Dear Editor,
Kemol (19), in St. Georges, Grenada, benches 120 kilogrammes and runs the 400 metres in 48 seconds. He has never had a formal job but he has been offered cash to “run something” for someone else twice this month. The sports economy we are not building is the difference between Kemol representing his country at the Olympics and Kemol representing a case file.
Walk through any village in the Eastern Caribbean on a Saturday morning and you will find them – young men, mostly – working with precision and dedication that would impress any corporate talent scout. They are shooting hoops, perfecting soccer dribbles, pumping serious weights, training with a seriousness the formal economy has never managed to elicit from them. The formal economy, for its part, has barely tried. It has classified their domain as recreation, budgeted it as welfare, and then expressed bewilderment when those same young men, finding no legitimate pathway to status or income, migrate toward the only economy that has consistently offered them both.
The Eastern Caribbean’s male crisis is structural, not cultural. Young men are disengaged because the structures available to them were not designed for their starting points, their learning styles, or the reality of their lives. The street economy has simply been more responsive to what young Caribbean men actually need than anything the formal sector has offered. But sport is not a social intervention, it is one of the most underdeveloped industry clusters in the Caribbean economy, and the moment to build it is overdue. This is also not only a male story. Women coach, manage, administer, and provide sports medicine. They face distinct barriers, access to finance, institutional credibility, unpaid labour burdens, that a serious sports economy strategy must address. The architecture proposed here is for everyone.
Caribbean athletes produce world-class value. The Caribbean economy captures almost none of it. That is not a natural condition. it is a policy choice we have simply not reversed.
The conceptual shift that unlocks everything. Sport is classified, budgeted, and administered as welfare. It does not appear in investment frameworks the way tourism does. It does not attract development financing the way energy infrastructure does.
This is an analytical error with serious economic consequences. A genuine sports economy is an industry cluster with multiplier effects across professional services, tourism, media, education, and manufacturing. The Eastern Caribbean possesses extraordinary raw material for such a cluster. What it lacks is the architecture to convert that raw material into durable value and the political will to build it before the next generation of talent emigrates to find it elsewhere.
“Yes, but our athletes just leave anyway.” They leave because the architecture to monetise their talent does not exist here. Jamaica retains more of its track talent than it did a decade ago, not because Jamaicans stopped migrating, but because MVP Track Club and ISSA created professional pathways at home. Migration is a symptom, not a cause.
Four layers of a Caribbean sports economy. The first layer is physical infrastructure, regional training centres of excellence attracting athletes from across the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the diaspora year-round, generating income in sports medicine, nutrition, coaching, and hospitality. When the temperature in London or Toronto makes outdoor training difficult, the Eastern Caribbean is ideal. We are sitting on a year-round competitive advantage we have never seriously tried to monetise.
The second layer is professional services. Every competitive athlete needs sports medicine, physiotherapy, legal representation, financial management, and coaching. These professional services are either not provided, done so on an amateur basis or sourced abroad. The network of community colleges across the OECS, University of the West Indies (UWI) Five Islands Campus, UWI Global Campus, Ross University, St. George’s University, and the American University of Antigua are positioned to be the academic home of this layer, offering applied, work-based degrees in Sports Science, Sports Business Management, and Sports Law, flexible, competency-based, and tied to real industry experience from day one.
The third layer is events and tourism monetisation. A coordinated regional calendar, cricket, athletics, football, water sports, combat sports, marketed to the Caribbean diaspora in the UK, Canada, and the US can generate significant foreign exchange. Here the tourism sector’s obligation becomes specific: cruise lines and international resorts should feature Caribbean sporting events and sports tourism products as part of their core offerings. The cruise capital of the world should be asking what it contributes to the sports economy of the communities it visits.
The fourth layer, where the sovereignty argument is sharpest, is broadcasting and intellectual property. Caribbean athletes attract global audiences. The broadcasting rights, streaming deals, and content licensing are enormous and the region captures almost none of that value. A regional sports media entity that aggregates broadcast rights and monetises Caribbean athletic identity is not a fantasy, it is a policy choice we have simply not made.
Finance and accountability, Sports Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), training academies, sports medicine clinics, event management companies, athlete management firms, do not fit conventional bank lending criteria: irregular cash flows, intangible assets, no fixed collateral. The young man who wants to build a legitimate sports business cannot get a loan. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) and the Caribbean Development Bank must develop instruments for this sector, IP-backed lending, revenue-based financing, small-ticket venture capital. We have the money in the domestic banking sector. What accountability mechanisms will ensure that a regional training centre, once announced, is actually built? What metrics will tell us, quarterly, whether the sector is growing or stalling? These questions separate a serious strategy from another well-intentioned document.
Prof. C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal
The University of the West Indies
Five Islands Campus,
Antigua and Barbuda
