FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — The football confederation embracing North and Central America and the Caribbean, CONCACAF, says it wants to play a more significant role in the development of nations within the 41-member association spread.

The organisation’s chief administrator, Enrique Sanz — in the job for just over a year — underscored the importance of using the “power of the game” to form sustainable partnerships with governments, the private sector and football authorities with the view to making better nations in the long term.

“We want to know what the governments need, what the private sector needs and how the vehicle of sports, and in this case football, along with the local federations, can work together to achieve goals together,” the Colombian-born American told the Jamaica Observer.

“We need to align our interests in growth, education, health, and everything can be done through the sport… football will not solve all the problems in the world, but through the power of the game, we can help a lot and governments are recognising that, and in partnerships with governments, private sector, we can grow society in a better way,” noted Sanz.

Sanz, who was a panellist at last Tuesday’s CONCACAF Sport Summit held in Grand Cayman, said the event that brought together stakeholders from all strata of society, including Jamaica’s Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, said he believed that CONCACAF scored with the inaugural forum.

“I think overall it was very important for us to bring people together, for CONCACAF to be the catalyst for change and to show everybody that we mean business, organisation, we mean transformation for partnership,” he said.

The CONCACAF general secretary indicated that the new CONCACAF has been successful in restoring the trust with its key partners, and new ones as well, and emphasised that the confederation is open for business and everyone recognises that.

“I think since we took CONCACAF and when president (Jeffrey) appointed me we have been able to work closely with the corporate world. The important thing is that we are looking out for their interests and aligning them into our mission statement.

“We have very clear objectives and we are developing partnerships that will last for a very long time as they (partners) see that football is a vehicle to get their objectives, and once their objectives and our objectives are aligned, then it becomes a win-win situation,” Sanz noted.

Since the 2011 corruption scandal that rocked CONCACAF and the wider football constituency, the football grouping maintains its rhetoric that it is better and stronger from financial, transparency, development and inclusiveness standpoints.

“I think we are doing very good; we had a very successful Gold Cup and we also had a very successful Champions League and we have been successful with other things that we have been doing.

“One of our main objectives is to be more productive, to get more revenue into the game and into the development of the game… development is very important as 76 per cent of all our revenue is reinvested into our tournaments and into development and a specific portion of that goes into grassroots development,” Sanz said.

Speaking to the proposed Caribbean professional league that president Webb is championing, Sanz believes its successful development and implementation will bring broad-based benefits to a region starved of economic opportunities.

“I think the concept of it is important as competition in football makes us grow and we want more and better competitions… in the Caribbean we need a more structured Caribbean league, a more professional league, which would fit into our elite competitions,” he argued.

But Sanz said the hard work will now depend on exactly how to bring this dream alive in a realistic and sustainable way from a development and commercial standpoint.

“Now we have to figure out how we are going to do it, how is it sustainable and to see how we will let it make the region better… the talent in the Caribbean is amazing, you look left and right, and you see talent, you see the passion for the sport.

“We have to take a snapshot now to see how we can get better competition for the players to grow and develop and so they can impact their national teams, and by extension, their countries,” he concluded.