PFF lays groundwork for national football league

MANILA, Philippines –The Philippine Football Federation has set the wheels in motion for the setting up of the Philippines Football League by issuing the PFF Club Licensing Regulations to prospective clubs and owners.

PFF president Nonong Araneta and general secretary Ed Gastanes said the Club Licensing Regulations contain the criteria by which a club will be licensed and be eligible for participation in the planned national professional league.

 “This is the first time in Philippine football history that Club Licensing Regulations have been crafted through the help of the Fifa and the AFC and approved by the PFF board of governors,” Gastanes said after conducting a briefing with officials and representatives of UFL clubs and other potential team owners at Marco Polo Ortigas.

The PFF targets a March 2017 kickoff for the truly national, fully professional league. It envisions a minimum of six clubs from different regions playing a home-and-away double-round robin format.

The cities of Manila, Makati, Quezon City, Marikina, Sta. Maria or Bocaue, Pampanga, and Laguna in Luzon; Bacolod, Cebu and Iloilo in Visayas; and Davao Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga in Mindanao have been identified as potential club homebase, as revealed by the PFF’s nationwide market research.

Araneta said more briefings and road shows in Cebu and Davao are in the pipeline.

“We’ll take all the inputs from the clubs so that the league will be sustainable,” Araneta said.

Randy Roxas of the Football Alliance, the mother organization of the NCR-based United Football League, welcomed the impending launch of the PFL.

“On behalf of Football Alliance, we’re very supportive of the effort of the federation to launch the National League. I think community football is the future in terms of where we want to go as far as professional football is concerned and the National League is a big step towards that direction,” he said.

He added that the UFL clubs will still “digest the info shared by the PFF” but expressed belief that “the likelihood of participating in this endeavor is pretty high.”