The World Cup we missed was worth a pitch in every parish

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).