There was a glowing report in yesterday's Jamaica Observer about the National Premier League's agreement with a sports management company in the USA and the UK to collect player data for an international soccer repository.  The site is called SoccerAssociation.com and is operated from the United Kingdom. The article goes on to say that the site is accessed by football clubs all over the world; maybe that's true but I have never heard of the site until this evening. (I know some club representatives visit here; have any of you heard of this site?  You can tell me on personal or company email.) 

It's a decent no-frills site with varying access levels for tracking domestic and international appearances as well as a data logging for scouts.  It might be possible to do some sort of analytics on the data (I don't know anything about the design of the database backend), but it's nothing more sophisticated than a player tracking site.  Nothing wrong with that, but for the Jamaican league officials to view this as a major leap forward illustrates the disconnect of much of the developing countries from the technology advances in football.

It is a step forward for Jamaican football, to be sure, but in the ultimate analysis I don't think this announcement is all that major.  Follow-on improvements in data collection might be, however.