Payatas Football Club

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 Grassroots football project
Summary to date
Following the success of the Philippine team in the Street Child World Cup and the Philippine National
team, the Azkals, in the Suzuki Cup, football in the Philippines has been taking off.
The rise in football has enabled Triple E to partner in starting a football team at Payatas dumpsite.
Payatas is a dumpsite in Manila where tens of
thousands of people live, scavenging from the
rubbish to find things to sell, recycle and even eat.
Despite such poverty, the people are incredibly
creative, intelligent and hard-working and at the
first session there were over 100 children playing
football on a small basketball court, which proved
quite a challenge!
Football offers a great opportunity to help others;
nutrition and fitness, for example, are promoted
throughout. Because of poor diet, the Philippines
has the highest rate of diabetes in the world and The Philippine National team - The Azkals
ranks highly for heart problems too! Football offers us a chance to educate the kids about these issues,
while providing a sense of community and a source of pride.
The advantages of football are well known, the game provides a level playing field, where merit, hard-
work and skill, not accident of birth, are the determinants of a person’s success. Through tying football
development to community development we have the beginnings of some great opportunities as team
work, discipline, building self-esteem and newly found knowledge are all translated into the real world.
These developments in the profile of Philippine football are feeding into the exciting developments of Tri-
ple E. Already receiving great feedback from some of the members of the Philippine Football Federation
(the Filipino version of the UK’s FA) and support from a number of high profile people within sporting and
political communities, grassroots football is more and more being attached to community development.

Working in partnership with each of us pulling together

we can achieve things we could have only imagined
before. From nothing we’ve started a football team in
one of the poorest areas of Manila and are ready to
play friendly matches and join tournaments this year.
With the establishment of the drop-in centres for
street kids football will become an integral part of our
vision ; a vision where we see the world changed one
life, or perhaps one team, at a time.
For tens of thousands of people at Payatas this is
home—together we can become part of something
good
 Benefits
The grassroots project is already becoming
an important part of many poor communi-
ties in Manila and indeed the centre of some
children’s lives. Football is more than just a
game to them and the project has the po-
tential to grow from strength to strength.
The benefits can be simply summarised as
this:

 Basic Skills
The chance to learn to play football is highly
motivating to many children. It can be used
as a vehicle to encourage and develop basic
skills. Many children (having grown up play-
ing basketball, the number one sport in the
Philippines) are still learning to play success-
fully and need lots of chances to practice
and learn the discipline that comes through
teamwork and sharing a vision. Waiting,
good listening and following an adult’s direc-
tion rather than their own agenda are really important skills to master. They are skills that as some of the
poorest children in the region they were often never given the chance to learn and so are now getting
that opportunity, which is a challenge to anyone! A lack of these skills is often the reason why a lot of
street children will get into fights on the streets. If they are lucky enough to be in school, a lack of these
skills is often the reason they will find it difficult to integrate and to learn, often being suspended or ex-
cluded. Getting a hang of these skills opens the door to future opportunities, such as getting an education
and ultimately a job to support themselves and their
families.

 Coordination
Many children who are brought up on the streets or in
areas of extreme deprivation will have good physical co-
ordination as this is needed in order to survive. Applying
what they needed on the streets to something more pro-
ductive we can show that even when looked down on by
others, and when others gave up on them, these Filipinos
can achieve great things. With football, they will learn
more about passing, teamwork, fitness and being able to
use their skills for a more constructive and positive goal
as part of a team.
 Friendship
Many poor children have difficulty
trusting others and getting along
with people they do not know
well. As many have experienced
abuse from an early age this is un-
derstandable, but often makes it
hard to build a community. Within
the structured setting of football
training, where the children are
getting constant support and en-
couragement, they learn to form
bonds of friendship and trust
through being part of a team and
sharing experiences and insights
with one another.

 Being part of a team

Football teaches kids how to take both individual and collective responsibility for what happens. Players
learn that working as a team will mean making chances for other players rather than trying to score on
their own all the time. It is good practice for the street children to have a little experience of thinking stra-
tegically, thinking for the future, which will then be directed to them thinking about their future outside
of sport.
Playing football teaches children to play by
the rules and accept decisions they may
disagree with. Children with no personal
boundaries often find it hard to ‘put them-
selves in someone else’s shoes’ or to have
a sense of justice, and they need plenty of
safe chances to practice acceptable ways
to manage disappointment.
With football we can create safe and struc-
tured opportunities to train and play but
also to learn social and internal bounda-
ries. Football provides that initial step to
encourage, enable and empower the kids;
from training to win the beautiful game to
training to create their own beautiful life.
 Can you help?

 Trainers/football boots: Many of the kids are too poor to

have a pair of shoes. If they do, as you will have seen in some
of the photos, they usually share these with siblings as it is
their only pair for the family. This means that when they play
football they tend to play in bare feet or slippers so we are
always looking for trainers and football boots for the kids to
use. The condition doesn’t matter so much as Filipinos are
very creative and can fix almost anything.
 Sponsor a coach: We are currently dependent on a volunteer coach and to make sure the pro-
gramme stays running we will at some point need to employ a coach to ensure the continuation of
the project. To sponsor a coach will cost roughly £150 per month, which will cover their living ex-
penses, travelling costs to and from training as well as friendly games and tournaments.
 Sponsor a team: We are in need of football kits too, so to sponsor the making of the uniforms in the
Philippines (as our sister charity’s cooperative can make such things much cheaper than in the UK),
or to sponsor maintenance and general training costs, such as the nutritional aspect of the training,
would also be a huge help. As it is sponsorship, your company or organisation would be advertised
in the same way as professional teams advertise sponsors on kits and training grounds.
 Sponsor a player's education: Many of the children are very poor and have to work as their families
cannot afford to send them to school. To sponsor a child’s education would cost approximately £30
per month. The child would then be able to learn to play football and maintain strong links with us,
particularly with our social worker, whilst getting an education to gain the skills and qualifications to
lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Our Guarantee
We guarantee to make sure that anything you donate will go to the designated project or person and not
into administration costs. We will also keep you updated with how the
project is progressing through regular reports, pictures and where else
the project has made the news.

Thank you!

Contact us:

Email: togetherwithtriplee@gmail.com
Website: www.triplee.org.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1325 310804
Address: St Francis Vicarage, Burnhope,
Newton Aycliffe, Durham,
DL5 7ER