Economist Villegas sees Philippine football evolving into an economic force
Ihad written in this space before that there is no money, no glory in Philippine football as there is in Philippine basketball. The article was in reaction to the puzzlement of many why the Philippines was not in the World Cup that year when Third World countries with population less than seven million like Paraguay, Togo, Croatia, Costa Rica, and Trinidad and Tobago (whose population is only one million) can each put together a football team good enough to play against football strongholds like England, France, Brazil, Germany, and Argentina.
After all, height is not a factor in football as it is in basketball.
I wrote then that not only were we not in the World Cup, we were not even in the elimination round of the region because we could not find enough skilled players to form a team good enough for international competitions. Local football players had not developed skills comparable to those of the Japanese and Koreans, who were representing the AsiaPacific region in the World Cup. As they would not find fame and fortune in Philippine football, local football players considered honing their skills all for naught.
While college football competitions through the decades had shown players with potential for greatness, their development stopped after graduating or leaving school. There was no commercial league where they could hone their skills and earn both glory and monetary rewards like their basketball counterparts.
My article was written in 2006, on June 27 to be exact, before the founding of the United Football League and the formation of
the Philippine national football team Azkals. That is why when I read in the papers last week that a book titled Philippine Football:
Its Past, Its Future is now available in bookstores and its author is Dr. Bernardo M. Villegas, I got extremely intrigued.
I have known Bernie as an exceptionally brilliant scholar, quintessential economist, and a highly respected adviser to governments in the area of investment promotion and consultant to many giant corporations with regard to business policies and strategies. Never did I associate him with sports in any capacity — player, avid fan, or writer.
He was one year ahead of me in high school and college in La Salle. As a fellow student in the relatively new program of LiaCom ( he belonged to the second batch of Lia-Com students, I to the third), we were classmates in some courses.
But it was my involvement in campus organizations that he led that made us good friends.
I was among the guests at the despedida luncheon tendered him days before his departure for doctoral studies at Harvard. I was one of 12 La Salle alumni he gathered in the old Villegas house on Arellano Street in Malate to introduce Opus Dei to upon his return from his studies. (I am not a member.)
While he was very active in extracurricular pursuits, he was not a participant in any sports
program, not even as a cheerleader or a mere fan. His high school and college batchmates led the La Salle senior basketball team to the 1956 NCAA championship.
As managing editor of the school paper he could have gotten a season pass to NCAA games as I did as a member of the paper’s staff. But I never saw him in the Rizal Memorial Coliseum where NCAA basketball games were played. I never saw him either in the tennis arena when his classmate Johnny Jose was the perennial NCAA tennis champion.
I surmised therefore that his book on Philippine football could only be about the economics of the sport or about the contribution of football to the country’s economy if the sport evolves into an industry as Philippine basketball has.
Even then, I was very keen on reading the book because I hope to be able to learn from it some lessons on how to revive interest in a once popular sport and raise it to the level of an industry like Philippine basketball. I have written many times in this space on how to generate interest in baseball, a sport I had followed since my grade school days, that I had played as a member of the school’s varsity team, and that I had run a column on in a sports weekly in the 1970s.
I scoured the branches of Fully Booked and Power Books all week last week to get a copy of Bernie’s latest book but was unsuccessful. I got one when I went to the University of Asia and the Pacific, publisher of the book, to meet with old grade school and high school classmate and J. Walter Thompson officemate JJ Calero.
Thumbing through the book, I learned that Bernie got enamored with football only in 2007 when he was a visiting professor in the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. The apartment he was staying in happened to be right across the home stadium of the football powerhouse FC Barcelona. A friend invited him to watch FC Barcelona play. The huge crowd at those games gave him the impression that football is an industry by itself in Spain.
As I do not have Bernie’s permission to reproduce any part of the book (he was not in his office when I went to UA&P last Friday), I can only say here that he pins his hope on turning football into an economic force on the formation of a national league composed of professional teams à la Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) or more like the defunct Metropolitan Basketball Association (MBA) as the teams will represent not companies but cities, each with certified home stadium. The teams will be reinforced with foreign players, meaning they need not have Filipino blood like the Younghusband brothers James and Phil.
Well, I do not share my good friend’s optimism regarding the future of Philippine football.
The MBA folded up because of the high cost of maintaining a team. As the teams played on a home-and-away basis, transportation and hotel expenses were additional items not incurred by teams in the rival PBA. As the personnel complement of a football team is twice as big as that of a basketball team, travel expenses will be much greater.
With a minimum of 25 players, a number of them foreigners and half-breed Filipinos, payroll will be huge. Professional basketball teams are owned by companies that are into consumer products and services. They carry the name of the company or its product. In a way the teams serve as advertising medium. The team’s budget or part of it is carried in the accounting books as advertising expense. They therefore reduce the tax liability of their mother company. Professional football teams will not provide their owners any tax advantage.
The seating capacity of football stadia in most provincial cities not being larger than 5,000, gate receipts would most probably be only a fraction of the cost of maintaining a football team. There would be additional revenue coming from the television coverage of the games. But sustained television coverage of the games would be dependent on the size of viewership and the consequent amount of advertising it draws. Size of viewership is in turn dependent on how exciting the games will be.
The participation of foreign players is no guarantee for exciting games. Games ending in ties, be they 2- 2,1-1, or 0- 0, will not build up a large following. And games decided by penalty shootouts, as it is done in the World Cup, reduce the sport to a test of the skills of two players, the opposing goalkeepers.
If TV viewership shrinks, the number of advertisers dwindles. Cost of covering out- of- town (Manila — base of TV networks) games will be greater than covering sports events in Metro Manila. If the station’s advertising revenue falls short of cost of production, TV coverage would be pulled out.
Well, the professional economist Bernardo M. Villegas wrote in the preface of the book that he can always plead insufficiency of knowledge if his forecasts are way off the marks. The forthcoming Philippine Football League competitions, originally slated to start this month but postponed to middle of April (an ominous sign?), will either enhance Bernie Villegas’ reputation as an economics genius or prove him to be insufficiently knowledgeable not only about Philippine football but about Philippine sports.