Despite winning the OFC qualifying tournament a few years back Tahiti have not put a team together for the U20's since?. Does anyone know why (Or care?). Seems strange since NZ wont be there and they have had a lot of exposure since then (Confed Cup + Beach football WC) that there failure to put out a team is bizarre.
That's a good observation - especially when you consider even the weakest football country in Oceania, American Samoa, population 55,000, are competing in the qualifiers taking place in a few weeks in Fiji.
The problem could lie in players and management not selling enough chickens on the street to finance travel:
I always thought Tahiti received a lot of financial input from France into its economy and so are one of the wealthier Pacific islands. According to Wiki, France donates US$150 million a year under a new agreement from the beginning of 2006. That's the equivalent of US $1000 given to every Tahitian. Imports are subsidized too.
However, it seems little French financial assistance goes to Tahitian football and what little money is available is often squandered by corruption / incompetence.
An article last year in leading French paper "Le Monde" revealed national u-20 players and their families had to sell chickens on the street to finance their travel to the 2009 u-20 World Cup in Egypt:
Interview with former Tahiti senior and u-20 manager Lionel Charbonnier:
http://translate.google.co.nz/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsport%2Farticle%2F2013%2F06%2F22%2Ffootball-a-tahiti-on-vendait-des-poulets-pour-financer-les-deplacements-de-la-selection_3434967_3242.html
"FOOTBALL: IN TAHITI THEY SOLD CHICKENS TO FINANCE THE NATIONAL TEAM'S TRAVEL"
Le Monde.fr | 22/06/2013 at 6:52 p.m. • Updated 22/06/2013 at 7:08 p.m. |Interview with Adrien Pécout
For these cash flow issues, you did not have the support of your president, the inescapable Temarii ?
"We were incompatibile and it was not going too well. Everyone knows what happened to him a few months later [in 2010, FIFA suspended him for suspected corruption in the vote for the host country of 2018 World Cup]. I remember when we had qualified for the FIFA 2009 World Cup Under 20 years, he stopped paying my technical staff. To finance part of the trip, he then made the players and the staff, including my wife and children, to go cook and sell chickens in the street ...."
Chickens?
"There is a tradition, often when an association or club need money to take the plane. The ticket price is very expensive. If I remember correctly, a roundtrip to the metropolis is 1 500 euros minimum in low season. So the families concerned work at night to cook chicken, and in the morning, everyone went door to door to sell his chickens everywhere. To help out, some buyers sometimes pay ten times more than the regular price. This extraordinary Tahitian solidarity has allowed us to bring a lot of money."