Saturday, September 27, 2008 Football's bright future
THE future looks bigger and brighter for Philippine football as the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) laid out all of its plans for the improvement of the quality of football in the country.
After assessing Cebu City last Thursday, and seeing the flaws of its football system, the contingent of the AFC Asia formulated a massive development plan to elevate the quality of football in the country.
"It will take 10 to 15 years to accomplish our goals, so what better time to start than now," said AFC Vision Asia director Brendan Menton in a press conference at the Casino Español last Thursday night.
The key targets of Vision Philippines' development plan are administration, clubs and competitions, grassroots and youth, referees and coaches' education.
AFC Philippines' priority will be the coaches' education, where they will be holding introductory coaching courses and C certifications this year and B certification courses in 2010.
Vision Philippines also plans to stage a Premier league for the elite teams in the Visayas and Mindanao regions, which will then compete with the best clubs in Luzon. The winners will be sent to compete in the AFC tournament.
Another focus of Vision Philippines is to promote the sport to the younger generation and teach them the right basics of the sport at the correct age.
The Philippines is the 12th and latest recipient of Vision Asia's programs and Cebu City as the 25th city to be assessed.
Cebu Football Association will play a vital role in this project and CebuFA president Richard Montayre is willing to cooperate with the PFF and the AFC.
Aside from Vision Philippines, the PFF has already accomplished one of its projects, the Filipino Premier League, which kicked off last Month in Manila.
"It's very good. I've just been president for eight months and we have done a lot. We're moving forward," Martinez said.
One of the future goals of Martinez as the PFF president is for Philippine football to be at the same level with the other nearby countries like Indonesia and Malaysia and for it to have the same popularity as that of basketball and boxing here in the Philippines. (EKA)
