Small but telling changes are happening on India’s traditional sporting
landscape. Some of the cricketers playing on ubiquitous urban maidans (open
grasslands) these days are wearing Manchester United shirts. Occasionally a
boy will even meander past with a football rather than a bat tucked under
his arm. In a country of cricket junkies, where every piece of scrubland and
every slum corridor is an opportunity for a wicket, it is enough to prompt a
double-take.
As India is transformed by unprecedented economic growth, the leisure habits
of the burgeoning middle classes and the fabulously wealthy elite are
evolving – and football is a beneficiary. At some, as yet intangible level,
the sport is starting to take hold in the world’s last, stubbornly resistant
mega-market. The adjustments are peripheral, but in a country the size of
India, with its 1.1 billion population, they demand attention.
This week the sport’s administrators took a step towards capitalising on that
subtle mood change by professionalising the domestic league. The I-League,
modelled on Japan’s J-League, is heralded as an opportunity to broaden the
playing base and increase India’s chances of qualifying for the World Cup –
a feat it has never come close to achieving on the pitch. A repackaging of
the semi-professional National Football League, it is also billed as a
chance to sell a slicker product to advertisers seeking another marketing
vehicle because they are priced out of cricket.
The I-League’s genesis coincided with a trip to India last April by Sepp
Blatter, the first official visit to the country by a Fifa president. Much
ado surrounded the occasion. Blatter was treated to the full dignitaries’
welcome, with conches blown, red carpets unfurled and tilak applied to his
forehead by women dressed in bright saris. They showered flower petals at
his feet and presented him with a giant garland of 1,400 roses.
He, in turn, granted the All India Football Federation $1 million (about
£500,000) for the next four years and suggested that a further $400,000 was
up for grabs if the national governing body could “wake up a sleeping
giant”. Fifa would like nothing more than for India – forecast by Goldman
Sachs, the investment bank, to grow into the world’s third-largest economy
by 2035 – to become part of its football family. But first things first.
India needs a competitive league, producing players capable of taking the
national team to the Asian Cup, let alone the World Cup, and decent
facilities to create a base to feed the system. Mohammed Bin Hammam, the
president of the Asian Football Confederation, said that India would not
reach world standards “in 100 years” without better grassroots
infrastructure after he looked around some grounds.
The I-League is a start. This season ten teams from five cities will take part
in the first division. In March two teams will be relegated and four teams
promoted. This promotion skew will continue for three seasons until there
are 16 teams in the top division.
The new league also aims to be more representative. Until now the capital city
of Delhi did not have a team. Other new entrants to the second division
include a team from Bangalore, India’s IT hub, and Poona, a rapidly
expanding industrial city close to Bombay. It is hoped that with their
substantial corporate backing – an estimated £400,000 per team – they will
soon rise to the top and attract serious sponsors. The league already has a
broadcast partner. Zee Sports, the satellite channel, paid about $70 million
for the rights to all domestic football under a ten-year deal that runs to
2015.
It is a boon to have the backing of one of India’s biggest media houses, in
whose interest it is for the league to thrive. Until now football has been
little more than an extension of company sport. The two teams in Bombay,
Mahindra United and Air India, are owned by a carmaker and the state-owned
national carrier respectively. While heartening for the employees, they
hardly evoke fiery passions among the city’s 18 million inhabitants. Hence
the hope that grey company monikers will be replaced by place names.
“A ten-year-old boy is more likely to support a team if it is named after his
city than a car manufacturer. We want people to become devoted to a local
club,” Gary Lovejoy, the chief operating officer of Zee Sports and a
lifelong Plymouth Argyle fan, said. In principle, media experts believe that
football is a “sellable proposition” in India because it has a regional
following where it draws bigger crowds than domestic cricket. The Calcutta
derby between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan attracts up to 120,000 fans.
Football has a history in India on which it can build – the Durand Cup is the
world’s oldest football tournament after the FA Cup and the Scottish FA Cup.
Imported by the British at the end of the 19th century, the sport was
embraced by the locals in the states of Goa, West Bengal and Kerala –
vibrant pockets today.
Nationally, where there has been no focal point, Indians have had exposure to
football through the Premier League, which attracts huge audiences. There
seems to be the commercial appetite among Indian companies to back football,
particularly with the escalating price of cricket sponsorship. Satyam
Computer Services, based in the southern city of Hyderabad, this week became
the first Indian sponsor of the World Cup in a deal covering the 2010 and
2014 tournaments.
“This is about packaging Indian football better and that has got advertisers
interested,” Prashant Singh, the business head of Ogilvy Sport, the sports
marketing consultancy, said. “Cricket is too expensive and for tier-two and
three advertisers, football is a great opportunity because people are
already following it.”
It will take time for India to fall for football. Interest will be piqued by
passing trends – the latest is for football-related Bollywood films. But
John Abraham, the Indian heart-throb in Dhan Dhana Dhan . . . Goal, a $4
million production about a struggling Southall club, can do only so much to
promote the game.
The rest is up to the players and their paymasters. Fifa and Zee, at least,
see a huge opportunity for the taking, although most agree that cricket will
never be usurped. “Football will clearly become the No 2 sport in India,”
Singh said. It is not a bad position to be.
The new force?
— Fifa world ranking No 145
— Qualified by default for the 1950 World Cup finals in Brazil but were
unable to participate because they refused to wear boots
— Beat Syria 1-0 in final in August to win the Nehru Cup international
tournament for first time
— Coached by Bob Houghton, a former Fulham midfield player and the first
foreigner to coach China
— Captained by Bhaichung Bhutia, the first Indian to play in England
when he joined Bury in 1999
— Michael Chopra, the Sunderland forward, is the only player of Indian
parentage in the Barclays Premier League
Numbers game
90 I-League matches, half of which will be broadcast
500,000 Rupees for the winners (about £6,000). The runners-up win
280,000 rupees and the winners of each match 35,000 rupees
3-0 Score in the inaugural I-League match, in which Dempo Sports Club
beat Salgoacar
90 Percentage of profits clubs can retain from gate receipts. Zee
retains broadcast revenues
10,000 Average crowd last season in India’s National Football League
(NFL)
200bn All India Football Federation’s annual budget in rupees, of which
70 billion was spent on the NFL
120.4bn Price in rupees that Star Ananda, a 24-hour Bengali-language
news channel, paid to broadcast the Calcutta Football League to 2011 – the
most any regional channel has bid for football in India
