The US is preparing to co-host the 2026 World Cup while also deciding who is allowed to attend. For the Caribbean, that contradiction is familiar. In nearly a century of men’s World Cup football, only four Caribbean nations have ever qualified.
This year, more finally will, but many of their supporters, especially Haitians, will be unable to travel to cheer them on, blocked by immigration rules that sit uneasily beside sport’s language of unity.
It is a dissonance capturing a deeper truth: Caribbean athletes are welcome on the global stage but Caribbean people less so.
And it is this tension – between global celebration and structural exclusion – that reveals why sport in the Caribbean has been a most powerful, and persistently ignored, development strategy.
For small island states in the Caribbean, with fragile economies, thin industrial bases and histories scarred by colonial extraction, sport has long served as development infrastructure: a pathway to scholarships, a ladder out of poverty, a source of global visibility and a generator of national confidence. This is development in practice.
The UN and other institutions now speak of “sport for development”, linking to education, health, gender equality, social inclusion and peacebuilding. The problem is that development discourse treats sport as a nice-to-have. In the Caribbean, sport has been a primary instrument of survival and self-definition, especially where the state has struggled to provide opportunity.
Take cricket, for example. The West Indies was not simply a team that won matches; it was a living rebuttal to the idea that the region was too small and divided to matter. At its peak, cricket became a regional language stitching together this fragmented archipelago into a united force with the shared goal of beating their colonisers.
The results were historic. In the 1980s the West Indies set records for consecutive Test victories and maintained long unbeaten runs. For nearly two decades, they dominated world cricket with an authority rarely seen before or since – an era when the maroon cap carried an aura of invincibility, and which produced a conveyor belt of icons, such as Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Then came the fast-bowling arsenal: Holding, Marshall, Walsh, Ambrose, Garner. Men who made pace feel like vigilante justice.
Alongside them, the West Indies women’s cricket team were already pioneers. For decades, they have remained among the most globally successful women’s teams.
What did that mean for “development”? It meant an export industry of talent long before anyone started calling it that, as well as sponsorship, broadcasting, tourism and a global brand; it meant a shared regional pride. Most importantly, it offered a template for integration: a functional Caribbean federation that worked.
And then it fell. The decline of West Indies cricket is often narrated as sporting tragedy, but it is also a governance parable: underinvestment in domestic systems, talent drain into global leagues, and slow erosion of institutions that convert raw ability into excellence.
Even sympathetic journalists note that natural talent is not enough when other countries industrialise performance through fitness science, analytics and structured pathways. The collapse of dominance was not the collapse of talent – it was the absence of an effective development strategy. That echoes across every other Caribbean sport.
If cricket gave the Caribbean a single flag to rally around, track and field gave individual islands a global microphone. Jamaica’s Usain Bolt became the most recognisable sprinter on Earth. With a string of world records and an undefeated Olympic career, he made athletics a cultural export.
But Bolt stands atop a Caribbean legacy of sprinting excellence since the 1960s, from Mottley and Quarrie, to Hasely Crawford, whose 100m gold in 1976 was carved out in an era with far less sport science and far fewer corporate pipelines.
Caribbean women have been just as central. For more than three decades, female sprinters, particularly from Jamaica, have dominated Olympic and world championship podiums, winning medals once monopolised by far wealthier countries.
This is where the Caribbean’s “impossible maths” becomes visible: tiny populations, limited state budgets, sporadic corporate support, inadequate facilities, yet repeated global breakthroughs. Sprinting became a development ecosystem, delivering scholarships, overseas training opportunities and routes out of poverty.
Our region has also created world-class moments across disciplines. Trinidad and Tobago’s Keshorn Walcott won Olympic javelin gold in 2012 and world championship gold in 2025: an event dominated by far larger countries with rich infrastructures. The Caribbean is not only fast, it can be technically elite.
Women’s netball tells an equally important story. In 1979, Trinidad and Tobago became joint world champions at the netball world championships. That triumph did not emerge from lavish funding, but from schools, community clubs and volunteer programmes.
Netball has long functioned as both sport and social infrastructure: expanding leadership, confidence and international exposure in societies where women’s sport is chronically undervalued.
Add boxing, swimming, and even Jamaica’s bobsledding at this Winter Olympics, and the pattern is consistent: performance arrives despite the system, not because of it.
Football is perhaps the most under-analysed Caribbean development engine, precisely because some of its greatest products play abroad. Dwight Yorke, Shaka Hislop, Leon Bailey – the region’s talent can meet the highest standards.
The influence of the Caribbean, particularly through the Windrush generation, has been deeply embedded in English football, starting with such pioneers as Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham. Followed by John Barnes, Les Ferdinand, Paul Ince and today, Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford and Cole Palmer, to name just a few.
The Caribbean’s football story is inseparable from migration. The “hidden league” has produced an entire diaspora of players of Caribbean descent who have shaped European and US football, often trained and financed elsewhere, but carrying the region’s DNA.
This raises an uncomfortable development question: how much Caribbean talent is “exported” without the region capturing the full value of what it produces? In other words, the Caribbean has been running a talent economy without owning the factories.
Caribbean sporting brilliance is often told as inspirational hardship: champions training on broken tracks, fundraising for flights, borrowing equipment, improvising gyms, making do.
That story is true. It is also an indictment. When excellence repeatedly emerges under conditions of scarcity, the conclusion should be that sport represents one of the region’s most underdeveloped sectors. The reality is that the Caribbean sits on a high-yield development sector, which it fails to plan properly.
Sport is public health policy, youth employment, gender equality, tourism and diplomacy combined. The Caribbean has already demonstrated the returns. What it has lacked is the political will to treat sport strategically.
Sport can replace structural economic reform; the United Nations argues that sport can be a powerful accelerator when aligned with the broader sustainable development goals. Sport can widen opportunity but only if institutions convert talent into pathways, and pathways into livelihoods.
If Caribbean governments were serious about sport as development, they would stop treating it like an annual photo-op and start building. Regional high-performance hubs, school-to-elite pathways, athlete welfare systems, diaspora partnerships and, most importantly, transparent governance in national associations, because corruption kills development.
The fall of West Indies cricket is the cautionary tale: raw talent cannot outrun institutional decay. The question is whether the region will keep relying on miracles. A development strategy that depends on exceptional individuals is not a strategy at all. It is a gamble – one the Caribbean has been winning more often than it has any right to.
But if the region can produce world-class athletes in spite of underfunding and thin facilities, imagine what it could do with planning, investment and coordination to match the scale of its ambition. For the Caribbean, sport has never been a distraction from development, but one of its clearest proofs.
