Soccer mania is building up in India with the arrival of European clubs.
At 5.30 in the evening and in spite of a heavy monsoonal downpour, a group of two dozen boys, undeterred by the pelting rain, is kicking a football around St Andrews ground in Mumbai’s Bandra. As part of the city’s Premier Indian Football Academy coaching camp, these young boys, all aged between 13 and 18 years, are hoping to not just emulate icons like Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Lionel Messi but harbour hopes of playing in the high testosterone and glamourous European leagues.
Ten years ago, Manchester United and Liverpool Football Club, Arsenal and Bayern Munich were teams Indian teenagers glimpsed occasionally on television, the stuff of fantasy, desirable but unreachable, but these and other European clubs are now queuing up to woo India. Chelsea and Cruziero and Barcelona are no longer distant planets. With interest in football in India growing, football audiences increasing, and with the potential of big money in soccer, India could be the preferred destination for these clubs as they spread their tentacles to this cricket-crazy nation.
Bayern Munich set the ball rolling in 2008 when it played Mohun Bagan in Kolkata with over 1,00,000 fans in attendance — a match that will be remembered for German legend Oliver Kahn’s final competitive appearance. Manchester United initiated its Soccer Schools programme in 2008 in a big way by tying up with Nike to hold an annual Manchester United Premier Cup where selected kids get a chance to interact and train with past and present United legends, indicating the serious intent with which it views its India plans. Liverpool Football Club is in the process of building an academy in Pune which should be up and running by the end of this year. Chelsea and Barcelona have announced their presence by reaching out to schools and through conducting scouting camps.
Clearly, the clubs are in it for financial gain, but the larger issue is how it’s likely to impact Indian football. According to Ian Ayre, commercial director, Liverpool Football Club, the coming of the European leagues to India is like a two-way announcement. “If all we wanted was to make our presence felt, we could just open a few touch points and sell merchandise and we would be there,” he said. It’s developing football and helping budding footballers in the country that the club is more interested in. With that in mind, it’s got into a four-way tie-up with Kick Worldwide, a UK-based football company, along with Bharti Vidyapeeth University, to start the Abhijeet Kadam Football Development Centre. “The potential in India is there for everyone to see,” Ayre said — which is why so many players are in a huddle for their share of the pie. The scale might be nothing when compared with cricket, but at Rs 400 crore (according to sports marketers’ estimates) and likely to grow by at least 50 per cent if the promised investment from these clubs comes through, it’s still sizeable.
Nirvan Shah, who runs the Premier Indian Football Academy in Mumbai, says it’s too early to measure the impact of these clubs on Indian football yet. “Just providing technical know-how is not going to be enough,” he said, “as we don’t have the infrastructure to support such ideas.” Shah knows what’s involved in trying to maintain and run an academy. The costs are high, of course, but that shouldn’t be a problem for the clubs. But if the clubs do set up academies as they have proposed, Shah said, it could do a lot of good for their leagues. “In ten years time, they could actually have someone from India playing for them.” That moment, whenever it comes, might be the litmus test that could result in the popularity of football exploding through the roof.
Anirban Das Blah, CEO of Globosport, which is working closely with the likes of Chelsea and Barcelona to gain a foothold in India, dismisses the notion that the clubs are in it for immediate profits. “What they need to do is forget about their investments for at least three years,” he said. Reluctant to share what the two clubs will do, at least initially, in India, he adds that a new initiative could be expected from them every six months, for a while. If Chelsea is opting for a cautious approach, at least for Arunava Chaudhary, editor of Indianfootball.com, that might prove to be the right policy. “They know what it will mean if an Indian makes it at their club,” he said, “it will be a gold mine.”
Bayern Munich, meanwhile, is lending its support to an academy in Burdwan, West Bengal, where it hopes to prepare the football ground, spot talent, train coaches and lay the blueprint for the academy’s programmes. Its support is technical and infrastructural rather than financial —the costs are to be borne by the Sports Authority of India.
Chelsea CEO Peter Kenyon believes the potential in India to be huge. “One of the first things we asked ourselves was whether there is any room for football,” says Kenyon referring to the cricket-mad spectators in the country. But he’s willing to wait for it to pan out in the long term, during which time he wants to associate with the sport from the grassroots up. At the moment, therefore, it’s a work in progress with the club mulling over various ideas on how to move forward in the country.
But the grassroots level is where Arsenal has made its foray in the country. A tie-up with Tata Tea has resulted in a programme called Arsenal Soccer Stars, to identify and nurture latent talent, especially among school children. The programme, targeted at children in the 10-15 years age group, offers participants access to top-class training, including the customised Arsenal development programme called The Arsenal Way. Manchester United too, along with Nike, has been organising coaching camps, and hundreds of kids have had the chance to travel to Manchester to see how junior football is nurtured there. Shah of Premier Indian Football Academy has tie-ups in place with clubs like AC Milan, Manchester United and Cruziero of Brazil, and his pupils travel to their academies for better exposure. “The clubs get a chance to look at talent from India, and we have received excellent feedback on some of our players,” Shah said.
Bharti Airtel too got into the act a few years ago when it announced an initiative with the All India Football Federation, pledging Rs 100 crore over 10 years for the development of football in the country, but it seems to have run into rough weather. A company spokesperson said that it was now focusing on its Satya Bharti school programme through the Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Bharti group, as a result of which “we have decided to put the football academy project on hold for now”. But it has sealed a deal with Manchester United (“worth multi-million dollars”) to provide content to its 94 million subscribers in India, Sri Lanka and the Seychelles.
League money is huge. The clubs are worth billions of pounds, For instance, Manchester United recorded a turnover of £245 million and Arsenal posted similar numbers, but there’s very little of that coming India’s way yet. Barcelona’s support comes by way of setting up two schools in Andhra Pradesh for underprivileged kids for which it has invested ¤2 million. But it’s a non-commercial transaction spread across various initiatives such as scouting camps or talent hunts (which involves lakhs of rupees, as opposed to the crores of rupees that setting up an academy is likely to cost). Yet, if the European clubs start to follow up on their promises with money, investment in football could draw substantial finances over the next few years. As a club spokesperson said in an email interaction with Business Standard, the immediate opportunity in India is in improving the environment for football whether through providing exposure to school children on how academies are run in Barcelona, or by way of technical support in improving the standard of the game in the country.
The biggest catch, of course, is the state of Indian football — as of now it languishes at 144 in world rankings.
National coach Bob Houghton doesn’t believe the foray of European clubs is anything other than an exercise in increasing the catchment area for making money for themselves. “Do you actually believe that they are interested in developing football in the country?” he asked emphatically, dismissing any notions of a growing fan following. “It’s a money-making exercise and if the administrators believe that it will do the sport good, they are in for a rude shock.”
Not so Blah of Globosport, who believes that football can reap huge dividends with what the European clubs are willing to invest in India, so long as improvements in infrastructure go hand-in-hand. “It is up to us to leverage the best deals for the sport or else it will help the clubs more than us,” he explained. At the end, it’s up to the All India Football Federation to seize these initiatives. Should it make them work for its benefit, it’s unlikely the clubs will get by with filling just their coffers, and India will gain immensely in the bargain.
