We have a massive opportunity to grow Philippine football… and we’re not taking advantage of it.

While football in most countries is dominated by the men’s game, the Philippines could flip the script. Instead of feeding off the scraps of the men’s game, the women’s game could become the face of Philippine football and grow the sport much faster than it is currently growing.

Women are the most undervalued talents in Philippine football, in Moneyball terms. They are the best performers by a mile. The potential is huge… but it remains untapped for now.

The Men’s Room

The Philippine Men’s Team is ranked 23rd in Asia. Out of 46. It’s about halfway, and that’s a fair assessment, IMO. There has certainly been progress, but the Philippines has never advanced further than the Semi Finals of the Suzuki Cup and continues to be dominated by Vietnam or Thailand.

On the world stage, though, Vietnam and Thailand are minnows. Since the end of WWII, Thailand are the only Southeast Asian side to have made it to the final World Cup Qualification round. And only once. The best in Southeast Asia are decades behind the best in Asia. And in terms of footballing infrastructure, grassroots, and world-class talents, the Philippines are decades behind the best in Southeast Asia right now.

The women’s team, however, is another story.

The Women’s Room

As in the men’s game, Thailand and Vietnam sit at the top of Southeast Asia in the women’s game. Unlike the men, the best women’s team in Southeast Asia recently qualified for the World Cup. Thailand infamously lost 13-0 to the USA in 2019 in the biggest win in World Cup history, but at least they got there. In both 2019 and 2015. They will likely be there in 2023 as well.

Qualifying for the women’s World Cup comes through the Asian Cup right now. In 2018, the Philippines beat Asian Cup hosts Jordan before losses to China and Thailand. This set up a playoff with South Korea. South Korea won 5-0. Even so, if there were 32 teams at the 2019 World Cup, not 24, remarkably the Philippines probably would have been there.

The 2015 World Cup Qualifiers saw the Philippines likewise narrowly lose out. In short, the women’s team are not far from the best teams in Southeast Asia, who are already beginning to qualify for the World Cup itself. With the World Cup expanding, the top two or three Southeast Asian teams now have a genuine shot at going to the biggest stage in the game.

The men’s World Cup is also growing, from 32 to 48 teams from 2026 onwards, and there will be three additional slots for Asia. The men’s team, however, have about 20 teams with better claims to those slots right now. The women’s team, meanwhile, only have a few competitors at their level. The top Asian women’s teams are dominant: Japan, Australia, China, and South Korea are typically shoe-ins, along with North Korea when they’re not being busted for doping/being hit by lightning. That leaves Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Taiwan, Jordan, and the Philippines likely contesting the additional one or two slots for Asia.

The men’s team are two rounds of qualification away from the World Cup. That’s roughly one or two decades per round of qualification in terms of development. The women’s team, meanwhile, are one or two matches away from the World Cup.

That’s an opportunity.

The Women’s Team have Fewer Barriers (Relatively)

And there are other reasons the women’s game has more potential in the Philippines and why the women’s team deserves more support.

While in general the women’s game faces a lot of discrimination around the world, the Philippines is ahead of the curve. The Philippines were the only team at the 2019 SEA Games with a female Head Coach, in Let Dimzon, widely considered one of the best Philippine coaches of any gender. The same is true at youth level, with Coach Let now handling the Senior Team, her mentees and former National Team players have taken over the younger girls groups. At youth tournaments, little is made of the now regular sight of female coaches coaching boys teams as well as girls teams. In other countries this would be a spectacle in itself.

That’s because these social norms in the Philippines are ahead of most countries. In worldwide surveys, the Philippines repeatedly ranks in the top ten for gender equality and while there are definitely things that need to improve, there are big opportunities here.

Last year, in the second episode of Fairplay TV, we shared a story about this, how people used to say to our girls in Payatas Football Club that they shouldn’t play football because they’re girls. Regine, featured in the story below, kept playing, kept improving, and played under Coach Let in the National Youth Team. She’s in Grade 11 now and several Universities are interested in her for varsity scholarships.

In other countries in Asia, there are laws and heavy cultural pressures preventing girls from playing. While the Azkals have tens of Middle Eastern countries with talented footballers and rapidly growing leagues to contend with, the Malditas essentially skip these countries. Countries the men’s team are trying to catch up to, like Qatar, Iran, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan… the Malditas are already ahead of, or recently beat. Beating Jordan 2-1 in 2018 was a big step as Jordan are the 2nd best women’s team in the Middle East. In the men’s game, Jordan are 10th in the Middle East and would be very heavy favourites against the Azkals. Others in the Middle East are so bad they put men on the women’s team.

Closer to home, just fielding a women’s team in the SEA Games has guaranteed a top six finish. All eleven Southeast Asian countries typically participate in the men’s tournament.

That’s an opportunity.

Women’s Team Full of Young, Homegrown Talents

The Azkals have developed almost entirely because of players from abroad. The children of the diaspora have come back to play for the Philippines, and that’s improved the team. But there’s also a limit. You cannot develop world class talents with second-choice players.

World class players typically have bigger options. While they each have Filipino mothers, for example, Alphone Areola plays for France, David Alaba for Austria, and the De Guzman brothers for the Netherlands and Canada. Players at that level want the best chance at being at the World Cup and doing well there. If they’re not immediately called up, they will wait until their late 20s until they are certain they won’t be called up for their first choice before committing to another. For the Azkals, think of players like Iain Ramsey, who after years of courting finally committed to the Azkals in his late 20s, after once again being left out of the Australian squad.

Millions of pesos are spent finding and convincing these players to play for the Philippines, flying them over and for appearance fees. That’s no knock on the players. They have done well and we should be grateful for their contributions. At best, though, we get a few good years before they retire and the cycle repeats. This should be the case with a handful of players in a healthy squad. Not the entire starting XI.

Without developing the game in the Philippines, the Azkals are trying to competing against countries like Australia with players who were not good enough for Australia. You can’t beat them with that ceiling. To break the ceiling, we need to produce our own world-class talents. And that’s why the men are decades behind.

The women’s team is a different story.

Of the twenty players in the previous SEA Games squad, five are based overseas. That’s a healthy ratio. By contrast, only four of the Azkals in the last squad are now based in the Philippines. Just three are homegrown talents. The Malditas were fifteen minutes from a bronze medal, before Myanmar scored two late goals on individual errors. When the men’s team are made up of mostly homegrown players, they draw with Cambodia and lose to Myanmar, even with home field advantage, failing to qualify from the group stage.

At youth level, too, the boys get smashed in every single tournament. The girls routinely reach Semi Finals and challenge for championships. The boys are decades from competing with the best in the region. The girls already do.

The most recent women’s team is also young. Their average age is 23 years old; 14 of the 20 would have been eligible if it were a U23 team. Only Indonesia had a younger squad. Footballers typically peak around 28, depending on their position, and so this is a team five or six years from it’s prime; by the 2022 World Cup campaign they should be even stronger.

This is an opportunity.

Does Qualifying for the World Cup Really Matter?

The women’s team isn’t far from gaining international recognition, just as the Thai National team did. Their achievements could dwarf the achievements of the men’s team, for a fraction of the cost. Even so, would that alone make a difference?

A cynic would say no. A cynic would say even if the Malditas qualified for the World Cup, few people are going to notice in basketball-crazy Philippines. There’s a good deal of truth to that. We’ve seen when the Azkals make history, stadiums are empty again a year later. The interest generated by a National Team isn’t sustained for very long because football isn’t driven by a National Team. We need to do other things to take advantage of that.

Whether or not the Women qualify for the World Cup in the next decade, and indeed however they perform there, the potential of Philippine football is still in the Filipina. If they have a space to play, girls will take to the sport faster than boys, and grow it faster. There are potentially far more female fans here than in most countries, even now in Philippine stadiums the crowd’s cheers are an octave higher than in any other stadium I’ve been to or heard on TV.

The PFF Women’s League can grow into multiple tiers faster than the PFL. A women’s futsal league and 7s league can gain popularity and professionalism faster than the men’s game. Very quickly, their highlights shows would be watched more, if well made. And with a fanbase, the sponsors would line up to advertise women’s products.

Right now, football in the Philippines is still mostly a man’s sport. Not because of the number of male and female fans, or male and female players, just because that’s where the money and attention goes. And the men’s game has been banging against the same ceiling for almost a full decade now.

We are missing out.

With women’s football the most rapidly growing sport in the world, the Philippines could become a powerhouse and claim a big share of the revenues.

We’re missing out on the potential to flip the script. We’re missing out on how close the women’s team are to qualifying for a World Cup. We’re missing out on the potential for women’s football to become the face of Philippine football and drive the growth of the game. We’re missing out on the potential of getting millions of girls playing, creating millions of future fans. We’re missing out on the marketing opportunities.

This is all possible… if only we take advantage of the opportunities.

In the second part I’ll layout a roadmap for how Philippine football can take advantage of these opportunities.