The University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP) has undeniably become a premier spectacle, drawing massive crowds and national attention. On December 15, 2024, a historic record of 25,248 fans packed the Smart Araneta Coliseum for Game Three of the Men’s Basketball Finals between the DLSU Green Archers and the UP Fighting Maroons—a turnout that rivals national leagues.
This growing stature, however, also forces the UAAP to contend with a packed sports calendar, where international tournaments and professional leagues compete for the same audiences and venues. Thus, behind the sold-out seats and primetime slots lie a complex scheme that struggles to meet student accessibility. Ticket prices have quietly risen with every season passing, live streams now sit behind paywalls, and games are scheduled late into weeknights to appease TV ratings.
As the UAAP Season 88 tips off, The LaSallian explores: In an era where sports become increasingly more marketable, has the UAAP—and by extension, other local leagues—become too commercialized for the community?
Paying the price
The UAAP has become a financial juggernaut. However, this success comes with a cost, burdening the very students the league represents. Sports like football, which used to draw more modest crowds, increased ticket prices in Season 87 from P100 to P150 despite being on the same field. While the P50-peso bump may seem meager, it is an added hurdle for students on a budget, especially when stacked with other expenses, such as transportation and meals for multiple games.
When big games draw even bigger demand, scalpers are quick to exploit the system. Online resale prices surge far beyond the original cost, creating yet another layer of inaccessibility to what was meant to be a student-first experience. In some cases, the willingness to pay is stretched to extremes. In a previous account by The LaSallian exploring UAAP ticket scalping, a student purchased Upper Box tickets for the Season 85 Men’s Basketball Finals for P8,000 despite originally being priced at just P250. Situations like these not only showcase that demand is king, but also price fans out of the experience, emphasizing how unchecked market forces end up gatekeeping school spirit from all.
Beyond the gates of the arena, however, a different kind of cost awaits—one that hides behind screens and subscription buttons.
Feeding off the viewership
Utilizing its free-to-air network, ABS-CBN’s Sports+Action became the primary streaming platform for the UAAP in the early 2010s. It allowed the league to connect with a bigger community through national television. Hence, it’s no surprise that the end of its contract with the association left a void in the sports community. This allowed companies to capitalize on the opportunity, with the UAAP finding its new broadcast home, Cignal TV. However, this also meant that streaming sports festivities pivoted to a new trajectory. The once-established community of UAAP loyalists became a mere facade for some corporate giants to turn passion into profit. Paywall-gated platforms and subscription-based viewership emerged to latch onto the media scene.
While Cignal TV does offer free streaming for selected events, the company only features mainstream sports and key match-ups, limiting casual viewers from following the entire league. Premium platforms that showcase notable matches, comprehensive coverage, and archived content were introduced to stitch the missing link between unfeatured seasons and live telecasts. While these do offer unprecedented accessibility to the multi-featured outlets, they unevenly impact lower-income households and students. For instance, prominent rivalries like the DLSU-UP basketball games are only accessible through subscription accounts, stressing the exclusive approach of this sports broadcasting.
The UAAP’s shift to paywalled platforms also reflects how it positions itself alongside other leagues in the Philippines. As broadcasters juggle contracts for both international and domestic competitions, the UAAP’s premium content model mirrors the strategies of professional leagues. This suggests that coexistence is not just logistical for the UAAP, but also ideological.
From virtual experiences to physical manifestations outside of screens and media interfaces, gaming venues and scheduling become another curveball to the community’s roster of challenges.
No place like home
Beyond cost and profit, demand also manifests in temporal and spatial lines. Aside from rising prices, time has emerged as a liability to the UAAP audience, with schedules and venues gradually becoming inaccessible to the league’s fundamental audience.
In the first phase of UAAP Season 87, basketball games have been moved further into primetime schedules, a big shift from the games’ familiarity with the afternoon time slots. While this decision increases visibility for collegiate sports, a looming nuisance is placed on the students. As game days conclude at ungodly hours, fans and athletes alike are burdened with going home late into the night, compromising safety and rest before a new day arrives. Granted, the league quickly heeded the public’s eventual calls to bump up the tip-off times earlier to avoid late finishes, reducing the number of daily games from six to five for a 30-minute improvement.
Commercialization pressures, however, extend far beyond just tip-off hours. The UAAP must also contend with an increasingly crowded sports calendar, where international bodies like the Federation Internationale de Volleyball and domestic leagues fight for the same venues. As hosts of Season 88, the University of Santo Tomas (UST) addressed these challenges by immediately announcing venue changes and their reasons, a move that maintained transparency and minimized backlash. UST leaned on maximizing the use of their own campus facilities and those of other UAAP schools, emphasizing how collegiate leagues make do to innovate amid national-level competition.
The causal effect of this coexistence cannot be ignored: as the UAAP adjusts to sharing space with professional and international tournaments, it also reinforces the push toward centralizing and commercializing its operations. The need to secure venues and visibility drives the league closer to a profit-driven model, raising the question of whether the collegiate experience is becoming more like a national league product than a student-first tradition. In an attempt to meet growing demands and keep true to its identity as a collegiate league, the “Home of the UAAP,” a Pasig-based facility set to become the central venue for UAAP events, was unveiled. Still, its true impact remains uncertain until its expected completion ahead of National University’s Season 90 hosting. For now, the collegiate league has to make ends meet with its current resources and developments.
The trifecta of concerns—rising ticket prices, inaccessible paywalls, and inconvenient scheduling and venues—is symptomatic of a broader systemic shift toward prioritizing revenue over accessibility. But these pressures are not merely internal. By sharing the same stage with professional and international tournaments, the UAAP is inevitably drawn into the orbit of commercialization. Its challenge now lies in proving that growth and coexistence with other leagues can reinforce, rather than erode, its student-centered identity.
This article was published in The LaSallian‘s Marcos Presidency Midterm Special. To read more, visit bit.ly/TLSMarcosMidtermSpecial.
