On March 23, the Belize National Football Team drew in an international friendly the Trinidad and Tobago National Team, the "Soca Warriors".
It's part of the preparation for the Gold Cup, but also, the Football Federation of Belize hoped to make some money to offset the huge expense of preparing the national team.
Today, they released the figures which show that, after expenses they made a rather paltry profit of $5,000 from a total revenue of $43,000.
That's a small but encouraging step toward the goal of $500,000 to fund the team until July. Today we caught up with the FFB President to ask him if he'll able to meet that target, given the fact they only have 3 more months to go:
Ruperto Vicente - Football Federation of Belize
"We did make a profit, but it wasn't a great profit because every time you have a national team of that magnitude, it cost you more - it cost us more than what we'll need but we're glad that we're able to make a small profit as well. The intention of that game was for the Belizean public, to see their national team in action, and we charged far below the normal price for national game of that magnitude. We should have charged $30 dollars per person but instead we cut it in half and went $15 dollars per person, so it was really a treat for the public, for them - giving them an opportunity to see their national tea in action. We will have to hit a target of $ 500,000 Belize dollars to prepare our national team and to take them to the United States for Gold Cup, and certainly we will be having more games. We plan to play a game against El Salvador, we plan to play one against Guatemala, so those game will certainly propel us forward, as well we will be having a telethon in - on the 27th of April where we're going to ask Belizeans to contribute towards the development of our national team and its preparation for Gold Cup."
Daniel Ortiz
$500,000 is not a little bit of money. It's a very large amount of money. To any Belizean that's a major payday; that's a retirement plan."
Ruperto Vicente
"That's right; and again we're looking at the telethon, we're asking each Belizean to contribute $1 dollar and if we have 350,000 thousand people in Belize, we should be able to get at least $300,000 thousand dollars from our telethon. Then we have our corporate sponsors and we have other fund raisers that will be going on in order to realize that figure."
Vicente says that they have several other fund raising ventures in the planning stages.
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