The T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) made a gi­ant step to­ward hav­ing clubs ful­ly com­pli­ant as well as bring­ing them in line with the man­dates of the CON­CA­CAF and FI­FA, fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of a Comet work­shop on Tues­day for clubs.

The work­shop was held at the North­ern Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA) in Port-of-Spain, but fol­low­ing its com­ple­tion, Ryan Nunes, the AC Port-of-Spain own­er said he fore­sees chal­lenges for clubs ahead of the start of the New Elite Foot­ball League which is set to kick off next month.

"It is a wel­comed move by the TTFA to bring the gen­tle­man, both to ed­u­cate and give a re­fresh­er of the comet sys­tem. It is pret­ty much a tall or­der, I think a lot of clubs will strug­gle to get com­pli­ant.

"I be­lieve Mrs Fe­lix-Tou­s­saint has her work cut out for her in try­ing to sup­port the clubs to reach that lev­el but it is a wel­come move and we wish every­body will get in­volved," Nunes said.

Nine­teen clubs, all of which are at­tempt­ing to be­come ful­ly com­pli­ant to be ac­cept­ed in the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion's new elite league, at­tend­ed the work­shop ei­ther phys­i­cal­ly or vir­tu­al­ly and were ex­posed to a sys­tem that will make com­pli­ance sim­pler.

Ama­ra Fe­lix-Tou­s­saint, the TTFA's Club Li­cens­ing Man­ag­er gave a sim­plis­tic ex­pla­na­tion of the comet sys­tem, say­ing: "Comet ba­si­cal­ly is a man­age­ment sys­tem for da­ta and in­for­ma­tion. With re­gards to foot­ball, this is where clubs will put in all their in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing play­ers, teams, ad­min­is­tra­tion, fi­nance, in­fra­struc­ture and ba­si­cal­ly the over­all run­ning of their club.

"As we say sport is a busi­ness so this is just putting stan­dards ahead and or­gan­is­ing it in a pro­fes­sion­al way.

"My job as the club li­cens­ing man­ag­er is not to de­ny or ap­prove any­thing but just to man­age the sys­tem and make sure that all the clubs sub­mit the right doc­u­ments with­in a cer­tain dead­line and that we meet the lo­cal and re­gion­al com­pli­ance."

Like all the club rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Fe­lix-Tou­s­saint was ex­cit­ed about the prospect of hav­ing foot­ball played, and more­so, in a pro­fes­sion­al man­ner, say­ing: "It's been a long time in com­ing, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter covid and the start of play. We look for­ward to hav­ing pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball again in T&T. This is just the first stage to mak­ing sure that every­body is com­pli­ant and that all the reg­u­la­tions and stan­dards are in place.

"We're so grate­ful to have CON­CA­CAF here to­day to be able to con­duct this work­shop and have a very hands-on work­shop where on­ly clubs that will be tak­ing part in the New Foot­ball league tak­ing part.

"We feel a lot more com­fort­able work­ing with the soft­ware."

Nunes said he un­der­stands what they're look­ing for in terms of the fa­cil­i­ties, in terms of the func­tion of the coach­es, the func­tion of the dif­fer­ent ad­min­is­tra­tors, look­ing at what they re­quire, and try­ing to in­crease the stan­dard and the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the clubs.

"But again, it's a tall or­der with the short time frame to do it with, but it's the right di­rec­tion we're mov­ing in," Nunes said.