Bri­an Jor­dan, or­gan­is­er of the Next Lev­el Con­sul­tant Ltd (NL­CL) Un­der-19 and U-15 youth foot­ball tour­na­ments, will be mak­ing a strong bid for the pres­i­den­cy of the South­ern Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (SFA) when the an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing (AGM) and elec­tions take place at the Man­nie Ramjohn Sta­di­um in Mara­bel­la on Thurs­day (April 27) from 7.30 pm.

Backed by an equal­ly strong team of Ker­win We­st­on (first vice pres­i­dent), Jef­fer­son George (sec­ond vice pres­i­dent) and oth­er hard­work­ing mem­bers such as Ani­ta Sinanan, for­mer FI­FA ref­er­ee Jag­ger­nath Goolcha­ran and Andy Smith, the team promis­es to bring back the crowds and the zeal that once sig­ni­fied the sport in the south­land.

They will be up against a team led by Ed­di­son Dean, a for­mer Su­per League vice pres­i­dent who will again con­test the po­si­tion of sec­ond vice pres­i­dent of a slate be­ing head­ed by busi­ness­man Den­nis Lat­iff.

Lat­iff was the man be­hind the spon­sor­ship of the Tiger Tanks Un­der-20 Cham­pi­onships. He will have on his team the for­mer “Strike Squad” goal­keep­er Michael Mau­rice as the sec­re­tary (ad­min­is­tra­tion), Ald­wyn Williams (sec­re­tary op­er­a­tions) and Joseph Rooplal who will con­test the po­si­tion of pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer.

Yes­ter­day, Jor­dan told Guardian Me­dia Sports of his plans, say­ing: “We are build­ing from a base be­cause for years the SFA has gone back­wards, but I know the folks there, the in­cum­bents, have been try­ing their best, but in spite of that, we’ve had low­er­ing num­bers in terms of par­tic­i­pa­tion, low­er­ing num­bers in terms of en­er­gy and en­thu­si­asm, so we ex­pect to bring that back, much like we have done with the NL­CL tour­na­ment.

“The NL­CL tour­na­ment has been around since 2019 and we’ve built from 10 teams to 16 at the Un­der-19 lev­el, and from noth­ing to 14 teams at the U-15 lev­el, so we ex­pect to do the same at all lev­els with the SFA, youth foot­ball, women and girls and se­nior foot­ball, so we are ex­cit­ed.”

Ac­cord­ing to Jor­dan, as the own­er of his own com­pa­ny, they will seek to make in­vest­ments in the sport in the south­land.

“Clear­ly the SFA, un­til re­cent­ly, has not paid out any prize monies to teams that have put out en­er­gies. Cer­tain­ly, at the end of a sea­son, you want to be re­ward­ed, so we are putting things in place to en­sure that there will be prize-giv­ing cer­e­monies and awards and so on.

“Fund­ing is com­ing in and NL­CL is our com­pa­ny, so we would cer­tain­ly want to in­vest.

“To pull off a vic­to­ry, we have to re­ly on the mem­bers agree­ing that we are the bet­ter choice, and so we have been talk­ing to them, we’ve been hav­ing on­line meet­ings, bring­ing folks from the USA on­line to talk to them about how we get our youths out­side in terms of youth cups and so on over there.

“We’ve been talk­ing about how we work in a post-covid en­vi­ron­ment, so the teams know we’ve been kind of em­bed­ded with them.

“We be­lieve in bot­tom-up de­vel­op­ment ver­sus a lot of folks who be­lieve in top-down. Any­thing that is top-down has a ten­den­cy to not be as sta­ble, we all know about the pyra­mids in Egypt, they are bot­tom-up de­vel­op­ment.

“We be­lieve in build­ing pyra­mids, that’s what we are plan­ning to do and I think we have a strong chance to do that.”

Jor­dan con­clud­ed by say­ing there has not been youth foot­ball in the SFA for quite some time now: “So yes, we would jump in right away and bring in acad­e­my foot­ball. We have girls’ and women’s foot­ball which we haven’t had ever and cer­tain­ly, we will have age-group foot­ball along with se­nior foot­ball, once we get in there.”