(From left) President of the Jamaica Football Federation Capt Horace Burrell with President of ISSA Dr Walton Small who accepts the main sponsorship cheque from Carlo Redwood, marketing manager at LIME at the press conference to launch the 2013 Manning and daCosta cups at the Terra Nova Hotel recently. - Ricardo Makyn

With $150 million invested in schoolboy football in Jamaica over the next five years, title sponsor LIME plans to work with the Inter-secondary School Sports Association (ISSA) to ensure that they both get good value for the money that will be spent.

"We're looking at a number of things. How media treats it from a television standpoint. There are a number of areas that we are looking at and there will be some announcements soon of what some of those fundamental changes will be," revealed LIME's vice-president of Marketing Carlo Redwood.

The Manning and DaCosta Cup competitions which together see more than 130 schools across the island compete for the coveted titles, generate a lot of annual excitement for millions of Jamaicans both here and abroad. But according to Redwood, there is still room for a lot of improvement.

"Well, it's really about expanding our footprint on football in Jamaica and the development of football in Jamaica on a national scale. This is the reason why we really went into this long-term partnership with ISSA," he said. "And the other thing is to make real change to schoolboy football in terms of the way it is presented in terms of the fields that the players are playing on, in terms of the format of the competition, really stimulating it and making it more attractive than it is. We really want to bring back the glory days of football when there were full stadia, bigger games and bigger support from a football fan standpoint. Not that it isn't big now, just making it bigger and to drive that kind of change and transformation of schoolboy football to make it more than what it is now and make it more of what it could be."

For this to happen, Redwood said, there will be ongoing discussion with ISSA so that there is a mutual understanding of what needs to be done and the time-frame within which changes will be made.

"That is certainly something that we started already and that you will see happening over the short and medium term in terms of this arrangement, to make it more spectator friendly, to make it more appealing to a wider cross-section of football fans, not just the students in the schools and general football fans and how do we entice those people because it is such an entertaining and high-value type of football activity," he said.