Philippine Sports: The Craze For Basketball And The Lack Of Interest In The World Cup

``Almost everywhere on the planet, people on Friday were stocking up on beer and food and readying themselves for long hours in front of the television set as football’s World Cup mania hit fever-pitch with the opening matches in Johannesburg, South Africa.”

This is from the Inquirer, who observed of the Filipinos’ lack of interest with the international football games.

The same article rationalizes such indifference...

``Fegidero said the continued failure of the Philippines to compete in major tournaments abroad had been the main reason football had not picked up here.

“We’re nowhere near the level of the world’s best teams, even in Asia, which is considered a weak continent in football,” he explained.

``The Philippines has never qualified for the World Cup since 1930, when the quadrennial meet began.

``This year, the country was only one of four countries that did not even bother to join the qualifying series for the tournament. The other three were Bhutan, Brunei and Laos.

“We don’t have the programs that can produce good players who can compete internationally,” Fegidero said. “We lack participation in international tournaments and local leagues.”

The Philippines has been obsessed with basketball, a sport, which unfortunately, we fail to excel in and continues to see rapid deterioration in performance based on the global or even regional competition standards.

The losing glory of Philippine men's basketball performance in the Asian Championship and the Asian Games, shown in the above table, where from the triumphant days in 60s to the early 70s, our competitive ranking continues to plunge, as time goes by.

But as consolation, at least based on South East Asia, we still remain dominant. (both charts from wikipedia) But the question is, given the underlying trend, for how long will this last?

Maybe we should ask first why Filipinos have been so fixated with a sport which we can't seem to win internationally due to structural reasons (lack of height)?

Yet this has been the case in spite of the active "participation in international tournaments and local leagues" in basketball, opposite to the reasoning of the expert as quoted above by the Inquirer article.

To consider, Philippine basketball teams have been complimented with Fil-Ams or Filipino Americans to fill in on the endemic height handicap, yet this has not been enough to reverse the degenerating trend.

The point is, it doesn't seem to be the lack of programs that determines the lack of acceptance of the World Cup. Instead, it is the lack of incentives brought about by the undue obsession on an unviable or unwinnable sport (basketball) and the attendant misdirection of investments that continues to feed on such delusion.

I see three reasons why Filipinos can't move away from basketball, in spite of the harsh reality that this is a sport which we simply can't compete in globally.

One, it seems a form of status signalling, which misleads Filipinos to believe that basketball is an irreplaceable cultural or social norm that needs to be conformed with. Otherwise said, to be IN (or to be identified as Filipino) means to patronize basketball in one way or another.

Second, it is part of the Groupthink fallacy, which Filipinos seem so entranced with.

According to Gloria Allendorfer Anderson, PhD., ``One of the dangers of our world today is group-think. It occurs as a person lets identification with a group cloud their reasoning and deliberations when reaching a position on a given issue. At best, it is a rhetorical device. At it's worst, it can be a very harmful replacement for sensible thought. In fact, it is considered one of the common fallacies of modern society." (emphasis added)

And groupthink is part of what shapes social or cultural norm, adds Ms. Anderson,

``When individuals identify with the state where they live, or a country of their heritage or origin, they relate to other individuals from the same state or country in their views of the world around them. This type of group identification indicates that they are part of a group of people who share the same life experience."(emphasis added)

Lastly basketball is a political sport or a sport used by politicians to attain political goals.

Basketball courts are one of the pet projects for pork barrel spending of local officials bent on achieving "accomplishments" for reelection or posterity or for financial purposes.

According to Gary W. Elliott,

``This year each of the 214 congressmen is allocated 60 million pesos (roughly USD1.5 million) for spending at his discretion, and each of the 24 senators receives twice that amount. With no real oversight or accountability, this institution is rife with corruption. Some of the funds intended for priority development projects in the congressmen’s districts, such as health care, clean water, and poverty alleviation, are typically spent on trivial projects which contribute nothing to the social and economic development of the country. Common examples are cement outdoor basketball courts and “waiting sheds,” small awnings or covered benches beside roads, where those waiting for a bus can get out of the rain. Large signs laud the congressman for spending government funds on the project (instead of just pocketing them?). Such projects are often accomplished just before elections, so signs touting the congressmen provide free campaign advertising for those seeking re-election." (bold highlights mine)

Since a basketball court has more player density per unit area, adding more courts on the local level draws in greater number of people to the sport. One may say that this is an example of Keynes' misinterpretation of Say's law where "supply creates its own demand"

So massive grassroot political investments in basketball courts impels more patrons relative to the other sports, hence more patrons translates to cultural acceptance, and the unwarranted fixation to basketball, in spite of the inherent handicaps, in terms of global standards. So goes the feedback mechanism driving the dynamics of basketball as a political sport.

So in my view, domestic politics represent as one of the key obstacles (if not the key hurdle) to the lack of diversity of Filipinos to engage in other more internationally competitive sports such as football.

World Cup Indicator: Boon Or Bane?

Will the World Cup games, which opened yesterday, portend of a bullish or bearish markets for the coming months?

Frank Holmes of US Global Investors argues that this should be bullish, especially from the perspective of the host country, i.e. South Africa...


So as with mint.com...

Pls click here to redirect link to mint's site to see a crispier image.

But Bespoke Invest sees the historical correlation as "negative"....

According to Bespoke, "both the US and world markets have averaged declines over both periods throughout history. The S&P 500 has averaged a decline of 1.65% during all 18 prior World Cups, and a decline of 0.37% in the three months following. The MSCI World Index, which we only have back to the 1970 World Cup, has averaged a decline of 1.25% during and 4.34% over the following three months. Historically the market has averaged gains over one- and three-month periods, so indices have definitely underperformed during World Cups. Most fans of the sport would take a couple months of declines in the market if it meant their country would win, however."

To my mind, historical patterns are not reliable measures in assessing market prospects because they can be positive and negative depending on the prevailing market and economic conditions then.

Instead, these indicators appeal to people who are only looking for patterns either to confirm their biases or to rationalize market actions.

Besides, major sporting events as the World Cup or the Olympics can only give a temporary boost to the economy. But on a larger picture such events could entail greater costs from the crowding out effect from inefficient government spending relative to private sector investments. In short, gains can be "exaggerated".

As Leander Schaerlaeckens at the ESPN writes, (bold highlights mine)

``People who are excited about hosting a World Cup, write Szymanski and Simon Kuper in "Soccernomics," "are merely expressing in extreme form a conventional belief: that hosting a big sports event can make a place rich."

``In truth, write the authors, while World Cups don't produce much monetary gain, they have been shown in several studies to be good for general happiness among the hosting population and a country's self-esteem. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president until September 2008, declared in a speech that the tournament would be "sending ripples of confidence from the Cape to Cairo." It doesn't look bad for a politician looking to get re-elected, either.

"FIFA and the Olympics all enjoy monopoly standings," Baade said. "And that permits them to foist enormous economic cost on those that compete for mega-events like the World Cup. They're in a position to expropriate public funds. The argument is made that we're going to bring in so many non-native spendthrifts that that will offset the expense of stadiums, but there's very little evidence to support that."

``Chances are that like many predecessors South Africa will eventually discover that hosting the World Cup was a poor choice, at least from a financial viewpoint. But by then, FIFA will have moved on to flattering some other country into believing it should pour the money it doesn't have into hosting another glorious edition of the World Cup."

As always, the temporal 'self-esteem' gains are skewed mostly towards grandstanding politicians. And at the end of the day, if revenues expected are not fulfilled, then the carrying costs of the 'country's self-esteem' will eventually be borne by the taxpayers.

In the Philippines, this is called the fiesta mentality.