Alas Pilipinas, the men’s national volleyball team, opened its Asian Games campaign in Aichi, Japan, on Sunday, September 27, with a straight-sets loss to South Korea, 25-16, 27-25, 25-22. Against one of Asia’s established volleyball programs, the scoreline was respectable. What people back home picked up on was what team captain Bryan Bagunas told reporters after the match.

“Wala kasi silang pamasahe, wala kaming allowance from July,” he said. (“They don’t have fare money. We haven’t had an allowance since July.”) Some of his teammates had been borrowing money just to make it to practice in the weeks before the Games.

Seven or Eight in the Gym

The 20th Asian Games, running in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture through October 4, has had its own budget story. To keep costs down, organizers skipped building a traditional athletes’ village and put competitors in hotels, temporary container lodgings, and a cruise ship docked in the bay. The Philippine volleyball team’s money problems began well before anyone boarded the flight to Japan.

According to Bagunas, players borrowed from teammates or from other people to pay for the ride to training and the trip home. Attendance dropped. “Sometimes, we’re only seven or eight in training,” he told Rappler, barely enough bodies to run a full practice. Most of the roster are student-athletes, so Bagunas and other senior players from the Spikers’ Turf, the country’s top men’s volleyball league, have been covering for teammates who still play in the UAAP (University Athletic Association of the Philippines), the collegiate league many national players come from.

The problem followed the team to Japan. Players have sometimes paid for their own meals because the hotel’s serving hours clash with their training schedule.

The allowance itself comes from the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC), the government agency that funds national athletes. Days before the Games, the PSC announced an extra ₱6,000 for every Filipino athlete competing in Nagoya, with more rewards promised if the delegation passed four gold medals. The Philippine National Volleyball Federation (PNVF), which runs the sport locally, responded to Bagunas the same day, admitting its financial support had fallen short and promising to address it.

Philippine volleyball has had a good year on paper. In August, the women’s team won the program’s first-ever SEA V Cup silver in Thailand. On the men’s side, players were still waiting on allowances that had stopped in July.

A Gold Medal the System Couldn’t See

Bagunas is far from the first Filipino athlete to say this in public. The case that cost the country the most came from chess.

Wesley So was the strongest Filipino player of his generation when he traveled to Kazan, Russia, in 2013 for the Universiade, the World University Games for student-athletes. He won the Philippines’ first-ever gold medal at the event, finishing unbeaten with four wins and five draws.

He had gone against the wishes of the National Chess Federation of the Philippines (NCFP), which wanted him at the Asian Indoor Games instead. The Philippine delegation to Kazan had also been organized by Graham Lim, a former basketball federation official whom the Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) had blacklisted. The PSC then denied So a ₱1 million bonus, saying the Universiade wasn’t among the events covered by the incentives law at the time.

So had not been left without support. For years he received ₱40,000 a month from the PSC, more than any Filipino chess player before him, along with help from private patrons. What he objected to was being caught in what he called “a quarrel between the kings of the sports bodies.”

He moved to the United States in 2014 and switched to the US Chess Federation. By 2017 he was No. 2 in the world rankings of FIDE, chess’s international governing body. In 2019 he won the first officially recognized world championship in Fischer Random, a chess variant that shuffles the pieces before each game so players can’t rely on memorized openings, beating Magnus Carlsen 13.5 to 2.5 without losing a game. He played that final for the United States, and became an American citizen in February 2021.

The Years Before the Medal

In 2019, weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz, already an Olympic silver medalist, asked on Instagram whether it would be okay to seek sponsorship from private companies. “Hirap na hirap na ako, I need financial support,” she wrote. The PSC chairman replied that she had one of the highest allowances in the national pool. Two years later she won the country’s first Olympic gold in Tokyo. She later said her misunderstandings with the PSC had been cleared, and private backers, including the MVP Sports Foundation, helped fund her training camp in Malaysia.

In 2022, the Philippine Athletics Track and Field Association (PATAFA) recommended expelling pole vaulter EJ Obiena from the national team and filing a criminal complaint over his coach’s salary. Obiena denied the allegations, and the dispute was settled only after a fifth round of mediation led by the PSC.

In each case, the money did come, most visibly as bonuses once a medal was won. What athletes keep raising in public is the stretch before the medal, when they still have to pay for coaching and travel on their own.

Dreaming of 2038

All of this is happening while the country’s sports leadership talks about something much bigger. The POC wants the Philippines to host the Asian Games in 2038, and Sen. Bong Go has backed the idea as a boost to tourism and the economy. A Daily Tribune editorial this week argued that the country’s sports institutions should first meet the same standard they expect from athletes.

The Philippines came to Nagoya aiming for eight gold medals, and the medal count is still being written. Bagunas didn’t sound bitter about any of it. He said he understood why the younger players struggled, since most are still in school, and described what the team worked out on its own: the senior players pooled their money so everyone could come to practice.