Embracing football after Filipinas’ win

After Sarina Bolden put Thailand to sleep with her tournament-best eighth goal, the Philippines’ women’s football team hoisted the Asean Football Federation (AFF) Women’s Championship trophy to cap a magical week of the sport in the country.

The team rejuvenated football’s local fandom as it collected yet another milestone on the way to its most significant achievement so far: The Filipinas are preparing for the Women’s World Cup after booking their berth to the grandest football stage in dramatic fashion early this year.

The beauty of the trailblazing successes by the women’s football team was a stark contrast to the backdrop of another World Cup-bound national squad. Gilas Pilipinas, the most beloved of all Philippine representations to the international arena, is having quite a bad year.

Huge losses in qualifying windows. The loss of the gold in the Southeast Asian Games. On the same night the Filipinas won the AFF crown, Gilas Pilipinas lost a crucial game to New Zealand in the Fiba Asia Cup.

And just two nights later, the team crashed out of contention after bowing to Japan.

As the sun dawned the morning after the Filipinas’ win, sports fans began asking: Shouldn’t we just fork over the enormous sums we are spending on basketball to other sports like football or, say, weightlifting?

Immediately after Gilas Pilipinas’ loss, a Philippine team made up of young weightlifters, all chasing the Hidilyn Diaz dream, collected 15 golds in the Asian Youth and Junior Weightlifting Championships in Tashkent, Uzbekistan—some in record fashion.

As these Filipino girls are triumphing — working on baseline budgets — and as Gilas Pilipinas tries to figure out how to end a string of debacles in the international field, the finance arm of the Fiba World Cup organizing committee is working frantically to trim a hosting cost (the Philippines will host the basketball World Cup next year) that is hovering close to P1.3 billion.

Sources say organizers want to shed off around P400 million from that budget.

“It’s an astronomical sum that the private sector will take care of,” Al Panlilio, the president of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, said. “Our country just loves the sport so much.”

There is the answer to the question.

Huge corporations will always leech off some return for the money they pour into sports in the form of association with something the market totally adores. As much as the people behind private funding spin off hackneyed “for love of the game” narratives, the question is always: What do we get in return?

A lot of things need to happen before basketball money—at least, a major part of it—is siphoned off elsewhere.

Football has its adoring, passionate fanbase, but its growth has largely been hinged on the successes of its national teams. Six years ago, in a special report by the Inquirer, Dan Palami, the chief backer of the Azkals, the national men’s team, warned that it would be a “disaster” if football’s popularity would hinge on the national team alone.

The Filipinas have their own ideas on how to build on their recent spate of successes: A league of their own.

“I believe that we’re at a unique point in time where people want to help, stakeholders want to help,” said Camille Rodriguez, the 26-year-old Filipinas defender. “And I believe that the league is a good springboard and a good opportunity for [the Philippine Football Federation] to work with different stakeholders, sponsors, brands. There’s never [been] … an opportunity like this. I think it’s the best time to ride this wave of success for the women’s team.”

But even that isn’t much of a guarantee. Men’s football does have its own pro league. And how many casual sports fans know there was a women’s league before the pandemic struck?

Perhaps all of us could take a page out of women’s volleyball’s playbook. In 2004, a group called Sports Vision launched a club league that sparked the fan interest. But it wasn’t really until 2012, when varsity rivals Ateneo and La Salle figured in dramatic matches, that women’s volleyball began to rival basketball in terms of mainstream popularity and fan engagement.

And the women’s national volleyball team has come up zilch in international competitions.

The growth of women’s volleyball has tipped the chicken-and-egg question to whichever side fan support is on. Football’s audience share has to increase consistently before serious money takes notice.

All the anger and frustration that has been thrown Gilas Pilipinas’ way doesn’t change one fact: The basketball market is huge and constantly growing. In the AFF title match, 8,257 fans came to rock Rizal Memorial Stadium. Impressive and promising, but that’s a bad number for a PBA championship game.

Football needs to find that kind of popularity—where local club games, not just national team outings, create a frenzy for tickets. The more eyeballs corporations can get on their brand names through football, the more they will pour much needed money into the sport.

MORE EDITORIALS

Time to ‘rightsize’ bureaucracy

Defending Ambeth, history

Go solar, not nuclear