Caribbean Football Union

• 1. Introduction

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  The Caribbean Football Union was born not from a boardroom plan, but from a chance conversation between a Trinidad and Tobago footballer and the Commissioner of the North American Soccer League. Patrick Raymond had gone looking for a Caribbean franchise in the NASL. What he got instead was something far bigger. Phil Woosnam turned down the franchise idea and proposed a Caribbean Professional League. That counter-proposal set off a chain of events that would eventually bring together more than 30 football associations spanning islands and coastlines from Anguilla to Suriname. Who were the figures behind this unlikely formation? What competitions did they build? And what scandal would come to define the organisation for years?

• 2. The Founding of the CFU

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  Patrick Raymond introduced his initiative in August 1977 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He had drawn support from a remarkable set of allies: Jimmy Hill, the former England player turned businessman whose company World Sports Academy provided assistance, and Sir Stanley Rous, the former FIFA President, who recommended that a Caribbean regional governing body as a sub-group within CONCACAF should come first. On the 28th of January 1978, the CFU was inaugurated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, taking its place as the Caribbean region's governing football body.

  The January 1978 inauguration was not actually the first attempt to organise Caribbean football. A predecessor body called the British Caribbean Football Association had been established in January 1957, with Ken Galt, President of the Trinidad and Tobago FA, serving as its president, and TTFA Secretary Eric James as General Secretary. That earlier grouping had enough momentum to send a representative BCFA team on a tour of the UK in 1959, yet it did not endure. Raymond's version, backed by international voices like Rous and Hill, proved more durable.

  The CFU's founding membership was substantial from the start. Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cuba, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, French Guiana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago all joined in 1978. The Netherlands Antilles was also a founding member, though that association was later succeeded by Federashon Futbol Korsou following the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2011, with Aruba having already split off in 1986 to form its own national team.

• 3. Competitions Built Over Decades

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  The CFU Championship was the union's first major tournament for national teams, running from 1978 to 1988, sometimes called the CFU Nations Cup. When it ended, the Caribbean Cup took over as the region's international cup, operating from 1989 to 2017. During that period, the top four teams in the Caribbean Cup earned qualification spots for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, giving Caribbean nations a meaningful pathway into the wider continental competition.

  At club level, the Caribbean Club Championship served as the championship for Caribbean club teams. From 1997 until 2008, the winner qualified for the CONCACAF Champions' Cup. From the 2008-09 season through 2016-17, the top three clubs qualified for a preliminary round of the CONCACAF Champions League. Since 2017, the winner of the rebranded Caribbean Club Championship has qualified directly for the knockout stage of that competition.

  The CFU also ran a pan-Caribbean league for a brief window: the Caribbean Professional Football League, active between 1992 and 1994. Youth competitions have formed another layer of the calendar, with U-17, U-20, U-23, and U-14 tournaments for both men's and women's sides, as well as a Futsal Championship and Women's Caribbean Cup. As of 2025, Mount Pleasant won the CONCACAF Caribbean Cup and Moca FC won the CFU Club Shield, with both clubs set to defend or compete again in 2026.

• 4. The Brown Envelope Scandal

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  In May 2011, representatives of several Caribbean Football Associations were handed brown paper envelopes, each containing US$40,000. The incident was reported to CONCACAF General Secretary Chuck Blazer. The following day, footage from a private meeting of CFU officials was leaked to the public. In that footage, CFU President Jack Warner could be seen telling the delegates who had received envelopes that the funds were for their personal use. His words were direct: "If you're pious, you should go to church."

  FIFA launched an investigation that examined the actions of more than 30 CFU representatives. The fallout was severe. Warner resigned as CFU President. The organisation's vice-presidents and staff were suspended. Several national football association staff also resigned. Warner had served as president since 1983, a tenure of nearly three decades, making the rupture all the more significant for the region's football governance.

  The administrative aftermath stretched beyond the immediate suspensions. Lisle Austin and then Yves Jean-Bart each served as acting president before Gordon Derrick took over in 2012 and held the role until 2017. The CFU had already relocated its offices in May 2013, when General Secretary Damien Hughes moved operations from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad to Kingston, Jamaica. In August 2015, Hughes was replaced by Antiguan Neil Cochrane, who announced that several jobs would shift from Jamaica to Antigua and that a smaller headquarters would be rented.

• 5. Jack Warner's Caribbean Vision

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  Jack Warner served the CFU first as General Secretary from 1978 to 1982, then as President from 1983 until his resignation in 2011, a combined tenure that spanned the organisation's entire formative era. In August 1993, while serving as president, Warner was asked about a recurring idea in Caribbean football circles: whether the region's nations should merge into a single team, modelled on the West Indies cricket team. He rejected the suggestion without hesitation.

  "There seems to be some myth outside there that a Caribbean team is the answer to football in the region. I have never heard anything so ludicrous," Warner said. He pressed the point further: "If to reach a FIFA World Cup have to be considered by size, why haven't China ever made it. The simple fact is, we must take whatever seems to be our liabilities and make them our assets. Being small is never a liability in this sport." That position shaped how the CFU approached its member associations, keeping each island's national identity intact rather than folding them into a collective.

  André Kamperveen preceded Warner in the presidency, holding the role from 1978 to 1982. After Warner's departure, Gordon Derrick, Randolph Harris, and now Lyndon Cooper of Saint Lucia have each led the organisation, with Cooper assuming the presidency in 2025. The current staff includes Vice Presidents representing Jamaica, Suriname, Guadeloupe, and Puerto Rico, a reflection of the geographic spread the CFU has always tried to represent.

• 6. Membership Across the Region

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  Today the CFU represents 25 FIFA member nations alongside 6 territories not affiliated with FIFA. The membership spans island groups as varied as the Leeward Islands, the Windward Islands, the Greater Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago, as well as South American coastal nations including Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Associations from Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, and Cayman Islands joined later in the 1990s, while Turks and Caicos Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands both joined in 1998, among the most recent additions.

  Bonaire joined in 2013 but holds non-member status within FIFA, as do Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Saint Martin, and Sint Maarten. Those territories compete within the CFU despite their different standing at the global level. The representative team angle adds a further dimension: since the CFU's formation, exhibition fixtures have typically taken place in Port of Spain. A Caribbean XI played against Brazilian club São Paulo FC in 1987, and a year later a Caribbean Selection faced the Trinidad and Tobago national team. The conversation about a permanent merged Caribbean team, firmly closed by Warner in 1993, has not reopened since.