In any election voters generally look at the amount of work that candidates have done over a period of time. And Michael Ricketts, the current president of the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF), believes his administration has done the work to earn another term.

Ricketts is being challenged for the top job by Vice-President Raymond Anderson, with elections scheduled for Sunday.

Since taking office in 2017, Ricketts said he and his team have had success in securing sponsorship for programmes. The federation’s kit sponsorship deal with sportswear giant adidas stands out as one of the administration’s major commercial achievements.

“We are intent on getting things right, and whenever the elections are called, I guarantee you, we have numbers, and we are going to triumph,” Ricketts said during his presentation at the launch of his manifesto at the Wembley Centre of Excellence in Clarendon on Wednesday.

“We have done a lot to develop football in this country. I mean, this administration would have negotiated the biggest contractual arrangement ever in the history of [Jamaica’s] football. It took us three years to have completed negotiations with adidas,” he said.

Ricketts said that the local football programmes will reap the benefits of the adidas partnership.

“As it is now, as part of the contractual arrangement, adidas will pay US$1.2 million in cash annually, and we will get $2 million worth of apparel annually. We were able to successfully negotiate a royalty payment: for every single piece of apparel that adidas sells with the Reggae Boyz and Reggae Girlz logos, we will get 20 per cent from that,” Ricketts said.

Comparing the partnership with adidas to other countries in Europe, Ricketts said that the Jamaica brand is selling like hot bread.

“When we met with adidas in May, they told us that Jamaica is no ordinary country. There are other countries in Europe that would have a similar arrangement as us, and they, up to May, have not sold half of what Jamaica would have sold. At the end of May, they [adidas] would have sold $3.5 million worth of apparel, marked Reggae Boyz or Reggae Girlz,” the president ended.