The official national sport of the Philippines is arnis, the Filipino stick-and-blade martial art also called eskrima or kali, which Republic Act 9850 declared the national martial art and sport in 2009, signed into law by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The sport most Filipinos actually play and watch, however, is basketball: brought in by American teachers around 1910, it now supports the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), founded in 1975 and the oldest professional league in Asia. Boxing, led by eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao, is the third pillar of the country's sporting identity, while the older native kicking game sipa is still sometimes listed as a national sport in unofficial lists.
Republic Act 9850: How Arnis Became the National Sport in 2009
The Philippines has only a handful of official national symbols. The flag, the coat of arms and the national motto are set out in the Flag and Heraldic Code (Republic Act 8491), and on top of those official proclamations between 1934 and 1996 named the sampaguita as national flower, the narra as national tree, the Philippine eagle as national bird and the South Sea pearl as national gem. In 2009 arnis joined that short list when Republic Act 9850 named it the national martial art and sport. Two more have joined it since: Filipino Sign Language, recognised by Republic Act 11106 in 2018, and the waling-waling, now the national orchid. Popular emblems such as the carabao and the mango have never been made official at all.
The choice was cultural: arnis is not the most played game, but its roots are traced to the weapon arts the Spanish found on arrival. The law also settled an old classroom question. Older textbooks and quiz books often gave sipa, a game in which players keep a rattan ball in the air using only their feet and legs, as the national sport. Sipa is genuinely ancient, older than the Spanish arrival and related to the sepak takraw played across Southeast Asia, but it was never enacted as a national symbol; arnis was.
One of the sport's best-known modern advocates is Juan Miguel Zubiri, who began training at sixteen, won an arnis world championship title in 1989 and later served as a senator. In 2017 he became the founding chairman of the Philippine Eskrima Kali Arnis Federation, the body recognised by the Philippine Olympic Committee as the national sports association for arnis.
Kalis, Rattan and Moro-moro Plays: Where Arnis Came From
Because arnis was mostly practised by commoners rather than a literate warrior class, its early history is largely oral. What is documented is that the Spanish met weapon-based fighting arts across the islands, and that these went by local names long before "arnis" existed: kalis or pananandata among Tagalogs, kaliradman among Cebuanos, pagaradman among Ilonggos and sinawali, meaning "to weave", among Kapampangans. Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, recorded the word calis for blades during the voyage through the Visayas in 1521, the year Magellan was killed at the Battle of Mactan by the forces of Lapulapu.
The modern names are Spanish in origin. Arnis comes from Old Spanish arnés, "armour", and is said to come from the costume armour worn in Moro-moro plays, stage dramas in which actors fought mock battles with wooden swords. Eskrima comes from esgrima, the Spanish word for fencing. Kali, the name many overseas schools prefer, is a 20th-century coinage, first used for the Filipino arts in 1948.
Spanish rule shaped the art in a second way. Colonial authorities barred civilians from carrying full-sized swords such as the kris and the kampilan, so practitioners trained with rattan sticks and kept techniques alive inside dances and theatre. That is one reason the stick-based styles of Luzon and the Visayas became so elaborate, while southern Mindanao, never fully conquered by Spain or the United States, kept an almost entirely blade-based tradition.
Baston, Sinawali and Espada y Daga: How Arnis Is Fought
The basic weapon is the baston or yantok, a rattan stick roughly 24 to 28 inches (about 60 to 70 cm) long. Rattan is cheap, light and tough, and it shreds rather than splinters, which makes it safer for partner training than hardwoods such as kamagong, which are rarely used for sparring.
Arnis is unusual among martial arts in that students usually start with weapons and move to empty hands later. Training with two sticks at once, called doble baston, builds ambidexterity, and the best-known two-stick drills are sinawali, "weaving", rhythmic two-weapon striking patterns. In espada y daga, "sword and dagger", one hand holds a long weapon and the other a short one, a method that shows the influence of Spanish fencing, although the stances are different because Filipino weapons are shorter than European swords.
Footwork, stances, blocks and disarms are often taught around the triangle, a shape so central that many training halls put it in their logos. Partner drills such as hubud-lubud, "to tie and untie", run continuous trapping sequences. Some schools also borrowed from Japanese arts: Cacoy Cañete of Doce Pares, the Cebu society founded in 1932, blended judo and aikido into eskrima, and Remy Presas's Modern Arnis took in elements of judo, karate and small-circle jujutsu.
From Palarong Pambansa to the SEA Games: Arnis as a Scored Sport
Turning a combat art into a school sport took decades. Remy Presas first taught his Modern Arnis to public and private school teachers in 1969, but there was no formal programme in the 1970s and 1980s, and a 1995 national development plan backed by Senator Orlando Mercado faded out. The lasting push came from the Department of Education's Task Force on School Sports, which held a national training of trainers in Baguio City in March 2006. Within two months arnis appeared at the Palarong Pambansa, the national school games, as a demonstration sport in Naga City, with nine of seventeen regions taking part. By the 2007 games in Coronadal it was a full medal event with all seventeen regions, and in 2009, the year of the law, secondary-school girls were added in Tacloban, doubling the events from nine to eighteen.
Competition comes in two main forms: full-contact bouts in padded vests and headgear, and anyo, choreographed forms judged on technique. Two rule systems dominate. The system of Arnis Philippines (ARPI), formed in 1986, was the one used when the Philippines hosted the 2005 Southeast Asian Games, where six gold medals were contested at Emilio Aguinaldo College in Manila. The World Eskrima Kali Arnis Federation (WEKAF), formed in 1989, runs the system most used abroad. Arnis was back on the SEA Games programme in 2019, again on home soil, at the AUF Sports and Cultural Center in Angeles City from 1 to 3 December, with Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines competing, and Phnom Penh staged 12 arnis events at the 2023 Games.
Basketball Since 1910: The Game the Islands Adopted
Basketball arrived with the American colonial school system. It was introduced to Philippine public schools in 1910, at first as a women's sport, and men's teams soon took over: the national side won the first Far Eastern Championship Games in 1913 and took gold at all but one of the ten editions. The NCAA collegiate league, with basketball as its main sport, followed in 1924, and the Philippines joined FIBA in 1936, the same year its team finished fifth at the Berlin Olympics, still the best Olympic result by an Asian basketball team.
The peak years came after independence in 1946. The Philippines won the first Asian Games basketball gold in 1951 and dominated the event until 1962, and at the 1954 World Championship in Rio de Janeiro it took bronze, still the best finish by an Asian country at a World Cup. Carlos "Caloy" Loyzaga was the tournament's third-highest scorer and was named to the all-tournament team.
Professional basketball began on 9 April 1975, when the PBA played its first game at the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City. Nine teams had broken away from the amateur MICAA, frustrated that the national federation kept taking their players for the national team. The PBA is the first professional league in Asia and the second-oldest in the world after the NBA, and its rules blend FIBA and NBA practice. The San Miguel Beermen are its most successful club, with 31 titles including the 1989 Grand Slam.
The country has hosted the World Cup twice. In 1978 Manila staged the first FIBA World Championship held in Asia, and in 2023 the Philippines co-hosted with Japan and Indonesia. During that tournament, 38,115 spectators watched the Dominican Republic play the Philippines at the Philippine Arena in Bocaue, Bulacan, a World Cup attendance record that broke the mark of 32,616 set at the 1994 final in Toronto. Volleyball, introduced through the YMCA by Elwood S. Brown in 1910, is the other American import that took hold; Filipino players are credited with the "set and spike", which Americans nicknamed the "Filipino bomb".
Pacquiao, Diaz and Yulo: Boxing and the Olympic Breakthroughs
If basketball is the everyday game, boxing has produced the country's most celebrated champions. Francisco Guilledo, who fought as Pancho Villa (1901–1925), became the first Asian world flyweight champion in 1923. Gabriel "Flash" Elorde (1935–1985) won the lineal super featherweight title in 1960 and the inaugural WBC and WBA belts in 1963, holding the division's longest title reign of seven years.
Manny Pacquiao, born in 1978 in Kibawe, Bukidnon, on Mindanao and raised in General Santos, went further than either. He is the only eight-division world champion in boxing history, won twelve major world titles, and is the only boxer to hold world championships in four decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s. In 2019, at 40, he became the oldest welterweight world champion when he beat Keith Thurman. He also served as a senator from 2016 to 2022, played and coached in the PBA, and entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2025.
Olympic gold took longer. The Philippines first competed in 1924, and its first gold came on 26 July 2021, when weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz won the women's 55 kg event at the Tokyo 2020 Games with an Olympic-record total of 224 kg. Three years later, gymnast Carlos Yulo won the floor exercise and vault at Paris 2024, becoming the first Filipino with two Olympic gold medals.
Arnis, then, holds the legal title, while basketball, boxing and a widening list of Olympic sports hold the crowds. For the people behind those medals, see our guide to famous people from the Philippines; for how the game spread to other basketball-mad countries, read the geography of the world's basketball nations; and for another country whose official symbol differs from its everyday favourite, compare the national animal of Sri Lanka.