It’s not a trivial question. Nearly one billion human beings are said to be watching the World Cup 2010 games, and the Filipinos are not. They're very strangely not participants in what an American columnist termed as the “human family at play”. If football, as a historian pointed out, is “the new religion”, then Filipinos are weirdly the fringe group atheists. And it’s a game Filipinos can dream of excelling in some day, unlike the tall man’s game, basketball, in which Filipinos are genetically handicapped so that we’ll never stand out.

Answering the question is even more interesting given the fact that there was a time when football competed with basketball in popularity before World War II. Indeed, the Philippines' sole “national stadium” was not a basketball stadium, but was officially named the Rizal Memorial Track and Football Stadium when it was inaugurated in 1934, in the old Manila area.

Many decades later, high school Ateneans of my generation routinely played both football and basketball, and many of the basketball stars of the late 1960s started off in football.

There are several reasons why Filipinos lost interest in the global game, some of which reveal the country's problems as a nation.

First, at least in explaining why we don’t care about football, there is indeed something to the communists’ big monster: US colonialism.

It was basketball (and baseball) but not football which was our colonisers’ favourite game; and the little brown brothers certainly followed their coloniser’s culture. Bird, Jabbar, Jordan, Kobe - any Filipino you meet at the mall would know them. Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldo - who they? (What do we do now after the US joined the global game, which is becoming more and more popular every year?)

The Philippines is indeed one of the most US-centered culture in the world. The ancient civilisations of Europe and their modern structures are alien to Filipinos. Welfare state? Social democracy? Labour parties? These are as unfamiliar to us as the football stars, even for many educated Filipinos. The parliamentary system - essentially one in which the people’s representatives, and not the people directly, choose the nation’s leader - is really strange and suspicious to us, even as it has developed over many centuries in Europe to be indubitably the ideal democracy as it prevents ochlocracy, or rule by the angry mob. But our mind-set is still what’s best for the USA (the masses directly voting for their leader, even in an era when media can easily manipulate people’s sentiments) is still the best for us.

The popularity of basketball is a case study of how capitalism moulds a cultural phenomenon and, in the Philippines, its unbridled power.

First, it was US-style, profit-driven television that boosted basketball and practically killed football in the country starting in the 1960s. The 48-minute game was divided into four quarters, with a 15-minute, half-time break and 12 one-minute time outs. It was almost designed for TV advertising—for inserting soap, beer and soft drink song-and-dance commercials. Football took so long, and running at least 90 minutes, with only one half-time break, and no time-out, TV advertising in that game was difficult. (FIFA, the world soccer federation, learned to commercially use television for the World Cup only in the 1990s.) Philippine capitalism strived for every second of basketball fans’ attention to be on their product and so they organised professional basketball and named the teams after the corporate entity and their flagship products: Crispa, Toyota, San Miguel, Ginebra, Purefoods, Sta. Lucia Realtors, Talk ’N Text. (In the US, teams were organised by cities, creating some sense of community. But Beermen?)