What can $50 million donation do for Singapore football?

“SPL clubs could also have more to invest in local young and senior players, which could convince the public that it is possible to make a good living out of playing football.

“Clubs are also in need of more resources and dedicated staff to look after areas off the pitch such as marketing, sponsorship recruitment, community engagement and social media, so that they can focus on their areas of expertise and help the clubs be more self-sustaining in the long run.”

While there are five Asean teams in the top 100 of the women’s world rankings, Singapore continue to languish at world No. 152 as the ninth out of 11 nations in the region, ahead of only Timor-Leste (157th) and unranked Brunei.

The new season of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) will feature a bigger prize purse and a promotion-relgation system. But it remains an amateur competition without a title sponsor and is being played on sub-par pitches, as the female players struggle to balance football and studies or work.

James Walton, sports business group leader of Deloitte Asia Pacific and South-east Asia, said: “If it’s aligned to the UTR spending, I hope that means some spending will go into women’s football, and not just men’s football, because it is still massively underfunded and it does represent an opportunity for us to play at a major tournament.”

Lion City Sailors goalkeeper Beatrice Tan, 33, hopes that the donation will support more holistic and sustained investment in the women’s football ecosystem.

The sports business manager at Deloitte outlined several priorities for strengthening the ecosystem, calling for greater investment to boost visibility, build robust development pathways and improve supporting infrastructure.

These include installing proper scoreboards at WPL matches, ensuring pitches are well maintained and making proper training facilities accessible to WPL and Women’s National League clubs.

Tan also highlighted the importance of structured youth development at the club level, supported by both funding and expertise.

She said: “Support WPL clubs in establishing their own all-girls football programmes so that they may create a sustainable pipeline for their first team through funding and secondment of expertise.”

Clearer and more accessible pathways are needed for women to pursue careers in coaching through initiatives like structured coach education and certification, as well as mentorship programmes.

Beyond coaching, she emphasised the need to support a wider range of roles for women in football, such as physiotherapists, sports trainers and data analysts.

Efforts must go beyond live broadcasts, with a more comprehensive approach to growing the visibility of the WPL and its players through marketing, storytelling, building player profiles and deepening fan engagement, stressed Tan.

With Singapore’s youth footballers continuing to struggle and failing to qualify for continental age-group tournaments, Walton hopes to see significant investment in youth and grassroots development so that there will be strong senior national teams in the future.

Noting that the donation is much larger than the FAS’ 2025 budget of $36.8 million – of which $28.9 million was from Sport Singapore – he said: “We need to accept the fact that realistically, with the current crop of players that we have, we are not going to be in a position in the next six or seven years to really do anything in terms of World Cup qualifications or even competing at the SEA Games level.

“So, money really has to go into building for the future. It has to go into turning the crop of young kids who are playing the game right now and giving them the best chance possible to succeed.

“It can be through infrastructure, coaching and opportunities to play. We need to focus and look at what is that next generation that’s coming through and find that golden generation and bring them through as best as we can.”

Agreeing with Walton, former Lion R. Sasikumar hopes that the money will be “intelligently deployed” to build a “complete player development ecosystem”.

He said: “We need to create a competitive match environment for our younger players and along with that comes the integration of performance data and sports science. There also needs to be a clear pathway from youth football to professional football.

“My worry is that if the funds are spread too thinly across multiple areas without a clear strategy, the impact will then be diluted. But if it’s concentrated into building a few high performance environments that really produce elite level players consistently, I think that’s where you can start to see some real transformation.”

While money is important to fund programmes and hire experts, it is no guarantee of results.

For instance, the Indonesian Football Association’s budget for 2025 was 650 billion rupiah (S$49.5 million), of which the government’s share was 220 billion rupiah and the bulk came from the private sector. This enabled them to build a national team with foreign-born heritage players and they made it through to the fourth round of World Cup qualifiers.

However, with a more modest 270 billion dong (S$13.2 million), the Vietnam Football Federation has a men’s team who are Asean champions and 99th in Fifa’s rankings, six positions behind the region’s top side Thailand. Their women’s team are top in South-east Asia at 37th.

Meanwhile, despite receiving $4 million across two years, developmental side Young Lions still finished last out of nine teams in the S.League in 2016 and 2017.

Sasikumar said: “Money alone doesn’t change football systems. It’s how you deploy it that really makes an impact. And I see this whole investment thing as an opportunity, not a solution to where Singapore is at the moment.

“What this kind of investment really does is reframe football as something that can actually create value, commercially, culturally and even internationally.

“Momentum attracts momentum, but it has to be backed by results. I believe that if this is structured properly and starts producing visible outcomes, better players, stronger leagues and more engagement, then it naturally becomes more attractive for other private investors to come in, creating a virtuous cycle and stronger Singapore football ecosystem.”