NO doubt the tax authorities are anxiously seeking ways to secure the estimated $100 million which they say is owed to them annually by tax-dodging Jamaican sports stars.

But there is another side to the story. For it seems to us that if $100 million in taxes is owed, then it surely means that hundreds of millions are being earned by our sports stars annually.

That would simply validate a basic point that this newspaper has consistently made: Sport is a money spinner and in priceless foreign exchange at that.

The available evidence suggests that even without Government’s long-planned and promised Sports Policy and any real coordination or focus towards the development of sport as a business, it is a net earner of foreign exchange.

Part of the problem for Jamaican sport is that those in positions of influence, be it school, government or business, have traditionally seen it as an amateur, recreational endeavour, geared at community building and “feel good” considerations.

Inevitably, given that kind of thinking, the tough economic times, underscored by the revival of a borrowing relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), means the funding of sport should take a back seat to virtually everything else.

But increasingly, our track stars led by the incomparable Mr Usain Bolt described as a multi-millionaire in “any currency”, our cricketers, our footballers et al are proving that rather than welfare funding, pumping money into sports is capital investment.

In that regard, those who insist that Jamaica gained nothing that is materially tangible from qualification for the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France should think again.

Prior to ’98, Jamaica had possibly one or two home-grown professional footballers plying their trade abroad. Since then, and as a direct result of the high profile ’98 campaign, we are told that 42 Jamaicans have played professionally abroad. That process started with the US$1 million signing of Mr Ricardo Gardner from the Harbour View FC by Bolton FC shortly after the ’98 World Cup ended.

Currently, according to the JFF, 30 Jamaican footballers play professionally in England, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, United States of America, Trinidad and Tobago, and Antigua

& Barbuda.

More to the point, we are told that they earn between US$2,000 monthly at the low end to an extraordinary US$150,000 monthly at the high end. That high-end figure as we understand it goes to one of our football stars in the English Premier League.

This newspaper believes that those are among the kind of considerations that should be taken on board as the nation contemplates supporting Jamaica’s qualification campaign for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Sport, its practitioners and administrators should not see themselves as mendicants with outstretched palms upward, but rather as activists in the drive towards national progress and development.