When Palestine recently played their first home match - a 1-1 draw with Jordan - there seemed to be more photographs of smug FIFA executives on the West Bank than of the actual game.

FIFA’s Goal Project helped fund the building of the Ar-Ram stadium and end a 14-year exile for the Palestinians, who had been forced to play across the Middle East due to security concerns. The project is worthy but the Goal scheme has not always resulted in such great public relations opportunities for FIFA.

In 2000, FIFA agreed a $471,364 grant towards a training centre for the Antiguan & Barbudan Football Association outside the Antiguan capital of St Johns. For three years the site stayed empty but FIFA did nothing.

In 2003, the Antiguan government tried to intervene and FIFA suspended the membership of the Antiguan & Barbudan FA, whose national team missed out the 2004 Olympic qualifiers as a result. The suspension was lifted later that year but nothing changed until 2005, when FIFA did do something: they handed over even more money, a $503,098 Goal grant for a second project.

This grant was for a pitch, floodlights, security fencing and dressing rooms to the training centre, which had still not been built. FIFA has nothing to say about either project and directs enquiries to its own website, which simply shows an empty field in Antigua.

Antigua’s main football man, Paul ‘Chet’ Greene, is reportedly close to Jack Warner, the president of the CONCACAF region, who has good reason to like the Goal scheme. FIFA will not disclose how much money has been ploughed into Goal projects, but 193 of FIFA’s 207 members have been beneficiaries of the 366 grants awarded so far.

Warner's CONCACAF region has 39 members and 35 are also full FIFA members. Of those 35, all bar one (the US) have received Goal grants. Many have received more than one, like Nicaragua, who are on their fourth Goal project. Grants are even awarded to places not affiliated to FIFA, like the colony of French Guyana, where football is played only sporadically at international level.

A FIFA spokesman says: “French Guyana is profiting from a project that was requested by the French Federation for the French territories. So it is actually a Goal project for the FFF.”

On FIFA’s website, members benefiting from Goal cash have a link showing what the funds have achieved. Associations, such as Pakistan, who in 2002 landed a $400,000 grant towards a headquarters in Lahore, can show a building going up.

On Antigua’s link there is that empty field, but on the Fédération Française de Football link there is no sign the FFF has ever been awarded any Goal funds.

In February this year, a Goal project in Barbados was “shelved until further notice due to a lack of progress” despite a $400,000 grant being agreed five years ago towards a proposed $627,500 training centre. According to the Barbados Goal link, the first stone was laid in July 2003 yet the project has been abandoned.

FIFA adds: “Member associations which get a project approved by FIFA in the frame of the FIFA Goal Programme have 18 months to begin construction.

“Once a project is approved, there is no money sent to the member association as FIFA directly deal with the constructors in charge of realising the infrastructure through the signature of a contract between both FIFA and the enterprise . . . and payments are only done upon reception of invoices and based on construction progress report. 

“The Barbados Goal project was approved on May 1 2003, but no work ever started, therefore no monies were ever paid by FIFA. The project did not progress as the (Barbados) Federation did not succeed in obtaining from their local authorities/government a land title or land lease as to secure the property of BFA on the said plot of land where the project were foreseen to take place.”

That statement contradicts information on FIFA’s website but then little is clear about some parts of the Goal programme.

One thing is certain, though. What better reason for CONCACAF members to support Jack Warner than if the body he represents is doling out grants in large quantities.