EVER since he stepped down as president of the Cebu Football Association–now the Central Visayas Regional Football Association–I haven’t seen Ricky Dakay that much.
But he was one of the first persons that I thought of when I learned that Cebu would be hosting the first Aboitiz Cup Champions League.
“Sayang wala si Sir Ricky,” CVFA president Engr. Rodney Orale, who managed to fill the huge shoes left by Sir Ricky told me when I met him at the Dynamic Herb Sports Complex. “Iya gyud ra ba ni vision.”
That vision was a champions league, where champions from Aboitiz Cups all over the country would meet and face each other.
But first, why did the Aboitiz Foundation decide to export the Aboitiz Cup? The answer is simple. It has become the most successful privately-funded tournament in the country today.
And Sir Ricky played a huge part in that. Though the Aboitiz Cup was already one of the biggest tournaments when Sir Ricky started his term, he changed it when he took his no-nonsense approach in business and applied it to the Aboitiz Cup, basically professionalizing how everything was run.
That change, which was continued under Engr. Orale’s term is what prodded the sponsors behind the tournament to bring it to other parts of the country, which culminated with the Champions League.
However, the Aboitiz Cup National Champions League turned out to be a bit of a disappointment and the reason behind it, I think, is a beautiful problem for the company.
You see the Aboitiz Cup (Cebu version) has become what it is now because it has become a community effort. People in the football community wants to succeed in the tournament and wants the tournament to succeed. You can feel that different kind of love when you hear players and coaches admonish each other, “Pagtarong mo diha, Aboitiz ra ba ni.”
And when I saw Don Bosco Technical College Cebu toying with Don Bosco Tarlac 10-0 in a 30-minute game I thought, “This is a battle of champions?” And that wasn’t even DBTC’s B team as it was composed of a rag-tag team of imports as it’s A Team was in the Cviraa.
The stark contrast among the different Aboitiz Cup versions is that in Cebu it’s almost a six-month, 11-a-side tournament while in the other areas, it’s just a football festival. And we all know sometimes that best team gets unlucky in a festival.
Short of exporting the people who run the Aboitiz Cup in Cebu to other areas or cloning Ricky Dakay and Engr. Rodney Orale, how can the Aboitiz Cup really replicate its Cebu experience in the other areas?
I think it can do that by adopting the Cebu model—getting the local FA and football community involved. Right now, the Aboitiz Cup is just another tournament in Davao and Batangas and it’s understandable since it just established its foothold there.
It could start by picking two age groups for a longer 11-a-side tournament—the 12-Under and the 18-Under, the elementary and high school divisions. And when I say it adopts the Cebu model, that means no pissing contests with other tournaments like the local private schools or DepEd meets. That’s how we do it in Cebu.
And of course, to improve the level of competition, just for those two age groups, the Aboitiz Cup may require teams to have licensed coaches and for the local FA to only allow licensed referees.
I call it a beautiful problem for the Aboitiz Cup because this is a huge directional arrow for the next steps that tournament should take in areas it is trying to establish.
And I tell you—and I’m willing to bet my last strand of hair—that if the Aboitiz Cup Cebu experience gets truly exported to other parts of the country, it will change football in the Philippines.
P.S. The pictures in this post are my first attempt at taking action shots in football.
