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Post by teddyandtimmysdad on Apr 13, 2012 0:37:20 GMT 8
There have been a number of recent successes by the Azkals, which has fueled continued and strengthening interest in Football here in the Philippines. This may cause us to ask the question, What is the Next Step in the Evolution of Professional Football here in the Philippines?
I have recently been talking to some ambitious young guys in Bulacan. Currently, they are just a bunch of guys that get together and play in Men's open events/tournaments. They are now at the stage wherein they want to get more serious. What does this mean? Well, first of all, these are guys who have regular jobs and as such can only play on weekends. They are ready to grow, and want to organize themselves and get sponsorship. Why can't they dedicate more time and energy to the team? Answer: There is not enough money in the system around the professional leagues to support their team. I am sure their story is very common, I am sure there are many talented footballers throughout the Philippines who are facing this difficulty. They want to play, but have families or other financial constraints that prevent them from playing within the current setup.
What about the sponsors? We already see some big names like Meralco in the mix. Isn't this good enough? Sadly, it is not. For a league to flourish, there needs to be a system that allows some return for team owners. As it is now, sponsorship or ownership is not likely to return anything but financial responsibilities. At best, firms can account for these as marketing expenses to help offset corporate profits and reduce their corporate tax liabilities. While this may be OK for biggies like Meralco, it is unlikely to be a framework for widespread investment and growth of the league. At worst, we will have a system which lacks any balance at all, where most teams will have no chance at all to compete with the big sponsors. As the league becomes less competitive, there is a danger that fan interest will taper off as the same old guys inhabit the "big four/five/six" slots at the top, season after season.
The core issue here seems to be how to drive revenues in the UFL to be able to support teams ie owners who want a return on their investment, as well as players who need to make at least a meager living. Driving fan support is also an issue, since we would want fans to support all the clubs, even if they are not part of the "big four/five/six." In summary, the next step in evolution of the game here seems to need - 1) A system for revenue generation 2) A system to drive tribal fan support at the grassroots level for all teams
There are some models to look at to consider in answer to these challenges.
1) Revenue generation Virtually every major league around the region recovers revenue through ticketing, commercials, and shared TV revenues. It would be interesting to know what the plans may be in the UFL / PFF to help drive this important agenda. One key question remains though - is there enough fan interest yet to support ticketing, TV commercialization, and the consequent revenue streams these would produce? This is a very key question to the timing of the evolution of football here in the Philippines. Which brings us to the second topic...
2) Tribal Fan Support At the end of the day, a revenue structure can only be built up if there is sufficient fan support. This means not only interested enthusiasts at the NCR, but rather a broad based and sustainable fan base across the entire country. How can this be achieved? Again, I believe that there are many examples in other countries to give us a clue to the answer. Looking at the examples in England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the USA for a start, the fan support seems to have at its roots a geographical affinity. This means that people from Burnley support their home town team. Similarly, people from LA cheer for the Galaxy... and so on and so forth. What does this mean for the Philippines? It would seem to indicate that the UFL must evolve from an NCR centric league, to one which fosters teams on a more regional basis, teams which represent their "home town" or "home region", teams which fans can rally around and support in a tribal fashion, much like the leagues in England, Italy, Spain, the USA, and elsewhere. The problem with this of course is travel cost for teams, as well as adequate playing infrastructure in the remote areas that may want to support a team.
At the end of the day, if we accept that these are two key elements to the next step in the evolution of the game here, we have to ask ourselves if we are ready to take steps to make these a reality. Sadly, I don't think we are yet ready to take this next transition in the game here. The problem as I see it is that we do not yet have the fan support required. In addition, I feel this may still take another 3 to 5 years for the fan base to develop to the extent that the base would exist to make the revenue generation a possibility.
So, what is the next step? I believe that the key is planning, with the move towards a regional approach for the UFL as a critical element to encourage a more vibrant and nationally excited fan base throughout the Philippines
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Post by veryfatchocobo on May 13, 2012 14:41:58 GMT 8
IMO, I could be wrong since I don't live in the Philippines, but I don't think the UFL will be successful at all until it reaches all parts of the Philippines. That means that the majority of the Manila-based clubs will have to go under though..... Regardless though, regional expansion should be first priority especially considering that the majority of the football talent came from the Visayas.
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Post by stellarboy on May 13, 2012 15:36:51 GMT 8
Revenue generation: Good thing that the UFL doesn't charge for admission for now, which is good. However, with the construction of the new field at McKinley Hill, I'm thinking, will they charge tickets now? I say, no. Other games from teams outside the Big Four (Loyola, Kaya, Global, Air Force) aren't that filled yet. Should a better fan base grows out, the UFL management should think of charging for tickets.
Sponsors have been pouring in, and with a TV contract to boot, so I think it compensated the apparently free admission.
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Post by zaphster24 on Aug 21, 2012 17:50:12 GMT 8
5 things that will Improve UFL:
1. More teams - Sa ngayon, meron tayong 10 teams sa Div. 1 & Div 2. Syempre pag mas maraming teams mas masaya kasi mas matagal ang season at mas maraming rivalries. I hope sa susunod na season walang ma-relegate from Div. 1 pero may ma promote na 4 sa Div. 2. Sa tingin ko mas madami ang sasali sa Div. 2 dahil sa UFL Cup, baka mag-debut na rin ang clubs kagaya ng Garuda,Shwarz,Manhur,Coast Gourd,Bagiuo,Mendiola (sana bumalik na sila),ABC Stars atbp.
2. More good players - para lumakas ang liga, dapat malakas ang teams, para lumakas ang teams dapat eh malakas ang players at coaching staff. Grassroots ay dapat pagbutihin at palawakin. Sipag at Tiyaga sa Training. At dapat kumuha rin tayo ng foriegn players na malakas. Ang mga bansang gusto ko kunan ng players (kung manager ako) eh yung mga di gano malalakas ang Nat. Team o di gano developed ang Football sa bansa nila kagaya ng American Samoa,Guam,Timor Leste,Brunie,Taiwan,Samoa,Tahiti(magaling na bansa ang Tahiti sa Football),Bhutan,Macau at marami pang iba. Ispin nyo, papalakasin nila ang teams sa UFL at kung National Player pa sila eh lalakas pa Nat. Team nila. Its a win-win situation
3. Clubs should have a "home stadium" - Madami ako naririnig at nababasa sa FB na "Dapat city/province based ang UFL at dapat ang clubs ang nirerepresenta nila eh city o province o region". HINDI PO. Ayos lang kung ano ang nirerepresnta, mapa samhan man o paaralan o syudad, ok lang basta may "home stadium". Sa BPL (Barclays Premiere League), Ang Arsenal, ano ba nirerepresnta? Mga nagawa ng mga canyon at baril sa London. Hindi nila directly nirerepresenta ang London. Ang Chelsea ganun din, mga engineers ata yung nirerepresenta nila eh (sa Chelsea ako hindi sugurado). Pero yung 2 club na ito eh merong Home Stadium! Basta may home stadium ang club, di ko naman inaasahan na magkaroon sila ng Stadium kagaya ng Old Trafford o Anfield, yung field lang (OK lang sakin kung may track oval) na may Upuan, kahit 3000 lang Cpacity eh. Ang dami kayang mga sports complex dito na may track & field na may bleachers, pwede gamitin ng mga clubs yun! HALIMBAWA: Stallions F.C. = Iloilo Sports Complex Cebu Queen City United F.C. =Cebu Sports Complex Kaya F.C. = RMS o UMak o Makati Sports Comples Green Archers United = La Salle Zobel o RMS (kapit bahay lang ng La Salle Manila ang RMS so OK namn kung yun ang kanilang home stadium) Pachanga F.C. = Yung wing McKinley Stadium
4. More Sponsors = Ang dami o company sa Pinas na pwede mag-sponsors sa Culbs! Habang padami ng padami ang alam ko sa Football , nalamaan ko na ang Football eh isang negosyo. Mga companya na kagaya ng BPI, PAL, Cebu Pacific, Nestle, Alaska, Cdo atbp ay pwede mag sponsors sa clubs. Yung SM eh payaman ng payaman lang, saan ka nakakita ng halos lahat ng Major cities sa isang bansa eh may Mall na i-isa lang ang pangalan. Papatayin mo na nga yung mga small businesses, 70% ng produkto mo eh galing China, DI KA PA NATULONG SA SPORTS! Pwede rin ang UFL maging daan sa Advertising ng mga company lalo na dun sa mga samll businesses. Marami rin satin na naghahangad na maging outfitter ng club ang mga big names kagaya ng Puma,Adidas at Nike, para sakin maganda kung yung mga clubs ay magkasundo sa mga Pinoy based sporting companies kagaya ng LGR at Accel. Maganda rin kung makipagkasundo naman ang clubs sa mga International brands pero di naman ganun ka bigtime ng Nike o Adidas kagaya ng Diadora,Lotto,Mizuno,Asics,Anta,Li-Ning,Reebok,Umbro,Le Coq Sportif,Hummel etc.
5. Better Officiating - Nakita naman antin yung last season eh, TERRIBLE OFFICIATING. Sana gawin nila na pag nakatanggap ng Yellow o Red card ang isang palyer may bayad yung player sa UFL, pwede gamitin yung pera sa Training ng Officials.
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Post by stellarboy on Aug 21, 2012 20:18:29 GMT 8
zaphster24,
I moved your post to this thread since I want to direct you to the first post by teddyandtimmysdad. In my opinion, the points he presented to us are the core issues that needs to be addressed first before we tackle your suggestions.
First and foremost, lahat nadadaan sa pera at dedikasyon. You have good points, pero itong lahat kinakailangan ng pondo at will-power. However, we also have to consider the overall situation in our country. We are not like Japan, South Korea, Malaysia or even Singapore na may sapat na pondo at tapat yung pamamalakad sa ekonomiya. If you look at the current state of sport in the country, it's not high a priority as other nations.
I am thankful that the UFL isn't charging yet to attend games. But here is one disadvantage I think would happen if they start charging tickets: attendance may definitely suffer even if it is around 50 to 100 pesos. You see, free admissions are attractive to the middle-class and lower-class no matter if its a football game, a basketball game or a concert event. Do you think the middle-to-low income parents can shell out a hundred pesos plus commute for them and their kids to watch a football game? Remember that the league is still basically making themselves competent with other sports league (PBA especially) as of yet.
A member in the Azkals.com forums says that one of the biggest mistakes that we fans do is to pattern our development of football to that of the UK, Spain or Germany, which are first-world nations and are facing very different realities compared to ours. Football is being played in the extreme sectors of our country's society: the kids of well-to-do people who can afford them to send to the best academies and to schools that have soccer as part of their curricula; on the other side, the kids of the poor in the outskirts of our country - children of farmers and blue-collar workers in Barotac Nuevo, to the children of scavengers in Payatas. We have to even up the playing field to mainstream the league to the majority of the middle-class.
If you want to demand more teams to play in the league, better players, home stadia and whatnot, we have to have "tribal fan support." Look at what the PBA has done. It's all based in Manila like the UFL is currently in, pero tingnan mo ang suporta ng bawat koponan. It's all about marketing each team to a certain sector of the masses and in every part of the country, and it's all about the infrastructure dahil pansin na pansin namumutakte ang mga coliseum sa buong bansa. Nagsisimula pa lang ang UFL, and it still has its problems with fan support and the places that they can engender support with.
That I think the league, the PFF and the fans must encourage before we think about the points you presented.
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Post by theamazingno17 on Sept 12, 2012 11:20:13 GMT 8
Give the fans and viewer a quality games so that they will see the true beauty of football hindi yung bara-bara style na sipa lang ng sipa sa bola.
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Post by kluverbucy on Sept 12, 2012 12:04:25 GMT 8
Quality Pitch and Grassroots plus Quality games, rules and regulations coming from PFF regarding UFL coaches, proper attire during games and Quality Refs.
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Post by cjeagle on Dec 25, 2012 11:54:23 GMT 8
I just wanted to share this conversations I had a year ago on the filipinofootballblogspot.com under the topic"cutillas says lets get real". It is relevant to the discussion here and basically listed how we thought professional football should become in the Philippines. One of the posters was a general manager of a UFL club and illustrated back in January of 2011 how difficult it was to run a club in response to my comments on how to improve professional football and medical insurance: "Regarding this professional thing you're saying, just come home and try to manage even a small football club to experience first-hand the difficulty. The club I manage has sponsors but the money we get from them is barely enough to pay for tournament fees and transportation. When we get extra, we save that for medical because our players sometimes get hurt and when that happens, the club shoulders what it can. It's the least we can do for our players' dedication (they get no salaries from the club). And no, medical insurance in the Philippines simply doesn't work the way it does in the US or in Europe. It's easy to fantasize when you're in Blogspot. But the reality is, companies are not going to give us too much money until our tournaments are covered by the media; and media will not cover until the games are attended by a significant number of people. The Azkals gives us hope because the more they compete, the more people become interested in football in general; the better they perform, the more passionate the fans become. We can only hope that some of these fans will be interested in football enough to come see the local tournaments this year so that media will actually cover the games one way or another. And maybe next year, we can ask for a bit more money from our sponsors. And the year after, maybe a bit more." A lot of things have changed in the UFL since I had this conversation with this general manager back in January of 2011 and I bet a lot of the ideas I have mentioned in this thread looks a lot more realistic today than it was back then. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of progress needed to be made to make the UFL a truly professional league and hopefully this can be made in the near future. filipinofootball.blogspot.com/2011/01/cutillas-says-lets-get-real.htmlMy comment on the MLS model and how it works: "Football is a business. And like any other businesses we have to start looking at football development esp. when in regards to developing a professional league, in terms of what makes financial sense. Business management students study business models from throughout the world and not only from their limited parochial view inside their country or region. When it comes to sports management, there are many models we can study throughout the world from which we can choose that might work for us. Even in Europe there are differences in the way their leagues work. Some clubs in Europe are owned by private individuals or corporations and a few are even owned by their fans with the fans having the right to vote out team officials every few years or so. The US Model(MLS) is a radical model based on single entity with owners having a stake in the league and not only their own club. By doing this they were able to formulate policies that would benefit the league in the long term rather than satisfying stockholders need for each club to show profit every year. They were also able to avoid practices that were inimical to the survival of the league like outbidding each other for players services beyond what makes financial sense like what you see in Europe, by instituting a hard salary cap. Whether this works for us is debatable. They had the advantage of having deep pocketed owners who were passionate about football, from the start who were willing to accept losses in the short term in the hope of seeing a reasonable return on their investment years down the road. The point is that we need to look at different models from all over the world, find what works for us and see it through. Unlike countries like Qatar, or Saudi Arabia we cannot just depend upon government largesse to finance our league. Of course city and govt. have a role to play in the success of the league by helping fund the stadiums that will host our team as well as possibly providing tax breaks as well. Even in our own region, our situation is unique in that football is not the number one sport and don't have the entrenched fan base to depend upon. In many ways that makes us closer to such countries like the US or Australia where our league would have to compete with other sports for fan interest. We have a lot to learn from them as well. As for me, I believe there is a natural rivalry among the regions that we can take advantage of. People from the south tend to call our capital Imperial Manila. Well Catalonia and by extension Barcelona feels the same way about Castillan Madrid and by extension Real Madrid. We wouldn't have to worry about not having packed stadiums in Bacolod or Cebu when Manila comes visiting. To make all this work, we would need committed ownership, corporate support, assistance from the govt. by providing venues for our teams and a CEO who has a proven record in successfully running major corporations." When I first wrote this, I was considering the MLS system as a good model to implement in the UFL. Nowadays, I think the promotion/relegation system works better in the Philippine setting as opposed to the single entity system that MLS uses as the incentive for each team to get better every year is greater through the promotion/relegation than through single entity. This is of course true, as long as the league and clubs can sustain themselves financially as they expand which still seems to be the case as of now. However, I still think that the UFL should start considering expanding to Cebu and Bacolod ASAP now that stadiums in those regions can now support a locally based UFL team. I think considering the football knowledgeable fanbase found in those areas and natural rivalries between them and Imperial Manila, their stadiums will most likely attract a loyal and rabid fanbase that will dwarf those found in Manila. Anyways there was a lot of interesting conversations on that thread(more than 50 responses I believe), and I encourage everyone to revisit it with the knowledge that they were posted nearly 2 years ago. One in particular I would like to see. "A good start would be to convince our foreign based player when they are finished with their careers to consider coaching in our future pro league. By transferring their experience and technical expertise to the younger players we can form a sustainable foundation for developing world class players right at home." I hope to see older players like Lucena and Gier who are at the tail end of their careers to consider coaching in the UFL. Their experience playing in top leagues in Europe would be of great benefit to the new generation of players coming through the league.
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Post by kikomatsing on Jan 7, 2013 20:11:25 GMT 8
one thing thing that can also encourage more fans is to promote more the UAAP and NCAA football games, if you watch college hoops on TV, their allumnis are always at full support, if we could encourage that to football games then that is a good start.
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Post by stellarboy on Jul 10, 2013 8:36:08 GMT 8
Bumped this thread, for those interested to read in light of the PFF's plans for a "national league".
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Post by rookoz on Jul 10, 2013 9:11:21 GMT 8
Bumped this thread, for those interested to read in light of the PFF's plans for a "national league". Is there an article online regarding this plan?
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Post by teddyandtimmysdad on Jul 10, 2013 9:13:41 GMT 8
...also interesting in light of the lack of support from the PSC for our young guys coming up the ranks.
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Post by stellarboy on Jul 10, 2013 9:17:51 GMT 8
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Post by rookoz on Jul 10, 2013 9:31:52 GMT 8
Thanks stellarboy. Interesting development.
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