A Spanish missionary priest, prodded by an inner voice from his past, starts an unthinkable project in one of Manila's most impoverished districts. From the young rabble of Tondo, he seeks to build a fighting team for a football tournament.
Football. In an Americanized country whose other major religion is basketball.
Nothing can stop the obstinately crazy Fr. Jose from his mission. He wants to show Tondo residents that people, even the most disadvantaged, can change for the better. He uses football - his sport as a schoolboy - to make his point.
He chose to do his missionary work in this working class district in Manila, because his inspiration, ever since he was a kid in Barcelona, was Paulino Alcantara, a Filipino who defied the odds by going to Spain and becoming the star player of the FC Barcelona. Alcantara was a real-life player in the 1930s.
It was his grandfather Jose Maria who told him stories about the legendary football player when he was still a kid back in Barcelona.
Tondo used to be the site of a smoking mountain of trash. That ugly symbol of urban decay is gone now, levelled by government bulldozers, replaced by substandard and cramped residential buildings for the poor.
But the cruel irony is not lost on its residents, they named their decrepit community "Happyland," which is a linguistic play on “happy land” and "hapilan" -- a Visayan word for "garbage dump."
The Philippines, after producing a stellar world-class football striker in 1937 -- Paulino Alcantara of FC Barcelona -- remain, to this day, a consistent bottom-feeder and a poor outsider to the World Cup games.
To those who pray for better days, "Happyland" carries a message of hope from the past.
For more than two decades, several generation of young men rose from the garbage dump to seek glorious victory.
Despite material deprivation -- none of them could afford to buy a decent pair of football shoes -- they fought hard. The exploits of these young boys are re-told in many football gatherings.
Nobody knows what became of these fearsome opponents -- only their stories remain. They are remembered as the "legendary barefoot players" of
