Carlo Redwood, Flow’s head of Marketing and TV, says his firm is committed to working with the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) in a bid to level the playing field between the lucrative Flow Super Cup and the traditional schoolboy football competitions — Manning and daCosta Cup, among others.

This follows the belief that the heavily marketed four-week- long Flow Super Cup, which came to the fore in 2014, has taken the shine off the traditional Manning, daCosta Cup and Olivier Shield, as well as Ben Francis and Walker Cup competitions.

A number of stakeholders had previously acknowledged that the Super Cup – which pits the best eight urban and rural schoolboy teams against each other – adds to the excitement of the schoolboy football season, while enhancing the unifying power of the sport and reviving the dying spectator interest.

But despite those results, Redwood declared that the intention was never to overshadow the traditional competitions.

“The history of Super Cup started when we signed the title sponsorship four years ago and really the intention was to try to demonstrate what schoolboy football could achieve.

“That is why we started Super Cup in the first place; it was never to overshadow the historically important competitions like Manning and daCosta Cup… it was never about that,” Redwood explained while speaking at the Jamaica Observer Sport Club at the tabloid’s Beechwood Avenue offices yesterday.

“It was about showing the potential of schoolboy football because we believe at the time it was undeveloped and it wasn’t maximised in terms of what it was and therefore we decided to lead and to show what it could be,” he added.

Now, with the quad-pack telecommunications firm in its final of a five-year partnership with ISSA, Redwood is optimistic that with the renewal of that joint venture, a few structural changes would be made to address the disparity between the competitions.

“Now that we have done that, there is a disparity between how it looks and we are trying to bring alignment now through this new approach. But certainly going forward, we expect all of schoolboy football to look like Super Cup, which was our intention from day one.

“I think how it has happened has created the opportunity for us to now be able to move forward towards bigger competitions and I think they (ISSA) are fully on board with what it is going to take to move schoolboy football in that direction,” said Redwood.

The marketing guru further outlined that another vision behind the Super Cup, which awards the winning team $1 million, was to prove that schoolboy football is commercially viable enough to provide schools with income.

And many in the local football fraternity concurred as they believed it was the proverbial shot in the arm needed to raise the standard of the country’s football.

“Our aim was to prove to ISSA the viability of what schoolboy football still is, and I think corporate Jamaica is now very interested in it because they have seen what it could be.

“All that needs to happen now is that it is structured properly and executed well and I believe that certainly the entire schoolboy football product could look like Super Cup.

“If we are able to make the partnership happen again, we certainly expect that the entire schoolboy football product will end up looking like Super Cup in the very near future,” Redwood noted.

He pointed out that the formula behind the success of the Super Cup over the past three years was due mainly to aggressive marketing.

And this, he said, will be a significant factor to bringing a balance starting with the upcoming season of the Manning and daCosta Cup competitions scheduled to commence on Saturday.

“It requires committed marketing and promotion to create the dynamic around the games that are being played, these (Manning and daCosta Cup) games are big games, but they just have not been executed at a particular level.

“Football fans in Jamaica would understand what quality execution is in football and they are willing to pay for that experience, and I just think that we have been able to do that all the way through outside of Super Cup, but as I said Super Cup was really to show commercial viability,” reiterated Redwood.

He continued: “Our goal is to make those things happen and to work with ISSA as best as possible to make those things happen.

“I don’t know if it is going to be perfect in year one, but we expect some of those games to come off with the same level of intensity because you are going to see a difference in terms of the marketing and promotion and the executing of the games themselves.”

The Super Cup will be launched in October.