March 18 – Michael Ricketts has been re-elected as the Jamaican Football Federation (JFF) president for a second term. Ricketts was first elected in 2017.
Ricketts won the election by 39 votes to 17 against challenger Raymond Anderson, himself a JFF vice president who turned on the leadership following a series of controversies that have haunted Ricketts’ presidency.
The vote eventually took place after the election was postponed for a month over a challenge to the voting caucus following the removal of the FIFA recognised Beach Soccer organisation from the vote in favour of a Ricketts-backed new Beach Soccer organisation.
Ricketts, a football politician who prefers to do his business behind closed doors, had his first term as president marked first by a court ruling handed down by Jamaica’s Surpreme Court in 2017 against Ricketts, for derogatory language he used publicly against Ainsley Lowe in an election run-off, suggested he was a homosexual.
That conviction was brought to the attention of FIFA’s ethics investigators but no action was given or explanation as to why it was ruled that in that case homophobic language did not merit a sanction.
During his presidency Ricketts became synonymous with the spectacular fallout with Jamaica’s over-achieving women’s team who qualified for back-to-back World Cups – the only Caribbean nation men’s or women’s team to do so and to qualify for the last 16.
That team ultimately refused en masse to play for their country when Ricketts’ administration held back their FIFA World Cup payments citing it as typical of his administration’s general disrespect of the women’s, failure to adequately fund a women’s national team programme and forcing them to self-fund their achievements with the significant donations of Cedilla Marley.
The end result was that the Jamaicans failed to qualify for the inaugural W Gold Cup, a huge opportunity missed for the women’s game in Jamaica, though one that didn’t seem to move Ricketts.
To a large degree Ricketts has sacrificed the women’s team for the men’s team who have qualified for the Copa America and this week play in the Nations League final four, with a semi-final match-up against the USA on Thursday. The team is also building towards the 2026 World Cup qualifiers.
Commenting on his re-election Ricketts told the Jamaica Gleaner: “I was torn down. They knelt in my neck. I was treated like an outcast. I was disrespected but my work has been vindicated today.”
In truth his work will only be vindicated if his men’s teams and its imported Jamaican naturalised players from the English Premier League start winning big games. But even then, the application of football’s new-found principles of equality, inclusion and respect under seem to still be different concepts in Ricketts’ world.
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