For­mer FI­FA vice pres­i­dent Austin Jack Warn­er, who has wide­ly been ac­knowl­edged as the man whose as­sis­tance and ad­min­is­tra­tive ex­pe­ri­ence helped Trinidad and To­ba­go qual­i­fy for its first and, to date, on­ly World Cup in Ger­many in 2006, is not con­fi­dent of 2026 World Cup par­tic­i­pa­tion for the So­ca War­riors. 

“Let me tell you this, and who is vex? Well,  vex. We will not see a World Cup fi­nal in foot­ball in our col­lec­tive life­time, not even for the one com­ing up (2026), and re­mem­ber, I have told you so,” Warn­er said on the Is­ports ra­dio pro­gram, host­ed by An­dre Er­rol Bap­tiste on Fri­day. 

“We have got­ten more chances and more slots to qual­i­fy, but our chances will not be bet­ter but worse. First of all, we don’t have the tal­ent at the top, and in terms of coach­ing, we don’t have that will to al­low our foot­ball play­ers to suc­ceed. We don’t have the com­pe­ti­tion at the bot­tom. Ask the av­er­age Trinidad and To­ba­go foot­baller to name five foot­ballers in the coun­try. He can’t. The av­er­age Tri­ni can­not, and some­thing is wrong,” said Warn­er. 

Warn­er be­lieves the coach­ing from An­gus Eve to Derek King will not work. “I know Derek King very well; he used to coach my club called Joe Pub­lic. I know him very well, but Derek King is out of his league. Derek King does not un­der­stand the nu­ances of coach­ing at the World Cup lev­el. And that is the dif­fer­ence I am talk­ing about. Derek King is not in Leo Been­hakker’s class, so to speak. Eng­land got rid of Gareth South­gate. What are we do­ing in terms of this?” asked Warn­er. 

I was told that this was un­fair as Trinidad and To­ba­go’s foot­ball team does not have that kind of mon­ey.

He said, “If you get the mon­ey to pay a top-class coach, you will spend less mon­ey in the ju­di­cia­ry and less mon­ey in na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty. The mon­ey that you will save from na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, you can pump back in­to sports. It fol­lows that you have to pri­ori­tise and see what is im­por­tant to you, and if sport is the ve­hi­cle for na­tion­al uni­ty and de­vel­op­ment and for peo­ple’s pride, put the mon­ey where it is.”

He con­tin­ued, “I re­call where sports­men and sports­women have to spend their own mon­ey at­tend­ing to in­juries. It does not help un­til we get se­ri­ous about sports. Noth­ing from noth­ing will leave noth­ing.” 

Re­spond­ing to the new Trinidad and To­ba­go Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) ex­ec­u­tive, who has as­sumed pow­er since the de­par­ture of the Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee in April, Warn­er said, “They are still green, and it is too ear­ly to judge, but at the top, they have some geri­atrics who should have left foot­ball long ago. It is a bit too ear­ly.”

With re­spect to the sup­port need­ed from cor­po­rate Trinidad and To­ba­go, Warn­er said, “They will not get cor­po­rate sup­port. They (cor­po­rate TT) on­ly come at the end. They come at the end, not at the be­gin­ning, where they are bad­ly need­ed. 

“There is no lo­cal coach that can take Trinidad and To­ba­go to the World Cup at this time, and I mean that sin­cere­ly, and that is not a crit­i­cism; that is a re­al­is­tic state­ment; we don’t have it; we just don’t have it. Ja­maica is look­ing for a top-class coach; they have nev­er con­sid­ered Dwight Yorke. Look where Ja­maica has gone. They don’t have the en­er­gy and oil we have, but they have the pride. We don’t have that, and that is the dif­fer­ence.” 

Asked for an up­date on his le­gal chal­lenges, Warn­er con­clud­ed, “The mat­ter will be thrown out, but it takes time in Trinidad and To­ba­go. All the col­leagues that have been ar­rest­ed and im­pris­oned in the Unit­ed States have since ap­pealed based on the Supreme Court state­ment and judg­ment, and I am now wait­ing to see what will come out of these ap­peals, and I will take it from there, but I don’t want to say too much on that at this stage, ex­cept to say, I am very op­ti­mistic.”