Larry Mussenden will explore the creation of a Caribbean Professional League if he is elected president of Concacaf on Thursday.

The Bermuda Football Association president promised to “work with the CFU [Caribbean Football Union] leadership to develop a professional league” in his election manifesto.

A professional league is an idea that has been explored before, and one which Mussenden would like to revisit.

“I would like to form a committee and do a feasibility study to look at options,” Mussenden said.

Among those options could be a franchise-based league similar to the cricket CPL, which has just expanded its reach to include six games that will be played in Florida.

“Another option is one team per island, or for small countries maybe a few islands form a team,” Mussenden said.

Players from member associations that do not have a team could be picked up by those that do, while associations may also be encouraged to be part of a team, in a similar partnership to the one that briefly existed between the BFA and the Bermuda Hogges.

Mussenden’s hope is that the creation of such a league would improve the standard of football at all levels across the Caribbean, from grass-roots to the international stage.

Victor Montagliani, who is running against Mussenden for the top job in the region, has hinted at something similar in his One Concacaf pamphlet, although he does not specifically mention professional football.

“One Concacaf will lead a process where Concacaf plays a stimulus role in providing solutions for players to have more accessibility to professional environments,” Montagliani writes. “Concacaf to lead process with its members to generate opportunities in the creation of leagues, regionally [Caribbean] or domestically [Canada].”

Of course the hardest part of creating a professional league would be to pay for it and then have it become self-sustaining.

Mussenden has proposed selling television rights to help fund the league and would also like to see an airline come on board as a corporate partner so “we could have a good travel solution.”

The election at the Concacaf Congress in Mexico City on Thursday will be preceded by a CFU meeting on Wednesday afternoon, and followed by the Fifa Congress on Friday.

Mussenden and a BFA delegation fly to South America tomorrow, with Mark Wade, the vice-president, David Sabir, the general secretary, and James Davis, the BFA treasurer also attending.