June 6 – The next few weeks are exciting ones for Concacaf. The Women’s World Cup in France sees the US defends its crown, and in just over a week the confederation’s expanded blue riband men’s national team event, the Gold Cup, kicks off at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles.
While public focus will be on their teams playing on both sides of the Atlantic, in the background the administration are preparing for the next phase of their development with the initial steps being taken with a new planning initiative designed to create a strategy that will take them through to 2030.
Concacaf has now finalised a Request for Proposal (RFP) process that will see them partner with a global consultancy “that will help us understand our communities better and give them the best possible opportunity to become architects of football’s evolution,” said Concacaf president Victor Montagliani.
The decision on who has won the tender will likely be announced around the start of the Gold Cup and the process of building a new strategy – essentially an evolution of Montagliani’s One Concacaf election manifesto that became the confederation’s blueprint for re-establishing itself within its region and globally following the FIFAgate scandals of 2015.
The next 12 months will see a data and information gathering process begin that will lead to the formulation of the Concacaf 2030 strategy document that Montagliani hopes will be launched next year.
“We have come a long way with our competitions with the Nations League. Yes it was a heavily structured competition at the start but I think we all now get it and the guarantee of 24 games in four years and the opportunity to improve and progress was not really there for everyone before but now they see it is and you only have to talk to the federations to feel the excitement of competitive progression,” said Montagliani.
“And of course we have expanded the expanded Gold Cup and we have always had strong women’s football but we will make that stronger and mainstream. We now have to understand what we want to look like in 2030 and how do we get there and what do we need to do.”
The next immediate step will be establishing and enjoying the 16-team Gold Cup in its expanded format, and if all Montagliani’s dreams are to come true another win for a Concacaf team at the Women’s World Cup in France, preferably the Canadian one.
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