Kanika Datta: Are we on the ball?

SWOT

He came, he saw, he exhorted ... but will he transform Indian football? To be fair, FIFA President Joseph Sepp Blatter couldn't be faulted for trying.

On Sunday, he visited Kolkata to watch a local derby (East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan) which he politely described as "interesting". Thereafter, he announced a four-year plan to popularise the game and committed another $400,000 to Indian football.

On Monday, he delivered an impassioned, if somewhat rambling, address to industry chiefs on why they should invest in the football business.

Yet, it was hard to miss the fact that, despite all the ardour, FIFA's involvement in Indian football (world ranking 165, 10 points behind Bangladesh), was hedged by many disclaimers. Both Blatter and the Asian Football Federation's Qatari chief, Mohammed Bin Hammam, were clear that the road to glory was a long and hard one.

"It is only if you help yourself that heaven will help you," Blatter said in Kolkata. Perhaps the fact that the current national football administration has been in situ for nearly two decades had not escaped him.

Bin Hammam was more forthright. He did not see India making it to the World Cup, FIFA's four-year piece de resistance, "for the next 100 years" with the current infrastructure. He did, however, hint that several foreign investors had evinced an interest in Indian football. Why, he said, the 71-year-old Blatter had privately said he would love to invest in an Indian football club had he been younger.

The good thing about Blatter's visit is that it focused media attention on a sport other than cricket, and one that can have a far deeper impact on ordinary lives than the monopsonistic business of cricket.

But despite the enthusiasm and corporate money that is being committed anew to the sport, the Indian football industry is roughly at the stage of evolution that Indian industry had been in 1991. It consists of a cosy cabal of amateur clubs that play in appalling conditions and are subjected to limited domestic competition.

As with conventional industry in the early nineties, Indian football sorely needs inflows of capital, significantly better infrastructure, open competition and a entrepreneurial cadre to bankroll it and make it a truly world-class enterprise that will attract global talent.

Call it coincidence but India's footballing fortunes have almost paralleled changes in economic policy. Thus, the country enjoyed some measure of success till the early seventies (see chart), when Indira Gandhi hitched India's fortunes to the Soviet Union and closed the Indian economy to the world. (The SAF games have been excluded because they included competitors about on a par with India.)

Thereafter, there was a hiatus of nearly 30 years, before a senior team registered some success in a significant Asian club tournament. That was about the time India Inc started reaping the benefits of globalisation and making its mark on the global stage.

It is worth noting that by the 2000s, Indian football clubs had a larger complement of extremely talented African and South American players and a greater degree of corporate interest from the Tatas, Mahindras, the UB group and so on.

Of course, none of this matches the kind of money, talent and commitment needed to convert Indian football into a vibrant industry of even Japanese and Korean standards, let alone European, where most leading clubs are listed on the markets.

Overall, Indian soccer infrastructure is abysmal""from the stadiums to facilities for players (many poorer African nations do better on this score). This has created a vicious circle of poor-quality football and low returns and explains why India has never made it to the World Cup Finals.

Certainly at the current state of play, Indian football will find it difficult to attract the hard cash it needs since gate money or media rights""the two mainstays of football club earnings""are not big enough to provide sustainable revenues for self-financing institutions.

But Blatter was emphatic that to develop, India needs hard-nosed commercial investment, not sponsorship. And Bin Hammam pointed to the urgent need to professionalise the sport, saying he could not see any future in amateur clubs like East Bengal, Mohun Bagan or Mohammedan Sporting.

Yet, the scope is admittedly huge. For one, more than half the Indian population is below 25 years of age, providing a vibrant addressable future market for football. Also, the sums involved are not as huge as businessmen might think. To provide an idea, US tycoon Malcom Glazer bought the world's richest soccer club, Manchester United, for $1.4 billion. Compare this, say, with the $12.9 billion that Tata Steel paid to acquire the world's fifth-largest steel producer Corus.

In short, like Indian industry in the early nineties, Indian football is full of potential. The question is whether it can match industry's feat and find a place for itself on the world stage in short order.