Thu, 28 Oct, 2021
Tubod: The Philippine Football Federation has lofty goals to develop their game by giving strong focus to grassroots football.
The Philippine Football Federation (PFF) has organised a grassroots festival attended by 243 boys and girls in the capital city of Lanao del Norte province.
The festival was part of the second Grassroots Development Officer Workshop held last weekend by the PFF and all the workshop participants, who were Grassroots Development Officers, were instrumental in the organisation of the festival.
The festival was conducted under beautiful weather that nicely complemented the football enjoyment atmosphere and received good support from the local government, volunteer coaches and medic staff.
The pitch was divided into stations of activities workshop and matches in line with FIFA’s festival format. In each station, at least one Grassroots Development Officer was based who ran the sessions.
Technical Director of PFF Jose Ariston P. Caslib said: “The main aim of the workshop was to provide evaluation of the first workshop and to present a plan for 2014. Aside from that, the workshop also provided our grassroots experts with trends of grassroots football in Asia and all over the world by inviting representatives from AFC and FIFA.
“A total of 243 children came to our festival and our grassroots experts took good care of them. I am very happy to see their capability to run the festival because the grassroots experts are responsible to conduct festivals in their provinces.
“In 2014, we would like to expand our programmes and activities. And we would like to sustain activities in the provincial football associations not only by our development officers but also others involved in grassroots football.
“We have already done grassroots courses and festivals. Then we are trying to do U-12 and U-10 tournaments and we are planning to end 2014 up with an U-12 international grassroots festival. We would like to invite three or four countries to the festival.
“We will try to do our best and show our effort for the development of grassroots football. It would be great if we could get continuous support from FIFA and AFC for our activities.”
The PFF along with other AFC Member Associations are encouragingly taking their own grassroots initiatives spurred by the AFC's Grassroots Year which was observed in 2013.
The AFC's focus on grassroots last year encouraged its Member Associations to organise their own activities to promote and emphasise that football is accessible and socially beneficial to everyone and that it provides a strong foundation that will allow children to someday progress to the elite level if they choose to do so.
Photo: PFF