During a February UFL (United Football League) Cup match, Global FC battled against Nomads at Rizal Memorial Stadium in the heart of Manila. The game, a competitive and entertaining affair, was also a case study of how difficult it has been to grow pro soccer in the Philippines.
Global, one of the best-funded and most successful professional teams in the country, was battling against Nomads, a 102-year-old semi-professional team. Despite perfect conditions for the game, only a few hundred spectators sat in the 12,000-seat stadium. Nomads held Global to only a first half goal but succumbed down the stretch, losing 4-0.
I watched the game in the stands with Bob Guerrero, a soccer journalist and football supporter (Twitter account @PassionateFanPH) in the Philippines. He has observed firsthand the birthing pains from growing soccer in the country.
“It has struggled,” lamented Guerrero. “There are some fans, there is a niche support, but it hasn’t received wide mass support.”
By the end of the league season, Global FC won the UFL and the UFL Cup to complete the domestic double. Nomads lost its home ground, dropped out of the league mid-season, and no longer has a men’s soccer team.
UFL, which is the de facto professional soccer league for the country, also faces an uncertain future. A recently proposed national Philippines Football League (PFL) plans to start next March. Few details have been released to the public other than to say that the league will only field professional teams.
Basketball is the sporting passion of the nation and regularly draws sold out crowds. Even Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquiao is a player/coach for a basketball team. Volleyball, and college women’s volleyball, in particular, has become the second most popular sport in the Philippines. College players appear in national television commercials, and the best players have rabid fan followings. Soccer is attempting to become the third most popular sport in the nation.
Several years ago it seemed like soccer looked primed for success in the Philippines.
In 2010 the Philippines national soccer team (nicknamed the Azkals) made it to the semifinals of the Suzuki Cup, the bi-annual ASEAN soccer competition between the national teams of Southeast Asia.
“We used to have a very bad team because soccer isn’t really well-developed [in the Philippines],” Guerrero explained. “But in 2010 they had a good group of heritage players (Filipino-British, Filipino-European) mixed with some very good players from here and they made the semifinals of the ASEAN championships.”
The popularity of the Azkals players has not led to success at the gate for UFL games.
“The most famous player is Phil Younghusband, and he’s got like 971,000 Twitter followers,” said Guerrero. Younghusband started out his career in the Chelsea youth system and their reserve team before moving to the Philippines and playing for UFL club Loyola Meralco Sparks. He has scored 42 goals for the national team. “The Azkals has 53,000 followers. His celebrity does not translate for the sport.”
The national team, which was ranked as low as 195th in the FIFA rankings, recently had made it up to 115th in the world and currently stands at 124. It’s coached by Thomas Dooley, who played for the US Men’s National Team.
Dan Palami, the Azkals manager since 2009, has been instrumental in bringing about a more professional structure for the national team. The Federation hired him because of his success running an amateur club in Metro Manila.
“The Federation decided that if someone was handling a club well, maybe they can handle the national team,” said Palami, also the Chairman of UFL’s Global FC. “Being manager of the national team is a solo effort. Our federation is more than 100 years old, but in terms of managing the national team before 2010, [the process was to] assemble the team a month before the tournament and then ‘see you next year.’
“In the Philippines the sport itself is young,” he explained. “The Azkals came into the picture in late 2010 and slowly we’ve entered the consciousness of Filipinos.”
The UFL, which started up in 2009, is technically considered by FIFA to be a semi-professional league. All teams are located in Metro Manila and play their games at Rizal Memorial Stadium.
“Some of the Filipino-European and Filipino-Americans have moved here to play in this league, so the standard has risen,” Guerrero commented. “Even among the local players, their standard has risen also. But it’s been a struggle.”
Teams play from the end of February until October. From February through April teams play in the UFL Cup, which is a round-robin competition, with a knockout stage like the World Cup. The league season started in late April and will finish this upcoming weekend. Some teams consist of professionals while some are semi-professional, including the largely-amateur Nomads club.
This season there has been a significant disparity between the quality of the top three teams (Global FC, Ceres, and Loyola) which average a +72 goal differential and the bottom three teams (Laos FC, Agila MSA, and Pasargad FC), which average a -63 goal differential. And three teams — Nomads, Agila MSA, and Pasargad FC — did not even finish the season, dropping out just after the midway point.
The same disparity is seen in the stands: UFL Kaya FC has a loud and enthusiastic group of supporters who attend games. But other matches, such as Global vs. Nomads, can be eerily quiet. But even with the UFL’s struggles, the league has been viewed as a platform to raise the quality of soccer players in the country.
“The league in 2010 was very amateur, so one of the things that we did bring in was more experienced players so that the quality level would rise, and it’s affected the local players,” said Palami.
Many of the teams in the UFL have scouted overseas and found players with Filipino heritage to play in Metro Manila. Filipino-German soccer player Stephan Schrock, who used to play for Germany at the youth levels, is currently is on loan from his Bundesliga 2 team SpVgg Greuther Furth to play for Ceres, one of the most successful teams in the league. Global FC has also been instrumental in opening the door for foreign players to play in the Philippines.
“It’s important to have the league because you can’t have a strong national team without a league,” said Guerrero.
But with all the growing pains, there are also positive signs of soccer’s growth in the country.
If it becomes a reality, the Philippines Football League will be a national league and feature at least six clubs that will represent a city or region of the country. The league released a list of communities that it believes can host a team. The list includes cities around Metro Manila and regions in the Visayan Islands and Mindanao.
College soccer games are competitive, some are well attended, and matches televised in the Philippines (albeit with low ratings). I was also able to attend a UAAP (University Athletic Association of the Philippines) game between Far East University and De La Salle at McKinnley Hill Stadium in Taguig. In the grandstands, several hundred lively fans consisting mostly of students, alumni, and cheerleaders watched De La Salle win a hard-fought 2-1 victory. Some college players are being scouted by for the Azkal’s squad, including FEU’s Tamaraw Paolo Bugas, who has been called up for his country several times.
There are parts of the country that are soccer mad; Guerrero noted that, at one point, almost three-fourths of the national team came from Barotac Nuevo Iloilo, where the soccer field is located right in the center of town.
“There was once a time in the Philippines where it could be said that if you play football, you were [either] a rich kid from Manila or a poor kid from the south,” Guerrero remarked. “Now it’s slowly changing.”
Although the Azkals were eliminated earlier this year from qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, they are hoping a successful run in next month’s Suzuki Cup will once again catch notice and the attention of the sporting public in the country and help the growth of professional soccer in the country.
The UFL could live on as the second division of soccer in the Philippines if the PFL starts next season, but it faces an uncertain future. The league’s five-year television contract with Philippines TV5 that’s reportedly worth 150 million pesos (around $3.4 million dollars) expires after the season, and that money is essential to running the league.
With all the uncertainty, Guerrero still believes pro soccer will continue to gain more acceptance as fans become more familiar with the intricacies of soccer. “Filipinos like a winner,” Guerrero concluded. “Casual fans get turned off but don’t realize that being a football fan is not about winning, but it’s about the experience and the passion.”
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