300 of India’s top footballers today are jobless as India doesn’t have a national football league anymore. It might sound ludicrous given the game’s greatest star Lionel Messi, received a raging (pun intended) welcome in India with hundreds of thousands of fans thronging stadiums and the rich and the famous paying over a million for a selfie with the legend. There doesn’t seem to be any dearth of fans or money for the game. Yet, the country ranks an embarrassing 142nd in the world having failed to qualify for the continental championships this year. If you don’t even have a national league, that outcome seems par for the course. Here’s Anirudh Menon ranting on the dismal state of the sport in the country:
“More than 50,000 people were willing to pay anything from ₹4300 ($47) per ticket (and up to ₹50,000/$550 unofficially) for a mere glimpse of Lionel Messi walking around the Salt Lake stadium on the first leg of an event called the ‘GOAT India Tour’. That’s all: walk around, wave a bit, and potentially say a few words in Spanish. Stadiums have been sold out for this in three other cities – Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi – this weekend. In the latter two cities, 200 people have already booked slots (100 each) for a photo and a handshake with Messi for ₹11.74 lakh (~$13000) a person
Even if you take only the two official meet-and-greet sessions, that’s about ₹23.4 crore (~$2.6 million) that people were willing to spend on the chance to appear in a photo with arguably the greatest footballer of all time. For context, a month back, a Request For Proposal (RFP) floated by the All India Football Federation for the running of the ISL [The Indian Super League] — which stipulated an annual payment of ₹37.5 crore (~$4.1 million) to the Federation — went unanswered.
…. The Week magazine estimates that the Messi event rang in anywhere between ₹120-180 crores ($13.2 million – $19.8 million) in sponsorships. For a three-day event that involves no sporting action at all. Being in the same vicinity as Brand Messi made it worth it for corporate sponsors across India, but the country’s domestic scene doesn’t seem to have any takers. It’s estimated that a club in the ISL spends ~₹60 crores ($6.6 million) a season, and posts losses of ~₹25 crores ($2.75 million). Even with the highest minimum-price ticket for an ISL match pegged at ₹300 ($3.3), and generally hovering around ₹100 ($1.1), attendances are dwindling. There’s a reason no one is interested in running the league in its current form, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
Instead, we had amounts that could have bankrolled two or three first division clubs spent on a three-day circus of PR and Paparazzi flash that is still somehow, absurdly, seen as some form of sporting event. It boggles the mind how that was done in the first place, for not only is there no real football connection to this ‘GOAT India Tour’, there’s also absolutely no benefit to the sport.”
He ends with this lament: “Messi will come, Messi will wave, Messi will smile. The politicians and the celebrities and the uber-rich will get their selfies. The fans may or may not get a glimpse of the man they so greatly adore. The world’s media will focus their attention on India and its behaviour in the face of sporting royalty and wonder at the extremes of it all. And then, once Messi departs, everyone else too will move on.
Everyone except Indian football, which will be left with these age-old questions for which there are no answers.
When will the ISL start? Will the ISL start? What about the I-League? I-League 2? Indian Women’s League? How are the footballers of this country doing? What are they doing?
Who cares – at least we have a 70-foot Messi statue that caused a riot when the great man was here.”
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