It won’t be quick, but it can be done.

An economist believes that football can overtake basketball as the Philippines’s poster sport, and establish itself as a “major industry” here, as it is in other countries. In the recent launch of his book, titled Philippine Football: Its Past, Its Future, at Amici in SM Megamall, Dr. Bernardo Villegas said the realization of these potentials are hinged on the sport’s continued and strengthened promotion to the country’s younger generation.

“This is on the long term; it cannot happen overnight,” Villegas said, adding that the present state of local football is still “very challenging”, as it trails not only basketball in terms of popularity, but women’s volleyball, as well.

A doctorate degree holder in Economics from Harvard University in 1963 and the cofounder of University of Asia & Pacific’s (UA&P) Center for Research and Communication (CRC), Villegas came out with the book with the hope of ingraining football deeper into the national consciousness, and to prod Filipinos to see it as a sport they can excel at and profit from. “We have a lot more chance of becoming world champions in football than in basketball,” he said, emphasizing the Filipino’s average height favors the natures of football. In terms of the sport’s economic appeal, Villegas pointed to a report on European football earning, which amounts to €1.5 billion in profits. “It’s an evidence that football is a very profitable sport that’s worth investing. Football can be a major industry in the Philippines.”

Contrary to what his impassioned outlook suggests, the 77-year-old Villegas considers himself a late-blooming football fan. He did play the sport as a striker during his high-school days in La Salle Greenhills, but it wasn’t until around 2007 that he fell head over heels with “the beautiful game”.

Villegas was on a sabbatical from UA&P to become a visiting professor in the prestigious IESE Business School in Barcelona. At that time, he resided on the 10th floor of an apartment that was right in front of Camp Nou, the home stadium of one of the world’s most famous football clubs, F.C. Barcelona. “Every night I would hear the cheering and the singing,” he said.

The interest only got stronger when he met IESE MBA graduate Josh Thomson, brother of former national swimmer Akiko Thomson and the Asia marketing director of F.C. Barcelona then. Thomson would invite Villegas to the games of “Barca”, leading the latter to know—and love—the club on a deeper level. That included Villegas’s encounter with the legend of Paulino Alcantara, the early 20th century Filipino football savant. Alcantara had scored a record of 369 goals for F.C. Barcelona, a feat that stood for more than 87 years. It was only broken in 2014 by present-day football icon Lionel Messi.

In Villegas’s new book—his first foray into sports book writing, to go with a number of economic textbooks and management best sellers under his name—a photo of Alcantara hitting the ball with a header is featured on the cover. This is just one of the many milestones of Philippine football the book touches on, along with stories of how the sport fostered under the watch of the Brits, the role of the Filipino-Chinese community, how it peaked in the 1950s, how it declined from then on, and how it will find its way again into the hearts of Filipinos.

But despite its vast collection of the past, Villegas remains clear of the book’s category and goal. “It tells an account of what happened to football over the last 100 years. However, the purpose of the book is not to tell history, but to promote football as a major sport in the Philippines. It’s really more a marketing book than a history book.”

To deliver the message effectively, Villegas chose a bunch of journalists and former players who have followed the sport to write about its growth through their accounts. “This is more of a book by Albert Ramirez, Bill Velasco and the others. They are the ones writing about football. I just put them together, and I consider myself more of a cheerleader,” Villegas said.

The book took more than three years from conceptualization to printing, and one glaring challenge its main writer and editor Ramirez encountered is the dearth of literature on Philippine football. Even in the age of Google, they had to scour for information and double-check every haul, including personal visits to veteran football personalities. Sometimes, they hit deadends with potential resource persons having gone to far-flung places, or were simply gone. “Quite simply, writing the book was not a simple, much less easy job,” Ramirez said.

For his part, Velasco, a sports analyst for ABS-CBN, wrote about the impact of media and sponsorship in local football. “A big part of that is the marketability of the athlete.”

According to Velasco, the most recent resurgence of the sport was put into motion in 2010. The night before the AFF Suzuki Cup, ABS-CBN decided to broadcast the tournament and called the franchise holder in Hong Kong. “Nobody’s broadcasting it on the Philippines and, apparently, they just gave it to us,” Velasco recalls. “And after that, it triggered something: an awareness of the sport,” he added, alluding to the Cinderella run of the Philippines’s national men’s football team, the Azkals. In the quarterfinals of that competition, the Philippines went up against defending champions Vietnam, and scored a monumental 2-0 upset win. It was such a huge win that the narrative made it to Sports Illustrated’s Top 10 football stories of 2010.

Now, there’s already the foundation, Velasco said. “Nasanay na tayong nanonood ng football sa TV. It’s a question of what the next generation is going to do with what has been laid out before them.”

Along with the release of the book, which is now available at Fully Booked outlets for P650 and through UA&P CRC at 637-0912 local 350 or 634-5874, what Villegas hopes to get football over the top is the country’s upcoming professional football association called the Philippines Football League (PFL), which will be launched in April.

The league will field teams from different parts of the country, in hopes of replicating the fan-base devotion and regional rivalries that thrive in the world’s top football leagues, like the Premier League in England and the La Liga in Spain. “I think that will enhance the popularity of football,” said Villegas, who chaired for two years the Philippine Football Federation League Task Force to lay the groundwork for the PFL.

With all these efforts to promote the sport, Villegas doesn’t stop at dreaming of football overtaking basketball as the country’s No. 1 sport, nor settle at the thought that it will be a billion-dollar empire one day. He has his eyes set on an even bigger target. “I hope that, at some point, before the century is over, we should be in the qualifying phase of the World Cup. Even if we reach only the quarterfinals, I would be happy already.”