Kolkata football, once the city’s religion, is now a pale shadow of its former self. Mohammad Safi Shamsi traces the decline of the game
Time was when Kolkata's streets would empty out whenever there was a match featuring the big three clubs of the city — Mohun Bagan, East Bengal or Mohammedan Sporting — as Bengal’s notoriously work-shy population parked themselves in front of their radio sets to listen to the commentary on Calcutta A station. Fans journeyed from far and near to catch a glimpse of their idols — Chuni Goswami, PK Banerjee, Sailen Manna, Atanu Bhattacharya and Krishanu Dey — practice on their home grounds. Before a big match, long queues of people who had travelled in from nearby towns and camped in front of the ticket counters through the night were a regular affair. Through ups and downs, football was what kept the city going.
The people of Kolkata are still passionate about the sport. When Bayern Munich descended on the Salt Lake Stadium in May 2008 to play Mohun Bagan, a crowd of 125,000 turned up to watch the match. Though the home team lost 0-3, the spectators were a happy lot because they had cheered non-stop for Oliver Kahn, Bayern Munich’s iconic goalkeeper. During the last World Cup, played in South Africa, passions were on the boil once again and every para (locality) painted itself in the colours of its favourite team — Brazil, Argentina, Germany et al.
Thus, the love for football has not diminished, but there is disdain for the fare dished out by the city's footballers. And this has been brought about by television. Till the early 1980s, the only diet of football the people of Kolkata got was what was played in its maidans (fields). With television, they got to see the power game of the Europeans, the deft moves of the South Americans and the agility and swiftness of the Africans. It was in a different league altogether from what they had seen. After the live telecast of the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain, disillusionment with local football set in swiftly. The city clubs had shortchanged the fans, the gripe was popular.
Most Kolkatans, young and old, will easily reel off the records of Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba and Christano Ronaldo but would be hard put to name some local superstars and their exploits on the field. There was a time that all the legends of Indian football — PK Banerjee, Chuni Goswami and Shyam Thapa, to name a few — came from Kolkata. Not any longer. Bhaichung Bhutia is from Sikkim, though he has played in Kolkata, Sunil Chhetri is from Delhi and IM Vijayan was from Kerala. The last sporting icon from the city was Sourav Ganguly, the cricketer. Most Kolkata teams now depend on foreign players to lift the game. The trend started in the 1980s when rejects from Africa found takers in Kolkata. The catchment area has since expanded to South America and West Asia. Some are paid up to a crore a year — that’s five times what a local footballer can hope to earn. Current rules bar a local team from playing more than three foreigners.
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“There is definitely a decline in the standard, which started in the early 1980s, and there was a bit of stagnation... In the last few years, there has been a recovery; you can’t have football without Bengal,” says Utpal Kumar Ganguli, honorary secretary of the West Bengal chapter of the Indian Football Association. Emotion, clearly, runs high, and legacies are hard to let go of. “We have not lost; we have gone astray. The reason for football’s downfall is the loss of emotion. Cricket has brought in so much competition. Our boys don’t get much,” says PK Banerjee who was tagged by FIFA as the Indian footballer of the 20th century. Football's loss to cricket was presaged by another incident — Chuni Goswami, Bengal’s best footballer, gave up the game completely in the latter half of the 1960s even as he increased his engagement with cricket. He played for West Bengal in the Ranji Trophy and even captained the team in two finals. The cricket wave after India won the World Cup in 1983 was the final straw.
There are too many symptoms of the decay. No Kolkata club has won the Indian Football League since 2003 when East Bengal came out on top. In the last 11 years, West Bengal, helped largely by Kolkata lads, has won the Santosh Trophy, which decides the national champion, only once in 2010 when it beat Punjab 2-1. The state had won the tournament 29 times between 1941, when it started, and 1998-99, the year of its last win. To be fair, the Federation Cup has stayed with either Mohun Bagan or East Bengal in the last five years. But the Federation Cup does not fall in the same category as the Indian Football League or the Santosh Trophy.
Apart from the Salt Lake Stadium, there is no other large ground for football. Eden Gardens was closed for football many years ago and now hosts only cricket matches. The home grounds of Mohun Bagan and East Bengal cannot accommodate more than 25,000 spectators.
The rivalry between Mohun Bagan (founded in 1889), East Bengal (1920) and Mohammedan Sporting (1891) was legendary. The Kolkata community was split between the three clubs: the original inhabitants of the city supported Mohun Bagan, those from elsewhere in the state rooted for East Bengal and the Muslims went with Mohammedan Sporting. Now, it so happens that Mohun Bagan and East Bengal are owned by the same person: Vijay Mallya. True, they sport different colours and logos (Kingfisher for East Bengal and McDowell’s for Mohun Bagan), but the sting is gone from their fabled rivalry. Mallya, of course, has renamed East Bengal as Kingfisher East Bengal Football Club. Mercifully, Mohun Bagan has been changed only to Mohun Bagan Athletic Club.
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Few contest that the centre of gravity has moved from Kolkata to Goa in the last few years. “It’s all about money. If you want to win the Indian Football League, you need to have strong money power. In the last two or three years, our average budget was Rs 5-6 crore, whereas the Goa teams were spending around Rs 10 crore. Foreign players can play for higher amounts in Goa,” says Kalyan Majumder, honorary general secretary, East Bengal.
Goswami has another explanation for the decline of Kolkata football — the decline in the city’s commercial preeminence. During the British times, Kolkata was the hub of economic activity in the country. Every large company worth its balance sheet was headquartered here — engineering giants, textile mills, jute mills, sugar factories, trading outfits et al. “Kolkata football was enriched by the activities of the British regiments stationed here,” says he. “The present crop of boys has not reached the required level.”
Most people in Kolkata know that the city’s football is on oxygen and something needs to be done urgently. The sparse coffers of the state, resulting from 34 years of uninterrupted Communist rule, means Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Finance Minister Amit Mitra will have no funds for it. But some corporations have stepped forward to help. “We are in discussions with the Indian Football Association in West Bengal to support its efforts in developing football in Kolkata as well as in the districts. For this, we want to make the Rabindra Sarobar football stadium in Kolkata worldclass,” says JSW Bengal Steel Managing Director and CEO Biswadip Gupta.
Clubs, too, are doing their bit. East Bengal is attempting to get modern facilities for players. Mohan Bagan is nurturing under-17 and under-19 players at its academy in Durgapur. “Students from schools are interested. From 3,000 applications and 700 trials, we have shortlisted 70 boys from 10 schools,” says Mohun Bagan Finance Secretary Debashis Dutta. Some are hopeful that with the change of guard at Writers’ Building, life could brighten for Kolkata football. “I want to ask Mamata Banerjee to make one good academy in Rajarhat. We are proud of our football in Bengal; she is a lover of football I am told and she can really do it,” says Goswami.
