As Air India restarts its hockey team, a look at Tata's sporting legacy

Some of India's top hockey and football talent has come from the ecosystem the conglomerate as nurtured

“For young boys who came from small towns but had a love for football and wanted to pursue the sport professionally, TFA (Tata Football Academy) was a brutal introduction,” former India captain Renedy Singh says. “It was a reality check; if you could make it there, with your peers, then you could make it anywhere.”

Renedy Singh leads a long list of India internationals who owe their youthful moulding to the Tata Football Academy in Jamshedpur – at one point of time, a one-stop for the best young footballers in the country. While the likes of Renedy Singh, Gouramangi Singh and Subrata Pal went on to captain India, the academy was also responsible for providing many other players a foothold into the professional game. 

Tata’s sports programmes have been pioneers in Indian sport. While Indians started playing football in the late 19th century, it wasn’t till 1937 that a governing body for the game, the All India Football Federation, was established. The same year, the Tata Sports Club was set up in Bombay (now Mumbai). 

This club was diverse, and included teams for football, cricket, hockey and athletics. Yolanda De Sousa, one of India’s greatest women players, credits the Tata Sports Club’s facilities for her interest in the game. “My father [Joveniano de Sousa] was a huge star in the Tata Sports Club team,” she says. “I would obviously watch the way he was adored and loved, and also used the access to learn football myself.” 

Tata shut shop in Bombay to restart as the Tata Football Academy in Jamshedpur (now in Jharkhand) in the 1980s, and chugged along until greater corporate investment, academies with foreign club collaborations and modern sport drove the small enterprise into obscurity. 

Flight beyond football

Not long after the birth of the Tata Sports Club, Tata Airlines launched its first domestic flight from Delhi to Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). In subsequent years, the airline went on to become a public limited company, Air India. A government-owned entity, Air India became a hub for sportspersons — footballers and hockey players in particular — to secure ‘sports quota’ jobs and represent the team at various national championships.

While Air India’s football team died a slow death in the mid-2000s due to stringent Asian club licence regulations, its hockey team thrived and remained at the forefront of producing and employing some of the best players in the country. 

Former Indian hockey international Arjun Halappa remembers a time when a bulk of the national team was employed by Air India. “Dhanraj [Pillay], Ashish [Ballal], Harender [Singh], Dilip Tirkey bhai, we were all part of the Air India team at a time,” he laughs.

Ballal, Pillay, Tirkey and Halappa formed an important core of the national team in the early 2000s. Their main challengers at national championships would be Punjab Police, which boasted a similar contingent.

And then, in 2020, for reasons unexplained, the team wound up, employment under sports quota stopped and a legacy was anchored.

Now, after a gap of three years, effort is on to give wing to it again. This February, Air India restarted its hockey team. And this team is currently playing in the Hockey India Senior Men Inter-Department National Championship.

Sports for a job

Globally, professional sport — for sponsorship reasons called Big Sport — is a lucrative, money-making beast. However, in India, for those working in the middle rung — not quite there to play for the nation, but good enough to ply their trade professionally — jobs via sport remain the only way to make sport itself viable.

A footballer who plays for a club in the I-League, while declining to be named, says that without his government job he would have quit the game long ago. 

“There’s no minimum wage in the sport,” he says. “I’m from a middle-class family, and need to be financially secure. Government jobs offer that.” But then these jobs themselves have dried up, he says. His own department has not hired a single sportsperson under the quota since him — eight years ago. 

Everything within a government job isn’t rosy though. With the sarkari tag comes the sarkari red tape. Take the case of a well-known player for the Kerala state team. A cult figure within his state, he has been highly sought after by many clubs, but cannot join them because his employers will not give him leave for the entirety of a season. The logic is that since he was employed under sports quota to represent them, he must be available for inter-department tournaments.

Rajpal Singh, a former India international, currently in Punjab Police says that some states do it better than others and, therefore, skew the dynamic itself. “For an outsider, it would seem that Punjab has a lot of sports quota jobs,” he says. “But it’s only true for some sports and some sportspersons. Haryana does more. Kerala does even more. We often look outwards and think about this.”

Those in the Northeast are a prime example. Renedy says that there are almost no government jobs for sportspersons in the Northeast. Manipur is among the few that have recently woken up and started giving eminent players positions in their police. 

With fewer such jobs, and openings usually leading to intense competition, corporate employment is a way out.

Air India’s recent resurgence in hockey will provide employment to many youngsters. Tata Football Academy’s youth system now feeds into the group’s corporate Indian Super League franchise, Jamshedpur FC. Punjab Police’s conveyor belt rolls into the Indian Men’s hockey team. For those in the middle rung though, smaller openings are all that remain.