For The Good Of The Game

Though she has been out of the local sporting radar for sometime now after her stint as Philippine Olympic Committee president, Cristy Ramos has resurfaced of late practically a reinvented woman as official of FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) for the distaff side, or women’s football, which last month held a three-day seminar at the Discovery Suites in Pasig City.

That’s right, you read it correctly: in a country that has trouble gathering a decent audience for men’s football –except perhaps in areas in the Visayas region–the Philippines was picked as host for the FIFA women’s football seminar, with its motto printed in pamphlets for all to see: "For the good of the game."

The NBA has "I love this game" while Major League Baseball has "I live for this," and both premier leagues in the United States have enjoyed bumper seasons despite mediocre showings in the international arena and accusations of steroid use and other performance enhancing drugs.

Football or soccer under the FIFA umbrella however remains the true international game, one with the widest fan base and accessible to varied social strata. So when Cristy Ramos is working for the good of women’s football in a country that has a middling soccer following, that job cannot be anything but quixotic, and not exactly–as her old man’s phrase goes–a win-win situation.

"Image problem," is how she diagnoses what ails the Philippine Football Federation (PFF), whose president Juan Miguel Romualdez however graced the opening of the FIFA women’s football seminar on Sept. 18 on the 42nd floor of Discovery Suites.

Football, even if not exactly dead in these parts, may just not cut it with the Pinoy temperament and predilection for high-scoring games. The only time we get to see a resurgence of interest in the beautiful game is once every four years, or whenever the World Cup is held. The sad fact is that even the Champions League games hardly get exposure in the sports pages.

"The PFF should have set up large screens in public places for free viewing," she says, lamenting a missed chance to further popularize the game here. In other places such as Malaysia, giant screens set up on promenades carried live coverage of the games, while poor Pinoys had to scramble for seats in swanky bars and hotels where cover charge could provide a family with two weeks worth of rice.

She also sadly notes that there is no systematic program for football in the country. No grassroots foundation, unlike say, Guam. There is no follow through, and she cites as an example the Kasibulan Youth 6-12 program, which helps kids of that age learn the football fundamentals during the elementary school years, but they are left in the lurch after that. A far cry from the Milo basketball program, where training is like clockwork from kindergarten until the kids try out for the school juniors team.

As far as football development is concerned, Cristy says that one thing she learned in the FIFA seminar is that it is only the Philippines that resorts to the Fil-foreign solution in recruiting athletes to beef up the national team, unlike most other countries where athletes are trained from the grassroots in the farthest reaches of the country.

"Again that’s the quick fix solution," she says of the Pinoy’s penchant for short cuts and the path of least resistance. It is also only in the Philippines where sports researchers rummage through old Playstation games and check the lineups for players of Filipino descent.

For starters, she says, the PFF should invest in a decent pitch so that the often used adjectives "muddy" and "slippery" would no longer be staples in dispatches on games in places like Silliman University and Foundation in football-crazy Dumaguete.

Then there should be a bona fide commercial league, like the Shakey’s V-League in women’s volleyball, to further interest in the sport and hone our players.

She also says the federation should take care of its sponsors, such as putting their logos in the PFF stationery beside the letterhead, which in its own small way would certainly help in promoting the sport–and the sponsor’s products. Win-win.

Cristy suggests the Department of Education should also get into the act by requiring a football derivative such as futsal–with five players on each side and can be played indoors, with greater chances of scoring–to be taken up in Physical Education classes and as a competition sport in the Palarong Pam-bansa.

Aside from futsal, where nil-nil scores are not as commonplace as in regular soccer, another derivative, beach soccer, is gaining headway in the beaches of Boracay and Subic.

On the last day of the workshop seminar, one of the delegates is discussing a key topic, marketing of women’s football as a sport "for all ages and abilities." He says that the US team, which boasts of past football Player of the Year Mia Hamm, once had their pictures taken with their children as they boarded a plane for a tournament. Peru, he says, did one better by having the players photographed playing with their babies on their backs.

Certainly lack of coverage and exposure is one of the pitfalls of any sport, especially for one as fledgling as women’s soccer. Add to this too injury anxieties and sexual abuse.

Do we have any of our own poster girls for the sport?

Yes, we do, Cristy says, pointing out just recently there were members of the women’s football team to the SEA Games on a huge billboard along EDSA advertising, what was it, shampoo or something.

Cristy says marketing is crucial in the success of sport, and mentions how the Chinese promoted their women’s football team by making postcards of each player in very womanly poses, in tank tops and such, not coming across as intimidating as a Gatusso-like sneer at all.

She says the best women’s teams in the world can now beat the lesser ranked men’s teams, most likely even the Philippines which continues to languish in the lower rungs, Younghusband or no Younghusband.

The Philippine women’s team is higher ranked than the men’s team, she says, adding that potential for the sport is just waiting to be tapped, "and could be the next badminton." Filipinas thus should go out there and learn the sport, since our country has no such restrictions for them to do so–haphazard organization and apathy aside–unlike in some Muslim countries where the women are not allowed to watch, much less play, the sport.

In closed, conservative societies, women risk stoning and lashes if they so much as gather into teams to kick a ball in the street, she says. If the women in Brunei and Iran, for example, can defy the odds, how much more Pinays whose creativity would make them naturals for the sport?

Of course, decent coverage in media is rudimentary, and not just for the sake of curiosity. The WNBA, for its part, had to ride on the coattails of the established NBA to finally develop into a league of its own.

The country’s representative to FIFA says she had just come from Russia, where the World Under-20 witnessed its first all-Asian final. The next major event, Cristy says, is the Asian Football Confederation Under-19 in Chinese Taipei in November, which would serve as qualifier for the 2008 Under-20. Again, like in most major events, the Philippines won’t be sending a team.

Also in 2008 is the first staging of the World Under-17, which will be held every two years thereafter. Then there’s the Women’s World Cup next year in China, where Germany and three-time football player of the year Birgit Prinz hope to defend their title. The women’s world cup is held a year after the men’s.

Cristy dreams of the day when spectators here would reach close to the hundred thousand that watched the final of the women’s World Cup in Los Angeles 1999 won by the US, which ranks number 1 and is the current Olympic titleholder.

But maybe the FIFA seminar being held here, albeit with the usual limited coverage save for some sporting type walk-ins and the plain curious, would signal the first step in the long arduous journey for Pinoy soccer to make it back to the elite of the region, despite half-hearted state and corporate support and adverse pitch conditions more suitable for mud wrestling and obstacle courses than football.