Flow, entering its final of a five-year agreement as title sponsor for schoolboy football, is satisfied with what has been achieved and is quietly confident that the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) will extend its contract.

The telecommunications provider, previously LIME, took over as title sponsor of schoolboy football in 2013 from rival Digicel and signed a whopping $150-m deal that expires at the end of the upcoming season.

Carlo Redwood, Flow’s vice-president of marketing and TV, told the Jamaica Observer Sport Club yesterday that his organisation has brought schoolboy football back to glorious, halcyon days.

“We have not just invested money in what we brought to the table. What we bring to the table is more than money. It’s vision. It’s understanding of football. It’s the understanding of the football fan. It’s everything that we bring to the table outside of what is monetary,” Redwood pointed out.

“Now we strongly believe that it is going to be very difficult for ISSA to find a partner like us. I think they acknowledge that and therefore we are pretty confident,” he added.

“Now you can never say it can never happen, but the most we can say is we’ve invested heavily. We’ve given more than just money and we think that ISSA understands what we bring to the table in terms of what this product could potentially be. So we are pretty confident that we are going to be able to make a deal happen with ISSA going forward,” Redwood reiterated.

“When we came into the sponsorship, we thought that it was on a bit of a downward slope…popularity, the type of support we were seeing around what was historically a huge competition,” said Redwood.

Redwood, who played Manning Cup for Wolmer’s Boys’ School and junior football for Jamaica College, said schoolboy football isn’t being developed as it should, especially since it is the feeder tree for the nation’s football.

“We decided that we were going to bring back what it was from the past. We thought that it was certainly the core of what football is in Jamaica and we continue to think that it is the source of real football development where the players who we have to look to in the future would come from and therefore we need to treat this competition in a particular way,” he explained.

“Obviously the other objective was on the back of that, at the time the LIME brand and we were able to do both,” Redwood noted.

“We thought we were able to build the support. Bring back the kind of energy and excitement around schoolboy football and working with ISSA to build back a structure focusing on spectators. If you don’t have spectators at the games, if you don’t improve the experience of those spectators, you lose everything,” he said.

In 2011, Jamaica’s Under-17 footballers were the last national team to qualify for a World Cup and prior to that, it was way back in 2001 that the Under-20s achieved the feat.

“We also feel that the players were being underdeveloped, not putting them on proper fields. Not giving them the proper incentives. Not giving the schools the proper incentives financially to improve the overall kind of preparation and play on the field, so that was again another focus that we had to work with ISSA to develop,” said Redwood.

He continued: “So we are very, very happy with five years. We think that we continued to show corporate Jamaica that schoolboy football is a real opportunity. Real opportunity for a brand. Look what it did for LIME. Look what it’s done for Flow.”

As title sponsors of the Manning Cup, daCosta Cup, Ben Francis Cup, Walker Cup and Olivier Shield, Flow introduced the rich Super Cup to great effect with the champion pocketing a whopping $1m.

“The aim was to work with ISSA to change the dynamic of what it is and I think what you would have seen over time is a total improvement of football.

“ISSA have seen the benefits. ISSA would have been unsure certainly when we took the title sponsorship at the time of whether a schoolboy football game could fill the National Stadium.

“There were certainly some uncertainty on their part that those days were never going to be able to come back. We certainly showed that with Super Cup that that opportunity was still there,” he remarked.

“We think that it’s still under- supported for what it is, but as I said, we think that, that is going to change as we kind of reinforce the structure of the competition working with ISSA to deliver a better patron experience, better marketing kind of promotion leading up to games and putting these fantastic players on better surfaces and better environment. We think we have developed football overall in Jamaica,” ended Redwood.