When I read about the Philippines qualifying for the FIFA Women’s World Cup earlier this year I was, of course, excited. I love football, I love the Philippines (the place where I was born and where my mother was from), and I’ve been waiting a long, long time for us to qualify for this tournament. And how great that it is the women who have done it first. This team is the first-ever team of any gender and age from the Philippines to qualify for a FIFA World Cup.

I knew it would be a bit of an effort to watch the matches given the time difference between the UK and New Zealand or Australia…and I was gearing myself up for it all.

But I’m not going to lie: I didn’t know much about the team and its journey over the past few years.

Fast-forward to last week and the games began. I started to look up the details of the team. I looked at Wikipedia page after Wikipedia page because there was so little information on the official World Cup website by FIFA about the team…considered a ‘rank outsider’ that was probably not worth giving any details about. My desk research gave me the quick realisation that most of the Philippines team (known as Filipinas) were born in the USA (18 of the 23 World Cup players in fact). Others were born and grew up in other parts of the world, and many are multi-racial. When I switched the TV on to watch our first match, I could see that some of them were even white presenting like me! This was a unique experience for me. It is very rare to see people like me being represented and I really was not expecting a football match to be the place where I felt that way.

So, the back story is that in the early 2010s, the team management began to scout for players of Filipino heritage in the United States- a place where the rise of women’s football (or soccer as it’s known there) has been huge, and indeed the USA team itself remains favourite to win this year’s World Cup. Identification camps for team Philippines have been set up in California but turnout comes from all parts of the US, and clearly, the strategy is working. You might imagine had you heard this story about the England players being scouted elsewhere perhaps a bit of a ruckus would kick off about whether the process was fair. But the reality is that whilst football is increasingly popular in the Philippines, it is still far behind the obvious sports of basketball and boxing, or perhaps even women’s volleyball. As a football lover, it seems ridiculous to me that football isn’t as popular as it is in some of the Latin American countries which in some ways, we are culturally closer to than other Southeast Asian countries. But we do have a complex colonial past that included not just Spain as a ruler (ruled from Mexico) but also America (that’s a blog for another day!) and I am sure that has had an impact on how sport has developed there.

What are the reasons why I love what this team represents? I have a few…

You could say that many of these players are not good enough to play for the USA so playing for the Philippines is the next best route to elite competition. That may be somewhat true, but this recent article in The Guardian gave me a bit more information about some of the challenges of ensuring qualification through citizenship. It tells the story of an increasing number of players who would spend time sitting at the local immigration office in Manila ‘ploughing’ through the necessary paperwork to obtain their passports. I suspect the individuals involved have put it very diplomatically for this article. Because I remember having to do the same despite being born in the Philippines in 1977 myself, back in 2004 when I was taking care of my mother having never needed a passport before. This time I needed one to stay there for an extended period to care for her. It was bureaucratic, difficult and at times I remember being made to feel I didn’t deserve it despite all my ‘qualifications’ and despite the very painful situation of having to care for someone with a terminal illness. In the Western world, the political narrative that dominates is around ‘tightening borders’ and making it difficult for people to emigrate. It’s very easy to assume that a country like the Philippines will give away passports to anyone freely. That is not the case. The players’ commitment to getting their citizenship shows how serious they are. And football has, in my opinion, allowed them to claim or reclaim their heritage perhaps in a way they did not expect it to.

I’ve also been following the team’s social posts and after their 1-0 win against co-hosts New Zealand, there was an 11-minute Facebook Live video of the team and its entourage seemingly hanging out in a hotel lobby. I watched with a beaming face as I saw this wonderful mix of people that represents the complexity of what it means to be a Filipinx today- many different colours, different representations of family, BFFs, BFs, respect for authority in the form of ‘Sir’ and ‘Attorney’. I love how this has been embraced. Choosing to play for the Philippines has given many players an opportunity to connect with their culture and heritage in new ways. According to the same article, they found welcoming groups of Filipinos everywhere including Chile where they brought them ‘treats like mangoes and turon, a deep-fried sweet treat’. Food is indeed a major cultural connector and I hope there are other things the players will be learning and experiencing including the language, for example.

The fact that players ‘do not hide from the fact that most of the team was born in the United States’ is also something I love. Why should they? Being a supporter in sport is tribal in its nature and football supporters are probably the most tribal of all. I remember in my early thirties getting swept up in the tribalism of travelling on the supporters’ bus for my beloved QPR. I felt a sense of belonging in a way I had not before. And when it comes to the athletes’ or players’ identities I can see how easy it is for us to put labels on them to suit our tribal needs (sometimes in a negative and exclusionary way). But their backgrounds are far more complex than we tend to initially acknowledge– Greg Rusedski is a former ‘British’ tennis player, although he was also Canadian. Emma Radacanu is a ‘British’ tennis player who is of Romanian and Chinese heritage (and was born in Canada), Ricky Hill (former footballer) was actually of Indian and Jamaican heritage, but he was often seen purely as a ‘Black footballer’ even though he was actually the first player of South Asian heritage to play for England. And so, with the team Philippines, you simply can’t hide from the obvious range of backgrounds and experiences because the team is made largely from the global Filipinx diaspora and they are not afraid to say it.

I am someone who has struggled for a long time with my identity as someone who presents as white but feels very much like a Filipinx. But watching this team makes me feel seen. I am hoping that it challenges assumptions about what it is to be a Filipinx but most importantly inspires anyone with Filipinx heritage in any part of the world to play the game and compete at the highest level that they want to.