Liga Familia
A family-owned corporation offering varied products and services through separate enterprises always has a holding company that makes the final decisions. Personnel and staff can always be pulled out and swapped from branches to maintain and improve sales. This could prove beneficial to both employee and employer.
Having all the resources to do so, results will always be on the positive side for these family-run businesses. Investors with no blood relations are rarely entertained or not at all in order to maintain controlling interest.
The same can be said of the current state of things with the PBA, who had prided itself as Asia’s first pro basketball league.
Two major companies monopolize the 12-team league fielding several teams. Not your ordinary team just for the sake of participation, mind you, but with the intent of ruling each conference year in and year out, with or without Covid. A food and beverage company is head and shoulders above the rest of the league with 27 championships. Two of its subsidiaries also have 27 titles combined.
Three other teams are subsidiaries of a company dealing in communications, power and construction. These teams are perennial final four contenders and had so far won 7 championships.
Only one independent team had escaped the league corporate choke hold and managed to win 14 titles of their own. Another team had two trophies to show. The rest of the field are battling for scraps because of the disparity of talents.
The league board is mostly populated with tunnel visioned members, with a largely titular commissioner dependent on the desires of the bosses. Expansion would have been ideal to gain back the interest of the fans, but this will be outweighed by biases to their teams, with the rest becoming a “farmers’ market” whose top players will be subjected to ridiculously loop-sided trades, as what had been the norm recently.
The defunct regional-based MBA could had been ideal as teams had rabid supporters from the provinces. Some unforgettable team and player rivalries were made. Its popularity rattled the nerves of the PBA in the early stages but sadly, because of player transfers and lack of sponsors, it folded.
A revival of sorts is thru Sen. Manny Pacquiao’s MPBL and so far, so good. More regional corporate backers will be needed to sustain the league as PacMan can’t be forever forking out from his own pockets. Even the NBA, with its billion-dollar owners now have corporate sponsors. Maybe with more promotions, the MPBL will be shown on prime time.
Likewise, here’s hoping that the VisMin Super Cup with global sports brand Puma as major sponsor, will prosper in the VisMin area. Puma’s confidence in the new league will surely attract more marketing support.
PBA, tayo ang bida! Of course, because it’s sagip kapamilya, liga familia.
- Latest
