HERE is a piece of arithmetic HERE is a piece of arithmetic I have not been able to stop thinking about.

A full-size, certified, floodlit football pitch — the kind a national youth team can prepare on and a Concacaf match can be played on — costs somewhere in the region of US$750,000 (over J$123 million) to be built properly. I know this figure is roughly right because I have spent the last several years paying for pitch work in Montego Bay, and because FIFA’s own development projects across the region land in that band.

Jamaica has 14 parishes. Fourteen pitches at that cost are about US$10.5 million (over J$1.7 billion).

The money we did not receive for missing the 2026 World Cup was reported at between US$10.5 and US$12.5 million (over J$2 billion).

I want to be careful, because this is not a claim that the money would have been spent that way, and it is not a suggestion that anyone did anything wrong. It is simply a way of understanding scale. One tournament we did not reach was worth, in cash, a certified football pitch in every single parish in this country — Hanover, Portland, St Thomas, St Mary, Trelawny, all of them. Permanent. Ours. Earning revenue for forty years.

That is what “almost” costs.

THE ACCOUNTING MISTAKE WE HAVE MADE FOR 40 YEARS

We have always talked about football infrastructure as a cost of national pride. Something we build because we are a proud people and our children deserve better. All of which is true, and none of which is the point.

A certified pitch is not a monument. It is a revenue-generating asset, and the moment you account for it that way, the conversation changes completely.

Consider what a properly Consider what a properly certified facility can earn. It can host confederation fixtures, which come with hosting fees. It can serve as a neutral venue for regional competitions, which are perpetually short of compliant grounds. It can host preseason camps for clubs escaping northern winters — a market Jamaica has barely touched, despite having the climate, the flights and the hotel stock. It can be leased for school competitions, for community leagues, for corporate events. It can carry naming rights.

An uncertified pitch can do none of that. It is a field with a maintenance bill.

The gap between those two things is not enormous, and that is what makes our position so frustrating. Certification is a matter of specification: Lighting to a defined vertical lux level with a defined uniformity ratio, a playing surface of standard dimensions, drainage that survives a Jamaican October, and an inspection completed well in advance of the fixture you hope to host. These are engineering requirements, not mysteries. Many Jamaican facilities sit just below the line, and have been allowed to sit there for decades, because nobody ever put the asset value of crossing it on a piece of paper.

FOURTEEN, NOT FOUR

Now, why one in every parish, rather than a smaller number of excellent regional centres?

Because talent does not distribute itself according to our administrative convenience. It appears in Hanover and in Kingston at roughly the same rate, and the only thing that varies is e probability of it being the probability of it being found, coached and developed. When a country of under three million tries to compete with countries of three hundred million, it Yoni Epstein cannot afford geography to act as a filter.

At present it does, decisively. A boy in Portland and a boy in St Andrew are not competing on the same terms, and everybody in Jamaican football knows this and has known it for a generation. We simply have not costed the solution, which means we have never had to look at how affordable it is.

There is also a plainer commercial argument. Fourteen facilities generate 14 revenue streams, 14 sponsorship inventories, 14 sets of community programming and 14 local constituencies with a permanent stake in the federation’s success. Four facilities generate four. Distribution is not charity here. It is diversification, which is the same principle that makes uncorrelated revenue valuable in the first place.

HOW IT GETS PAID FOR

I am not proposing that the federation write a cheque for US$10.5 million, because it cannot.

I am proposing a stack, built over a single four-year cycle, four pitches per year.

FIFA’s development programme funds specific infrastructure projects, as distinct from operational support, and that is precisely the bucket this belongs in. The Tourism Enhancement Fund has a legitimate and demonstrable interest in sports facilities in tourism parishes. Parish councils hold land, which is frequently the largest single line in any facility budget and the one most easily facility budget and the one most easily contributed rather than purchased. And private capital will co-invest in a build-operate structure where the returns are real and the community-use obligations are written into the agreement — I know this because I have made exactly that argument to private investors in Montego Bay and found them considerably more receptive than the conventional wisdom suggests.

Four sources, none of them fanciful, none of them requiring anyone to discover new money. What they require is a documented plan of a quality that funders can act on, which is a capability question rather than a financial one, and which I will come to in a future piece.

The one thing to do first

Before any of that, there is a step that costs almost nothing and that we have somehow never taken.

Commission a national facilities audit. Every football facility in every parish, inspected and condition-rated against the certification standards, with the cost of closing each gap attached. One document. Published.

Do it now, and do it before 2027, because the next FIFA development cycle opens that year and funding cycles reward the associations that arrive with plans rather than intentions. Arrive without a facilities audit and we will spend another four years discovering, one disappointment at a time, which of our grounds cannot host the fixtures we have been awarded.

We have just been shown, in the most expensive way available, what our infrastructure gap costs us. The least we can do is find out exactly how wide it is.

Yoni Epstein is chairman of Montego Bay United FC and a director of Professional Football Jamaica Limited. He writes in a personal capacity.