CAS­TRIES – FI­FA pres­i­dent Gi­an­ni In­fan­ti­no will be among sev­er­al high-pro­file foot­ball of­fi­cials in St Lu­cia this week­end to at­tend the 40th Con­fed­er­a­tion of North, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, and Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion Foot­ball (CON­CA­CAF) Con­gress.

Over 250 del­e­gates will be present for the event which serves as the an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing for the re­gion’s gov­ern­ing body for foot­ball.

In host­ing the Con­gress, St Lu­cia will be­come the first small is­land de­vel­op­ing state to do so.

Min­is­ter for Youth De­vel­op­ment and Sports, Ken­son Casimir said it was a ma­jor sport­ing ac­com­plish­ment for the coun­try.

“For an is­land as small as Saint Lu­cia to be in a po­si­tion and have the where­with­al to host a CON­CA­CAF Con­gress, it speaks vol­umes about our so­cial and eco­nom­ic po­si­tion in the re­gion.

“It means that we have all the dy­nam­ics that a glob­al en­ti­ty like CON­CA­CAF re­quires to host all the del­e­gates,” Casimir said.

“It means that we have the ho­tels. It means that we have the con­fer­ence space. It means that we have the lo­gis­tics on the ground. It means that we are in a fun­da­men­tal eco­nom­ic po­si­tion to host them suc­cess­ful­ly as a Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment, and it means that Saint Lu­cia is putting the rest of the world on no­tice that when it comes to sports de­vel­op­ment, the rest of the world could look to Saint Lu­cia to host sig­nif­i­cant events such as this.”

The Saint Lu­cia Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (SLFA), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with lo­cal agen­cies, has been in­stru­men­tal in or­gan­is­ing this con­gress.

Re­cent ini­tia­tives, such as the launch of the in­au­gur­al Se­mi-Pro­fes­sion­al Foot­ball League (SPFL), high­light the na­tion’s com­mit­ment to ad­vanc­ing foot­ball.

Casimir re­vealed that foot­ball ad­min­is­tra­tors will ben­e­fit from the op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­gage in dis­cus­sions with CON­CA­CAF of­fi­cials re­gard­ing the de­vel­op­ment of the SPFL, par­tic­u­lar­ly in terms of lo­gis­tics.

CMC