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The Trinidad and Tobago Women’s National Senior Team dropped to their lowest ever Fifa ranking of 83rd in the world, after the global governing body updated its rankings today.
The Women Soca Warriors completed their 2026 Concacaf W Championship qualifying series last Friday, when they were defeated 2-0 by El Salvador at the Hasely Crawford Stadium in Port of Spain.
Photo: TTFA Media.
The loss meant Trinidad and Tobago finished the three-game series with one win over Barbados (5-0), a draw away to Honduras (2-2) and, finally, the El Salvador result, which eliminated coach Damian Briggs’ team.
The Women Warriors were consistently one of Fifa’s top 50 nations for the first 12 years of the global body’s rankings, with a high of 38 in 2007. However, they never recovered from a nose-dive during the era of late Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA) president David John-Williams.
In just one controversial term, John-Williams oversaw a fall of 24 places for the Women’s National Senior Team, as they dropped from 48th to 72nd.
(via Fifa.)
Neither Fifa-appointed normalisation committee head Robert Hadad nor current TTFA president Kieron Edwards have helped.
In two years, the largely dormant Women Warriors played a solitary friendly under Edwards—excluding three games in mid-2024 with a makeshift team, under the banner of the High Performance programme, which comprised a dozen teenagers and included most of the senior players.
As a result, the Trinidad and Tobago Women dropped a further six places down the Fifa rankings under Edwards.
The picture is not rosier for other national football teams, with the exception of the Men’s National Senior Team.
Coach Dwight Yorke led the Soca Warriors to the 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup tournament, via a playoff with Cuba, and the final round of the 2026 World Cup qualifying series last year, before being sacked.
Photo: TTFA Media.
(Yorke’s predecessor, Angus Eve, steered the Warriors to successive Gold Cup tournaments and the Concacaf Nations League A, under Hadad.)
However, the Trinidad and Tobago Men’s National Under-17 Team and Under-20 Teams both finished below Barbados and Bermuda respectively in recent qualifiers, under coaches Randolph Boyce and Marvin Gordon.
And the Women’s National Under-20 Team, led by coach Dernelle Mascall, failed to qualify for the Concacaf Championship last year.
(via TTFA Media.)
Edwards, who criticised national coaches for “letting all these kids down” earlier this year, also heads the TTFA technical committee, which oversees the operation of national coaches.
However, the appointments of Briggs, Gordon and interim Men’s National Senior Team head coach Derek King were made without input from the technical committee, while the committee was only partially involved in Boyce’s selection.
Briggs made a plea to be retained as Women Warriors head coach in the wake of Trinidad and Tobago’s loss to El Salvador. But the short-term future of the programme is uncertain.
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Lasana Liburd is the managing director and chief editor at Wired868.com and a journalist with over 20 years experience at several Trinidad and Tobago and international publications including Play the Game, World Soccer, UK Guardian and the Trinidad Express.
This is the most embarrassing rankings I ever seen in my life because of Kieron Edwards!!