go­ing to the fi­nals in 1974 and 1990.

Sad­ly, those glo­ry days are now well be­hind us. T&T foot­ball is in sham­bles, mired in debt, tum­bling down the world rank­ings and fac­ing im­mi­nent dan­ger of sanc­tions from world gov­ern­ing body FI­FA.

The pre­cip­i­tous de­cline in a sport that has a large and ded­i­cat­ed fol­low­ing in this coun­try adds an­oth­er shame­ful chap­ter to the sto­ry of debt, cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment linked for decades to the ad­min­is­tra­tion of T&T’s foot­ball.

Now, to make the sit­u­a­tion even worse comes rev­e­la­tions in the ground­break­ing doc­u­men­tary, TTFA’s Se­cret Pana­ma Trail, which aired on CNC3 on Thurs­day night.

Ques­tions have now been raised about the tenure of for­mer TTFA pres­i­dent David John-Williams­—ques­tions he re­peat­ed­ly failed to an­swer when con­front­ed by Mark Bas­sant, Guardian Me­dia’s In­ves­tiga­tive Lead Ed­i­tor.

These ques­tions arise over sus­pi­cious fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions in re­la­tion to the TTFA’s Home of Foot­ball project in Cou­va.

Mr John-Williams, who had tout­ed the project as key to turn­ing around lo­cal foot­ball’s for­tunes, owes an ex­pla­na­tion to the na­tion over how it plunged the as­so­ci­a­tion in­to fur­ther debt.

These dis­turb­ing facts have sur­faced at a crit­i­cal time. The TTFA was dis­band­ed by FI­FA in mid-March and a Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee has been in­stalled to re­struc­ture the af­fairs of lo­cal foot­ball and work out a debt re­pay­ment plan for the TTFA.

A le­gal chal­lenge to FI­FA’s ac­tion by oust­ed TTFA pres­i­dent William Wal­lace and his team may draw sanc­tions and even more neg­a­tive reper­cus­sions for lo­cal foot­ball.

This is the biggest cri­sis in the TTFA since Jack Warn­er, a for­mer TTFA and CON­CA­CAF pres­i­dent, was banned for life from tak­ing part in any kind of foot­ball-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ty at na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el. This fol­lowed the foot­ball-re­lat­ed cor­rup­tion charges laid against him by Unit­ed States au­thor­i­ties for which he con­tin­ues to fight ex­tra­di­tion to that coun­try.

It is dis­tress­ing to see how far T&T foot­ball has fall­en and with it the dreams of all of those tal­ent­ed young play­ers who as­pire to fol­low in the foot­steps of Ever­ald “Gal­ly” Cum­mings, Rus­sell Lat­apy, Sha­ka His­lop, Dwight Yorke and all our oth­er home­grown stars.

So from once be­ing part of a World Cup, T&T is now ranked at an abysmal 105th and poised to drop fur­ther.

This is a far cry from as re­cent­ly as 2016, when, un­der coach Stephen Hart, T&T was ranked 54th. A year af­ter that, the team slid 11 places to 65th and has been on a down­ward tra­jec­to­ry since then.

This is a sad state of af­fairs for which many for­mer TTFA ad­min­is­tra­tors must be made to ac­count.