Indian Football

[Socceroo_06]

With the proposition of an I-league team joining the ACL next season i thought i would post the website about all things indian football, just in case you might be interested.

http://www.indianfootball.com/

[Sean Oh Yeah]

we love to football you
roflav

roflandvomitting

[Patch80]

I actually put some the following post in another thread, but I'll dump it here too as it relevant...

imon Hill wrote an article in a june magazine which talks about Indian football. In it he says Indian club Mohan Bagan are said to be the oldest club in Asia and when they play their derby vs East Bengal they get crowds of 80,000..

Apparently Kolkata and Goa are football hotbeds.. if the Indian market is ever tapped and the locals get on board then they are likely to build some of the biggest and most popular clubs in the world.

Apparently the bloke who has been instrumental in the IPL (cricket) approached the Indian football authority some years ago with his ideas and they rejected them now the same guy is key figure in the BCCI and the IPL is obviously going bonkers.. I dont think the Indian football admin will make the mistake and they will definitely be encouraged by what they see in the IPL...

[Socceroo_06]

we love to football you
roflav

roflandvomitting

i laughed at that too.

[Socceroo_06]

Rejoice if you wish about Ricky Ponting and his Australian cricket team winning the 2007 ICC World Cup. I won’t be among you. Cricket is a sport that has lost its way over the past decade, mugged by match-fixing, money whores and Steve Waugh’s pioneering work in the field of mental disintegration. The characters have gone from the game, the play is predictable, bowlers are no match for bat technology and, foremost of all, there aren’t enough competitive national teams.

http://blogs.news.com.au/images/uploads/indian2.jpg

Who to blame? The ICC must carry the can. When it was apparent the ranks of the great West Indies cricketers we all loved throughout the 1970s and 1980s were inexorably thinning out with no new blood coming in, the hard work should have gone into rebuilding the sport up from the grassroots, professionalising the bureaucracy, pumping millions of dollars into broadening the appeal of the game.

Instead, that necessary graft was ignored, the great athletes who could have been the next Joel Garners and Andy Robertses turned to basketball or football, and now the sport as a whole is suffering for that expediency. I’m certain the West Indies cricket team will eventually become notable for its historic novelty only, much like the Hungarian national football team – a one-time great reduced to a laughing stock.

Cricket is not dead yet, but the disaster that was the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean is a last-chance wake-up call for the ICC. Not only does it have to start aggressively resuscitating the game in all its lesser regions through massive financial and developmental programs, but to soberly re-evaluate what it is doing to help the sport in the traditional homes of cricket, especially on the subcontinent.

Why?

Because football, aided by the rise of an affluent, educated and internationally mobile middle class in India, is beginning to do what was previously thought impossible: starting to steer the attention of the world’s second-most populous nation away from cricket.

Indian sports writer Mukul Kesavan, writing in Calcutta’s Telegraph in February, used his 15-year-old son, a student at the famous Delhi cricket school Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, as an example of the subtle cultural changes currently taking place.

“Most of my son’s classmates find greater pleasure in watching Thierry Henry, a Frenchman who captains a London club, Arsenal, than in watching Rahul Dravid turn out for India,” he wrote. “The boys in his class who aren’t fixated on Arsenal are obsessed with Manchester United and someone called Rooney who looks worryingly like an eighties-model skinhead. I could be wrong, my sample could be too small, but I think we’re seeing a shift in the sporting culture of metropolitan Indian schoolboys of a particular class. They’re seceding from international cricket and offering their enthusiasm and loyalty to English league football.

“Ask any parent with a boy in middle school and he’ll tell you the same thing: cricket’s reasonably popular, but it isn’t cool. No, watching Arsenal play Chelsea with your friends is cool. Watching Arsenal play Chelsea wearing the red, obscenely priced Arsenal jersey, is cooler. To fold yourself into Arsenal’s global fan base with a casual ‘we’ is coolest of all, because that’s the very acme of cosmopolitan belonging.”

Cricket’s cool, he goes on to say, has been mercilessly chipped away by the overwhelming superiority of the Australian cricket team, the last decade leaving “other cricketing nations looking like pygmies squabbling for second place”.

Young Indian kids, like any young kids anywhere, want to follow winners. It’s why Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea remain the best-followed club teams in Asia despite the concerted efforts of other Premier League clubs to establish a foothold in the region.

Those same kids have been fortunate to grow up in an era when India produced some of the finest cricketers of this or any other generation – Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid – which in turn fuelled a massive boom in the sport on the subcontinent.

But now, suddenly, with satellite TV, the internet and mobile phones streaming European football action into Indian homes 24 hours a day, Tendulkar and Dravid aren’t as cool any more.

It would be premature and stupid to claim football is about to supplant cricket as India’s national obsession – that time, if we ever see it, is a long way off. But once an Indian footballer makes the grade in Europe, prepare to be surprised how dramatically cricket will fall from its perch.

Professionalism, systematic rerouting of youth development and coaching pathways, the flow of local players to Europe, the emergence of India as a first-world, technological superpower, even a first if unlikely World Cup – all could easily tilt the battle for Indian hearts and minds firmly in favour of football. FIFA knows this, and recognises the unlimited bounty on offer, even though the present conditions of the game on the subcontinent are decidedly third-world.

Mohamed bin Hammam, president of the Asian Football Confederation, recently visited the country with FIFA president Sepp Blatter, and on seeing the parlous state of the game’s infrastructure, didn’t mince his words.

“India should not even dream of being in the World Cup for another hundred years,” he said.

But he also claimed that with the right infrastructure behind them, there was no reason to think an Indian team wouldn’t be able to cut it against a top European side at some point in the distant future. And why not? There was a time not too long ago that the idea of India competing against Australia in cricket was regarded as a bad joke.

With China emerging slowly but steadily as a football nation, India – which qualified for the World Cup in 1950 but didn’t play because its players didn’t want to wear boots (!) – remains the last Eldorado for world football. The immediate prospects may be discouraging but at least, unlike the ICC when faced with the decline of the West Indies in the 1980s, FIFA is not standing still and saying it’s all too hard. It’s investing millions into the Indian code in a program called “Win in India with India” and looking to overhaul the game’s administration from the top down. A new ten-team competition along the lines of the A-League, the Professional League, is due to start later this year, replacing the moribund National League.

So the steps are small, but the potential payoff is huge. The ICC would do well to look over its shoulder. Cricket, once unassailable in India, is being put on notice.

http://blogs.foxsports.com.au/football/index.php/foxsports/comments/the_birth_of_football_cool_in_india/

[gweeds]

Apparently Kolkata and Goa are football hotbeds.. if the Indian market is ever tapped and the locals get on board then they are likely to build some of the biggest and most popular clubs in the world.



I knew Goa was into football as it was a part of India which was a Portuguese Colony, rather than British. But Calcutta (or as you rightly point out Kolkata) surprises me.

From Wikipedia:

Football is perhaps the most popular sport in Goa and is embedded in Goan culture.

Its origins in the state are traced back to 1883 when the visiting British priest Fr. William Robert Lyons established the sport as part of a "Christian education".

On December 22, 1959 the Associação de Futebol de Goa was formed, which continues to administer the game in the state under the new name, Goa Football Association. Goa, along with West Bengal,and Kerala is the locus of football in the country and is home to many football club in India's National Football League, including three of the ten Premier Division teams.

The state's football powerhouses include Salgaocar, Dempo, Churchill Brothers, Vasco Sports Club and Sporting Clube de Goa.

The state's main football stadium, Fatroda (or Nehru stadium), is located at Margao and also hosts cricket matches.

[Sean Oh Yeah]

Fink is gonna go bonkers with this one.

[LS 11]

The state's football powerhouses include Salgaocar, Dempo, Churchill Brothers, Vasco Sports Club and Sporting Clube de Goa.

We will fight them on the beaches...

[wc-remix]

Lol @ We Love To Football You

[NULL]

This section of the forum is on its last legs IMO.

[El Zilcho]

if the Indian market is ever tapped and the locals get on board then they are likely to build some of the biggest and most popular clubs in the world.

Heard it all before with China. And going back further, the USA. Its not going to happen.

[watt]

Heard it all before with China. And going back further, the USA. Its not going to happen.

Ireckon it will happen with China and India at the same time.

Thanks for the link 06 I've been wondering about Indian football for a while

[El Zilcho]

Ireckon it will happen with China and India at the same time.

If it does ever happen, i really dont think it will be any time soon... it would have to be through generational change, im talking decades.

Thanks for the link 06 I've been wondering about Indian football for a while

Your next FM challenge? :lol:

[sirtrev]

Heard it all before with China. And going back further, the USA. Its not going to happen.

China it will happen. It is the no.1 sport and they are following the same relatively successful path that Japan and Korea have gone down.

USA will never happen as the mass media will not support it. All US cities have their own tv and newspapers and they would rather report on the local high school 'Football' team rather than an 'international' sport.

India will get popularity with football with the 80-100 million middle and upper classes eventually. With the rest of the world raising their game too though, they won't have a decent league or qualify for the world cup though. It will be like Thailand at the Asia Cup where the locals would rather watch the premier league on tv than their country of 'losers.'

The 1 billion masses of India will not join the middle classes in our lifetime. These people have no electricity let alone internet/cable and crowd around radios to listen to the indian cricket team. It is old school with kids playing cricket on the streets imagining they are stars having never seen moving pictures of their heroes.

[watt]

If it does ever happen, i really dont think it will be any time soon... it would have to be through generational change, im talking decades.



Your next FM challenge? :lol:

Lol I thought about it, still enjoying Union Berlin though :)

[HHHHH]

There only hope in Football is if the large contingent of first generation Indians living in the UK decide to represent India.
Players such as Michael Chopra and a few more playing in the lower divisions.

[stevok]

roflav

[criscione]

roflav

can you stop saying rofl and lol and lmao and post something that is normal and not fucking repetetive?


ffs steve.

[oz mackem]

There only hope in Football is if the large contingent of first generation Indians living in the UK decide to represent India.
Players such as Michael Chopra and a few more playing in the lower divisions.

Who's Michael Chopra?

[shoot goal]

China it will happen. It is the no.1 sport and they are following the same relatively successful path that Japan and Korea have gone down.


In China it is happening

USA will never happen as the mass media will not support it. All US cities have their own tv and newspapers and they would rather report on the local high school 'Football' team rather than an 'international' sport.

correct, given that there is also media ownership of a number of teams

India will get popularity with football with the 80-100 million middle and upper classes eventually. With the rest of the world raising their game too though, they won't have a decent league or qualify for the world cup though. It will be like Thailand at the Asia Cup where the locals would rather watch the premier league on tv than their country of 'losers.'

Australia was much like that with relatively poor following of the NSL, and many fans laughing off Australia as a hopeless cause in International games

The 1 billion masses of India will not join the middle classes in our lifetime. These people have no electricity let alone internet/cable and crowd around radios to listen to the indian cricket team. It is old school with kids playing cricket on the streets imagining they are stars having never seen moving pictures of their heroes.

200 million people with money will see a flourishing league and competition! 200 million is the equivalent of 20 Australias or over 3 Italys...

[The Frederick]

India just hosted a Bayern Munich vs Mohun Bagan, 100000 turned up. :thumbup:

[matt]

200 million people with money will see a flourishing league and competition! 200 million is the equivalent of 20 Australias or over 3 Italys...

Lol you aren't a mathematician are you?

[juanpabloangel]

he's not... but his point is generally ok. I have to say though, I have never seen a skilfull Indian footballer. I only saw the ones who pay for their Utd or Liverpool shirt, even though if they went to the stadium they were more likely to get their head kicked in than a kick around.

[Setza]

Ive seen quite a few at EPL games actually, theres plenty of football supporters there but as for players not sure

I guess if they want to and put money into the game surely they have the ability to become a decent footballing nation.. again thats if they want to

India just hosted a Bayern Munich vs Mohun Bagan, 100000 turned up. :thumbup:

mmm theres definately potential, if games like this can sell-out

[markattack]

thanks for the article!
I always wondered why a country with almost a billion people can't find eleven guys who can play football...

[hannef]

Have a look at the crowd http://youtube.com/watch?v=uSCLi934Glc&feature=relatedjust after 25 seconds in when the ifrst goal is scored.

Should convince anyone about potential of Indian football.