Technical director of Humble Lion FC Andrew Price was among those in attendance at the four-day Concacaf/Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Assist Capacity Building Workshop which was hosted at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel last week.

The workshop was carried out in conjunction with the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) and the Professional Football Jamaica Limited (PFJL).

Price believes that clubs will benefit significantly from what was imparted by the UEFA representatives which should lead to better governance and operations among other things.

“I have been able to take away a lot from it. It was very encouraging and enterprising for the UEFA Assist Programme along with Concacaf, the Jamaica Football Federation and PFJL to come together to put together this capacity-building workshop,” he said.

“It will definitely assist the clubs in improving facets of their operations such as technical department, commercialisation, administration and financial welfare.

“So, it was a very, very good session and we were able to interact with people and develop a lot of best practices that we can carry back to our respective clubs, where we can incorporate it in our governance and operations,” Price added.

Humble Lion is one of the clubs that benefit from a significant fan base, as they are more often than not, the lone representative from the parish of Clarendon in the premier league. Price said that going forward they will be looking to exploit that advantage.

“One of the good things is that we learned that we have to engage our fans and especially our community more, get them more involved in what we are doing. They are the heartbeat of the club so we have to get them involved.

“It’s going to be very challenging with the COVID-19 currently but we are going to work to put some of those emphasis in, where we can get more people to start coming to our games and start coming to the games much earlier.”

An area of importance that will be getting urgent attention is making the club into a viable financial organisation through commercialisation. This is seen as important to the sustainability of Humble Lion as a top flight club.

“We have to look at how we are going to commercialise the club. We have to look at merchandising, ways that we can engage sponsors to come around so that we can get income generating opportunities out there that we weren’t having before.

“So, it’s about thinking outside of the box and using the best practices that we have learnt to see if we can become sustainable,” he said.

— Dwayne Richards