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Mark Torcaso’s team qualified for a third straight AFC Women’s Asian Cup. But making the Philippines take notice is the next challenge.
The Filipinas are back in the Asian spotlight next March after downing Hong Kong in a tough 1-0 battle over the weekend.
Their qualifying campaign was impressive, with three clean sheets against Saudi Arabia and hosts Cambodia in the days before.
The squad has no shortage of fascinating stories and achievements. Olivia McDaniel’s half-century of caps as the goalie. The emergence of Alexa Pino, a creative force in the midfield who is only 18 years old. Meryll Serrano’s three goals, including one jaw-dropping strike from the center circle against Cambodia. Inday Tolentin is carrying the flag for the homegrown players with solid play off the bench.
But how much is all of this penetrating into the consciousness of the Filipino sports fan? This side needs to step up from having a niche fanbase to going truly mainstream. Let’s look at the data.
The pivotal Hong Kong match, where the team needed either a draw or a win to progress, drew an impressive 218,000 views on the livestream of the team’s official Facebook page. Strangely, the Cambodia game, a 6-0 rout, attracted 322,000 sets of eyeballs.
These are good numbers, but how do they compare with, say, the Alas Pilipinas Volleyball team? Alas, for me, is a benchmark that the Filipinas should strive to reach. Yes, they are household names, and volleyball is far more popular than football. But we have to dream and give ourselves stretch goals.
I was unable to find comparable live streams for Alas Pilipinas’ recent AVC Nations Cup matches, but there were highlights from One Sports on YouTube. The most viewed match highlights I could see was the game against Kazakhstan, with 854,000 views. One imagines that that match had a live viewership in the millions if you include other platforms.
It is apples to oranges, yes, but I believe the national football team still has a ways to go before reaching the heights of our volleyball stars. But we must keep on trying. There is too much at stake.
How can we make the team more popular? The answer is a little more complex than one might think.
I have written in the past about how the Filipinas, and even the Men’s team, sometimes announce the livestream details very late. There is a theory I have heard that explains this: that the PFF is trying to get a network or broadcast partner to buy the rights to the matches, but if there are no takers, at the last minute, they simply air it on their Facebook or YouTube pages. It is hard to tell how true this is, but the livestream announcement, as far as I could tell from the Facebook feed of the team, was made the day before the game against the Saudis, June 28, and the post gave a Cambodian link. In the comments, there are numerous folks asking how to watch the game in the lead-up.
We hope this can be sorted out in the matches before the AFC Asian Cup. Ideally, fans should know where they can watch their heroes.
Media5 COO Dino Laurena, who knows a thing or two about broadcasting football in the Philippines since he was in ABS-CBN Sports during the Azkals era, says this:
“If you are announcing your stream late, you are not treating your content with respect. If your content is good enough to watch, two weeks before, you are telling me (where) to watch.”
Which begs the question: does the team need to partner with an established broadcast network in order to get the matches and highlights out to a wider audience?
I believe that even in the age of live streaming on Facebook and YouTube, a network partnership can bring good dividends. Networks can air the games on multiple platforms, from cable to YouTube to streaming apps, meaning the net is cast wider. If the network will also produce the broadcast and not just air, then the team can tap the better resources and manpower of the network to improve the production values, making the product look classier and more appealing to fans and sponsors.
Networks also have their own social media accounts with plenty of followers, thus helping get the word out better.
You would think that someone like Laurena, who is in the same conglomerate as TV5, would be an enthusiastic proponent of the PWNFT partnering with a network. But his view is very nuanced indeed.
“The network is not the magic pill. The network will struggle if you don’t build everything around it,” says Laurena.
“Sometimes there is the thinking that if you put it on a network, it (a sports property) will easily expand to casual fans who don’t have that same desire to watch it as the regular football fans. But it is not just putting the game on the network. You gotta make them love it. You have to do programs, tell the stories. The network will not do that for you if they know there is no revenue,” he explains.
The broadcast veteran explains another problem with trying to go the route of getting into a network.
“Networks are playing a whole lot of basketball, a whole lot of volleyball, and university leagues. At what time will you show football live? The network will not give the time slot of the sports that are already there. Are you gonna give up, or build it from what is available? If it is YouTube or Facebook, so be it.”
Laurena does note that Pilipinas Live, the app that shows a variety of Filipino sports, some for free and some for a small monthly fee, is a distinct possibility for the team.
“Pilipinas Live is the best platform for you to establish regularity about where they can find football,” he asserts. Unlike networks, Pilipinas Live can air more than one live event at a time on its app.
Laurena preaches patience and creative, out-of-the-box thinking. His best example of this was when ABS-CBN began heavily promoting UAAP Women’s Volleyball.
“Ateneo vs La Salle was a firestarter. But when we saw there was a rivalry between UST and FEU, we built it up,” recounts Laurena.
“We did lifestyle programs like Up Front. We worked with social media, put in content related to volleyball but was not necessarily about the game.”
Laurena talks about the “bag ambush” features ABS CBN did back then, showing the contents of the handbags of stars like Michele Gumabao and Gretchen Ho, to get fans to see their heroes as people and not just athletes.
Thankfully, there already is a cadre of dedicated fans of women’s football who are hard at work spreading the gospel, like Mia Montayre and Venice Furio. But their tribe must increase, and the personalities behind the players need to be shared.
Kaya FC is one club that has an excellent social media and marketing team that puts out fantastic content on their players. I especially liked this piece on Maegan Alforque, a young player from Cebu.
“If you are pushing women’s football to casual fans, there can be a lot of creativity around it. It’s gotta be about engagement, and has to be experiential. You have to do events, get into activities, family days, TikTok, etcetera,” adds Laurena.
We need more of this to drum up support for the ladies as they aim for even greater glory in the tournament they have been playing in since 2018.
The Asian Cup is important. Unlike the Women’s World Cup, there is a much more realistic chance for the Philippines to go deep in this competition. With only twelve sides participating, a strong performance and some luck in the draw could see a full-strength Philippines crashing the semifinals party and duking it out against the likes of Japan, Korea Republic, and hosts Australia.
That’s why it’s vital to boost the profile of the team, reel in the fans, rope in sponsors, and make all of this sustainable. Sustainability is and has been the holy grail of Philippine football that we have yet to achieve. Success on the pitch needs to be matched with financial stability off it.
The recent pull-out of Freddy Gonzalez from the men’s national team only adds to the uncertainty, since, for a time, he was also handling the women’s team.
We have seven months to go before the AFC Women’s Asian Cup 2026 kicks off in Australia. There will be camps and friendlies before that. It’s plenty of time to give the Filipinas the attention they richly deserve. We need a holistic plan that I believe includes a network deal or an app deal, plus all of the other efforts that can help the side.
There will be lots of hard work, and everyone must be on board.
“Remember the quote from the movie Field of Dreams? Build it and they will come,” says Laurena.
“But building something, it is never done overnight.”
Banner image from Philippine Women’s National Football Team.