There doesn’t seem to be any end to Indian sports bodies’ run-ins with courts. The country’s most influential federation, BCCI, is engaged in a protracted battle and awaits the Supreme Court’s verdict.
The Delhi High Court declaring the All India Football Federation (AIFF) elections of December 2016 invalid means another federation has fallen foul of the sports code.
The biggest point of contention is the nomination process that violates the code. They seem to have been made on the basis of a pre-determined list prepared by AIFF bosses, and that has been adjudged to have rendered the election process invalid.
A total of 17 members were elected to the executive committee, all unopposed, with Patel winning his third term as president.
On Tuesday evening, hours after the court verdict, an AIFF statement said the election was “fully compliant with all statutory regulations in terms of the Registrar of Societies Act as well as other notifications and orders of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.”
However, the nomination process under Article 25.4 of the AIFF constitution is clearly in conflict with the sports code. “A candidate for the post of President, Vice President, Treasurer or Member of the Executive Committee shall be proposed by at least five Permanent Members,” it says.
The model election guidelines as per the sports code says a member’s nomination can be proposed by one association and seconded by another.
Emails accessed by Hindustan Times show the AIFF gave state units details of the electoral college as well as the name and contact information of the Returning Officer on November 25, 26 days ahead of the election. The AIFF constitution says it should be done at least 30 days in advance (Articles 23.2 and 25.9).
The biggest dispute is the AIFF asking state bodies to file nomination papers for a pre-determined list of 17. On November 26, vice-president Subrata Dutta sent an email to state units, listing the names.
Later that day, he sent another mail. “There is a typographical error in the proposed Executive Committee. The name Mr. Deepak Sharma (North Zone) has been wrongly written as Deepak Singh. Please write Deepak Sharma in the nomination form for executive committee member from North Zone,” he wrote.
Eventually all but one from the list were elected unopposed. Only Assam unit secretary, Ankur Dutta, was left out with the association president, HN Brahma elected.
Goa Football Association (GFA) in a petition to the returning officer contested the election. GFA, for the first time in three decades, failed to get a representative into any post in the Executive Committee.
Two controversial inductions were Delhi Soccer Association (DSA) president Subhash Chopra, who had been heading his state body 19 months past his term without an election, and Rajasthan unit president Manvendra Singh, who had just been elected after the Rajasthan body was de-recognised by the AIFF for nine years. He got the plum post of Vice-President (West Zone).
There are some fears the court verdict could lead to FIFA suspending AIFF for outside interference, as Pakistan remains suspended following a disputed election. But the Pakistan body was split into two factions, with both claiming election victory. And FIFA had given it two years to sort out the mess.
The AIFF will have to sort out the issue quickly to avoid erosion of the goodwill built by India staging the FIFA U-17 World Cup.
Indian football is under a cloud of uncertainty following the Delhi High Court's decision on Tuesday to set aside the December 2016 election of All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Praful Patel. But there are few doubts in the mind of SY Quraishi, the man who was appointed by the court to serve as administrator to the AIFF and conduct fresh elections in five months' time, about getting the job done.
His confidence comes in part from his experience as the former chief election commissioner of India in 2011 and 2012. "We have conducted elections for 90 crore [900 million] Indians. I don't think conducting elections for 90 people [roughly the electorate of the AIFF] will be nearly as challenging," Quraishi told ESPN.
This will not be the first time the 70-year-old is tasked with taking over as administrator of a national sports federation. In August, the same Delhi High Court bench had handed him charge of the Archery Association of India (AAI) and tasked him with carrying out elections for the body. He currently occupies two rooms in the Sports Authority of India office in New Delhi from where he goes about that job. He expects to carry out his work with the AIFF from the same premises and isn't concerned about taking on vested interests. "This is not a major undertaking," he says. "It is a small job. I haven't yet been contacted by anyone from the AIFF but I have no doubt I will find people in the organization that I can depend on."
Quraishi sees his task as a very simple one. "My role is very clearly defined," he says. "The Supreme Court has taken the view that the sports code has to be adopted. And in this specific case, the Delhi High Court has declared that the AIFF election in 2016 has been held void because the norms of the sports code were violated. It has appointed me as a neutral party to ensure that the election is conducted according to the correct norms. I'm to hold elections in the AIFF in five months and then step aside. I don't plan on staying as administrator indefinitely."
When he steps into his office on Friday, Quraishi will go about the job in a similar way as he did with the AAI. "I will have to take a look at the electoral rolls and update them if that has to be done," he says. "Some of the names in the rolls might be challenged by some of the state federations and that matter too will have to be sorted. In my understanding the election was declared void owing to a technicality. I will have to ensure that the electoral rolls are perfect. In the archery federation there were further challenges because two associations were competing for recognition. I will have to see if there are similar issues with the AIFF too."
Quraishi has been given five months as administrator to fix things. While the actual task of conducting an election will not take as much time, Quraishi says he might have to first ensure that the norms of the sports code are first written into the AIFF constitution. The current AIFF constitution, for instance, requires five members to nominate an individual to stand for a post on the executive committee. The sports code only requires one member to nominate the individual for election. This norm was one of the reasons for the 2016 election to be declared void.
"I assume it will take about a month or so to put things in place," he says. "In the archery federation we have to hold two elections. The first body will have to adopt the sports code into the constitution before we can conduct the second election. I have been given four months to complete the process in the archery federation and since I have been given five months as administrator of the AIFF, I assume a similar process will have to be followed."
Qureshi's task isn't just about resolving the administrative logjam. There are concerns about the conduct of domestic competition and the future of athletes. Qureshi allays these fears using the example of Indian archers. "In the last one month both camps and domestic competitions have been held," he says. "In domestic competitions we found out that some of the judges were woefully underpaid so we tried to pay them a fair amount. I made sure to talk to the players and they were happy in that there was no change in their preparations. We have been able to send teams for international tournaments and the athletes have competed and won medals too. So fears of disruption to the sport will likely not happen."
He also is confident that the AIFF's fate will not mirror that of the Pakistan Football Federation (PFA). Last month FIFA, football's world governing body, banned the PFA after a court-appointed administrator took over the functioning of the latter. "I have heard from reports that the international body (FIFA) might ban the Indian federation," Quraishi says. "There were similar concerns in archery too but that were not justified."
Indeed, Quraishi says he hopes in time he would not be called upon to step into a sports federation and conduct elections at all. "It would be sensible if every federation falls in line and adopts and adheres to the sports code," he says. "Unless you hold free and fresh elections, you will find people hanging around for 40 years or more."
If a football commentator had to describe recent scenes in Indian football, he would say Praful Patel has been hit on the counter. From the glory and euphoria of standing alongside world football's most powerful before 66,000 spectators and millions on TV to being removed, three days later, from his position as AIFF president by the Delhi High Court for getting elected via a flawed process.
Patel now has two options. Either make friends with the new AIFF administrator SY Quraishi and go about organising a fresh round of elections, which means starting by rewriting the AIFF constitution, making it compliant with the National Sports Code and adhering to it. Or he can do as the BCCI's top man of the time, N Srinivasan, did when presented with a 2013 Bombay High Court order asking the BCCI to install a proper committee to investigate the IPL corruption scandal. Srinivasan went to the Supreme Court, and look where that took the BCCI and its leading men. #justsaying
Patel remains the AFC vice-president, which is common in football and in many sports under governance scrutiny. My prediction, based on the past dramas around the BCCI and Indian Olympic Association, is that the words that will be bandied about a lot over the next few weeks, mostly off record, will be "autonomy" and "government interference." Or that, as happened in the case of the BCCI, the airing of the bogey that without Patel and a few trusted aides, Indian football will be on the verge of total collapse. Yawn. Such smokescreens.
Like the one floating over the successful staging of the Under-17 World Cup. That has been touted by some as a revolutionary moment for Indian football. India has "become", it was said more than once, a footballing nation. The host team's debut became a "winning billion hearts" story, carefully side-stepping the awkward contrast - how fellow debutants Niger (80% Sahara desert) got into the knockouts and New Caledonia (population 278,000), also in their first World Cup, got a point off Japan.
Patel had once said said that infrastructure was Indian football's biggest handicap; closer to the tournament, he said the infrastructure had "been improved to be at par with the international standards". It has been only a year since I began reporting or writing on Indian football, but it is very obvious that Indian football's biggest handicaps are not related to the hardware, or pertaining to grounds or buildings or training centres. Our biggest problems hinge on our flawed software.
Software, in this context, is what is considered Indian football's priorities - the width, depth and longevity of our competitive footballing calendars across ages, our rather midget-sized (in duration and number of clubs involved) nationwide leagues, the shortage of qualified coaches on the ground and professionals in administration and the mindsets of a good number of the powerful running the sport at different levels.
At one point during the Under-17 World Cup, I was given a copy of a Masters dissertation by a 23-year-old student of Mumbai's Tata Institute of Social Sciences. It was about India's football cultures in an age of the newly-created leagues. The dissertation posed a very important question about the "new developments" taking place in Indian football - that is Indian Super League and the world U-17 World Cup. It asked, "Are these developments indicative of the betterment of the game or the betterment of the market of the game?"
There will be many who know the answer to this one. Indian football's flawed software means the two - the betterment of the game and the market for the game - remain completely disconnected. Hosting big events makes for feel-good, momentary distractions from the mountains that remain to be climbed. These are found everywhere.
The AIFF has received much FIFA-love over the past decade, yet it has chosen to sell off commercial rights to a private company to set up a glamorous, far-better-marketed rival league to its own official league. This season we are being presented with the first signs of the ISL-I League merger. Who knows where the merger will leave clubs. Not the fussy types who may eventually get what they want, but newer, smaller, less cash-rich organisations trying to find their feet and put in place credible junior programmes.
Travel around Indian football and you see, broadly, two extremes: one, privately run grassroots programmes that get no love from their state associations but still push on to send village kids into decent livelihoods and jobs through football. Then there are senior state officials who cannot be bothered to work with clubs to reorganize and strengthen their state leagues so that there are competition pathways for the young footballers coming through. FIFA's own financial and technical assistance programmes set up in 2015 across seven states in India - Maharashtra, Kerala, Mizoram, Goa, Delhi, Assam and Bengal - had to shut down in Goa, Assam and Delhi.
Beyond the leagues is the question: what do we do with our young? Should the national federation be running fundamental developmental academies? Or should it focus on creating a coherent, inclusive, longer-lasting league and focus, like England has done at St George's Park, a high-performance centre which focuses only on those at the very top who come through the private academies run by clubs? Seven players from the 21 on the under-17 team came from private academies who were picked after they stamped their presence against the official India under-17 team. What you wonder, is the AIFF's definition of scouting?
Planet Football must have many nations with similar problems - a lack of quality governance, funding, shining stadia - and still they tend to produce a larger number of quality professional players earning decent wages in footballing countries. When Indian football fans hear about Japan's 100-year-plan to win the World Cup in 2094, we are awestruck and staggered at what one Indian football person described as its "ridiculous selflessness."
Now that the Under-17 World Cup is over, it is hard to pin down an Indian football plan outside of two dozen under-17 players, a few AIFF-run academies and the dream of hosting the next big event. Mission XI Million was a bunch of photo-ops, information around a Centre of Excellence is nebulous and no one barring Mizoram has got stuck into any formal steps towards the Baby Leagues. The only widely-publicized option is the flashy league offering big wages being the way to develop Indian football. Go top down rather than bottom up. Indian football's software has a powerful virus in it.
The crowd and media response to the World Cup would have given the FIFA event itself quite a boost. Maybe this means that India is now the new staging post for more bigger, grander revenue-generating, headline-grabbing FIFA events. A notch lower than Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Singapore but still there or thereabouts. In terms of marketability of football, Indian football could very obviously be the global game's new golden goose. But no matter how golden, you would hope, no one wants to be a goose.
Delusions and alternate history: How Praful Patel fooled football fans, one quote at a time
The ex-president of the AIFF clearly doesn’t know the history of Indian football and the true facts surrounding the sport.
It is all well and good commending the spirit of the team but it is important to be aware of the situation and comment accordingly. In Indian football, denial and delusion start at the very top.
The man is an idiot in my opinion but some of these are stretching so much. The guy is a politician, most of the things he says are things he is saying because he has too. He wouldn't be doing his job if, for example, he didn't say our goal is to qualify for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Is it a stupid statement? Yes. Could he have said "Our goal is to make it into the final 12 for World Cup qualification"? Also yes but to berate him for saying the goal is to qualify? Come on.
It's been an eventful week since the completion of the U-17 World Cup, the first FIFA event hosted by the Indian subcontinent. While the headlines since then have been dominated by the court ruling that removed All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Praful Patel from his post, there's a need to look beyond the immediate and see what the World Cup did for India and where Indian football can go from here.
So can the World Cup make a difference?
'The passion (for football) is growing; the access to the sport on TV is growing.' Jan Kruger
Santosh Desai, columnist and CEO of Future Brands sounds bullish on the future. "There will be two kinds of people -- those that recognise that football is the number one sport in the world and by being on the ground floor now, eventually India has to be part of it," says Desai. "Others may not support it because of our football standards. But I would think a majority will take the optimistic call on this."
FIFA technical director Steven Martens, who was in India for the tournament, says backers of the football in India need to come forward and stick with the sport in the long term.
"Although football has been played in India for a long time, there has only been a realisation in the last couple of years that you would like to do more," he says. "The passion is growing; the access to the sport on TV is growing. The idols are more visible so there is more of a dream. People want to participate more and that is what the AIFF will have to pick up (on)."
Martens believes the need of the hour is to cash in on the "euphoria" around the World Cup right now. "That's both the opportunity and also the pitfall of the situation," he warns. "A lot of investment has gone into the team and this event and that is great because that needed to happen. But now those who have invested in it need to keep investing in it."
"This World Cup could be a turning point. But it is interesting how turning points go. It can turn upwards but also turn downwards," says Martens. "If you look at the experiences of what happens here, take it as a point of reference and assume that you will get the same results every two years without making any structural changes or actions then it might be a disappointment."
What's the issue that needs to be addressed first?
More football would lead to more leagues, enhancing the performance of both players and coaches.
Put simply, more football, more leagues. "To impact a wider set of players you need to target coaches, facilities and leagues," says Ajax Coaching Academy manager Corne Groenendijk. "From the top down, you need to make things available. I think you need several leagues. A national league from U-13 will be the best because it will be the first time you play serious competition.
"But you will need a lot of money so there you will need to find sponsors. That is an advantage that smaller countries have," says Groenendijk, citing the example of how the junior teams of Ajax only need to travel short distances to get successive games against big clubs like Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven.
"You need to work top-down and bottom-up. Bottom-up means more competitive opportunities for kids at the lower levels. The number of games has to go up and the season has to get longer, six months and eight months a year. Competition will drive the sport to develop a football culture in general. It might not happen in all areas of the country but make sure it is happening in sufficient areas of the country," he says.
Groenendijk contests that exposure tours, such as the ones undertaken by the U-17 team in preparation for the World Cup, are not enough. "In India, if you have 10 ISL clubs, these clubs need to have a youth academy system and they need to play each other frequently. They will gain a lot of experience and game time (that way)."
It is a thought impossible to argue against; England's U-17 World Cup winnerand right-back Timothy Eyoma was defending against Spain's forward Cesar Gelabert in a UEFA Youth League game between Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid in Enfield on November 1 -- just four days on from a physically and mentally exhausting World Cup final that the latter started. Gelabert would score the first goal for Real in a 3-2 defeat, but the experience of playing varied levels in different competitions will do a world of good for both.
Next on the priority list?
The coaches. Patel has spoken of a desire to set up a National Centre for Excellence within the next two years, supported by at least six football academies around the country. One of the key thrusts behind some of the decisions from here on is to enable a wider ecosystem around the sport in India, not just for players.
Henry Menezes, former India international and deputy chairman of the AIFF technical committee, for instance, says the thought behind extending the contract of U-17 coach Luis Norton de Matos was to create a "second line" of coaching. Matos' support staff at the World Cup was conspicuous by the absence of any Indian but he will now work with India's Floyd Pinto, who has been with the India U-19 team for a while.
Menezes says the World Cup has taught India to both embrace modern methods, and yet find an Indian way. "The emphasis on sports science, psychologists, physiotherapists, nutritionists and trainers is so high in this sport now, that we must use every scientific method available, and from the age-group level itself," he says. "We can't just copy Germany or Japan, we have to adapt to our own system."
The good news? AIFF has started a U-13 League, which will be played across zones this season, and more and more of India's recent internationals are seeing the benefit of getting into coaching. Among the eight coaches who successfully cleared AFC's B license course in July, two are Mehrajuddin Wadoo and Gouramangi Singh, former India teammates and regulars in all seasons of the Indian Super League (ISL).
Finally: Don't get carried away
"There is no doubt that people are in a mood to explore sports beyond just cricket, and this has probably heightened over the last couple of years," Desai says. "The issue is that it needs to be in a sport where India does well or at least is competitive. In the absence of that, the challenge will not be overall popularity, but how will a local connect with India come about."
Desai warns of the potential error of comparing football in India with cricket's Indian Premier League (IPL) and other leagues that have been reasonably successful in commercial terms. "The thing to get cautious about is that it is easy to overprice something easily, especially in the era of the IPL. IPL worked because the format was there and it works, and kabaddi worked because there was no frame of reference. If the denominator is kept under check, football can work as a brand. But we must not get too far ahead of ourselves," he says.
In Manipur, ‘Football the only way out of the mess’
Things can go south in Manipur if Indian football cannot capitalise on the inroads made in a state where violence and its memories used to bookend lives in past years.
Hype vs Reality Check Part 1: 13,47,143 Indians shattered the record for largest attendance at the FIFA Under-17 World Cup. With India making its presence felt on Planet Football, it’s time to take stock and make a sobering assessment of where the game is headed. Wiser after their travels to the six World Cup venues – Guwahati, Goa, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi – The Indian Express reporters find out how older nurseries at traditional centres have gradually rung hollow. And, football in metros is all style – weekend at EPL sportsbars, FIFA on Playstation and ugly takedowns on Whatsapp – and little substance.
Comments
There doesn’t seem to be any end to Indian sports bodies’ run-ins with courts. The country’s most influential federation, BCCI, is engaged in a protracted battle and awaits the Supreme Court’s verdict.
The Delhi High Court declaring the All India Football Federation (AIFF) elections of December 2016 invalid means another federation has fallen foul of the sports code.
The biggest point of contention is the nomination process that violates the code. They seem to have been made on the basis of a pre-determined list prepared by AIFF bosses, and that has been adjudged to have rendered the election process invalid.
A total of 17 members were elected to the executive committee, all unopposed, with Patel winning his third term as president.
On Tuesday evening, hours after the court verdict, an AIFF statement said the election was “fully compliant with all statutory regulations in terms of the Registrar of Societies Act as well as other notifications and orders of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.”
However, the nomination process under Article 25.4 of the AIFF constitution is clearly in conflict with the sports code. “A candidate for the post of President, Vice President, Treasurer or Member of the Executive Committee shall be proposed by at least five Permanent Members,” it says.
The model election guidelines as per the sports code says a member’s nomination can be proposed by one association and seconded by another.
Emails accessed by Hindustan Times show the AIFF gave state units details of the electoral college as well as the name and contact information of the Returning Officer on November 25, 26 days ahead of the election. The AIFF constitution says it should be done at least 30 days in advance (Articles 23.2 and 25.9).
The biggest dispute is the AIFF asking state bodies to file nomination papers for a pre-determined list of 17. On November 26, vice-president Subrata Dutta sent an email to state units, listing the names.
Later that day, he sent another mail. “There is a typographical error in the proposed Executive Committee. The name Mr. Deepak Sharma (North Zone) has been wrongly written as Deepak Singh. Please write Deepak Sharma in the nomination form for executive committee member from North Zone,” he wrote.
Eventually all but one from the list were elected unopposed. Only Assam unit secretary, Ankur Dutta, was left out with the association president, HN Brahma elected.
Goa Football Association (GFA) in a petition to the returning officer contested the election. GFA, for the first time in three decades, failed to get a representative into any post in the Executive Committee.
Two controversial inductions were Delhi Soccer Association (DSA) president Subhash Chopra, who had been heading his state body 19 months past his term without an election, and Rajasthan unit president Manvendra Singh, who had just been elected after the Rajasthan body was de-recognised by the AIFF for nine years. He got the plum post of Vice-President (West Zone).
There are some fears the court verdict could lead to FIFA suspending AIFF for outside interference, as Pakistan remains suspended following a disputed election. But the Pakistan body was split into two factions, with both claiming election victory. And FIFA had given it two years to sort out the mess.
The AIFF will have to sort out the issue quickly to avoid erosion of the goodwill built by India staging the FIFA U-17 World Cup.
Indian football is under a cloud of uncertainty following the Delhi High Court's decision on Tuesday to set aside the December 2016 election of All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Praful Patel. But there are few doubts in the mind of SY Quraishi, the man who was appointed by the court to serve as administrator to the AIFF and conduct fresh elections in five months' time, about getting the job done.
His confidence comes in part from his experience as the former chief election commissioner of India in 2011 and 2012. "We have conducted elections for 90 crore [900 million] Indians. I don't think conducting elections for 90 people [roughly the electorate of the AIFF] will be nearly as challenging," Quraishi told ESPN.
This will not be the first time the 70-year-old is tasked with taking over as administrator of a national sports federation. In August, the same Delhi High Court bench had handed him charge of the Archery Association of India (AAI) and tasked him with carrying out elections for the body. He currently occupies two rooms in the Sports Authority of India office in New Delhi from where he goes about that job. He expects to carry out his work with the AIFF from the same premises and isn't concerned about taking on vested interests. "This is not a major undertaking," he says. "It is a small job. I haven't yet been contacted by anyone from the AIFF but I have no doubt I will find people in the organization that I can depend on."
Quraishi sees his task as a very simple one. "My role is very clearly defined," he says. "The Supreme Court has taken the view that the sports code has to be adopted. And in this specific case, the Delhi High Court has declared that the AIFF election in 2016 has been held void because the norms of the sports code were violated. It has appointed me as a neutral party to ensure that the election is conducted according to the correct norms. I'm to hold elections in the AIFF in five months and then step aside. I don't plan on staying as administrator indefinitely."
When he steps into his office on Friday, Quraishi will go about the job in a similar way as he did with the AAI. "I will have to take a look at the electoral rolls and update them if that has to be done," he says. "Some of the names in the rolls might be challenged by some of the state federations and that matter too will have to be sorted. In my understanding the election was declared void owing to a technicality. I will have to ensure that the electoral rolls are perfect. In the archery federation there were further challenges because two associations were competing for recognition. I will have to see if there are similar issues with the AIFF too."
Quraishi has been given five months as administrator to fix things. While the actual task of conducting an election will not take as much time, Quraishi says he might have to first ensure that the norms of the sports code are first written into the AIFF constitution. The current AIFF constitution, for instance, requires five members to nominate an individual to stand for a post on the executive committee. The sports code only requires one member to nominate the individual for election. This norm was one of the reasons for the 2016 election to be declared void.
"I assume it will take about a month or so to put things in place," he says. "In the archery federation we have to hold two elections. The first body will have to adopt the sports code into the constitution before we can conduct the second election. I have been given four months to complete the process in the archery federation and since I have been given five months as administrator of the AIFF, I assume a similar process will have to be followed."
Qureshi's task isn't just about resolving the administrative logjam. There are concerns about the conduct of domestic competition and the future of athletes. Qureshi allays these fears using the example of Indian archers. "In the last one month both camps and domestic competitions have been held," he says. "In domestic competitions we found out that some of the judges were woefully underpaid so we tried to pay them a fair amount. I made sure to talk to the players and they were happy in that there was no change in their preparations. We have been able to send teams for international tournaments and the athletes have competed and won medals too. So fears of disruption to the sport will likely not happen."
He also is confident that the AIFF's fate will not mirror that of the Pakistan Football Federation (PFA). Last month FIFA, football's world governing body, banned the PFA after a court-appointed administrator took over the functioning of the latter. "I have heard from reports that the international body (FIFA) might ban the Indian federation," Quraishi says. "There were similar concerns in archery too but that were not justified."
Indeed, Quraishi says he hopes in time he would not be called upon to step into a sports federation and conduct elections at all. "It would be sensible if every federation falls in line and adopts and adheres to the sports code," he says. "Unless you hold free and fresh elections, you will find people hanging around for 40 years or more."
http://www.espn.in/football/india/story/3255396/praful-patel-gets-the-boot-as-aiff-president-but-indian-football-needs-a-reboot
If a football commentator had to describe recent scenes in Indian football, he would say Praful Patel has been hit on the counter. From the glory and euphoria of standing alongside world football's most powerful before 66,000 spectators and millions on TV to being removed, three days later, from his position as AIFF president by the Delhi High Court for getting elected via a flawed process.
Patel now has two options. Either make friends with the new AIFF administrator SY Quraishi and go about organising a fresh round of elections, which means starting by rewriting the AIFF constitution, making it compliant with the National Sports Code and adhering to it. Or he can do as the BCCI's top man of the time, N Srinivasan, did when presented with a 2013 Bombay High Court order asking the BCCI to install a proper committee to investigate the IPL corruption scandal. Srinivasan went to the Supreme Court, and look where that took the BCCI and its leading men. #justsaying
Patel remains the AFC vice-president, which is common in football and in many sports under governance scrutiny. My prediction, based on the past dramas around the BCCI and Indian Olympic Association, is that the words that will be bandied about a lot over the next few weeks, mostly off record, will be "autonomy" and "government interference." Or that, as happened in the case of the BCCI, the airing of the bogey that without Patel and a few trusted aides, Indian football will be on the verge of total collapse. Yawn. Such smokescreens.
Like the one floating over the successful staging of the Under-17 World Cup. That has been touted by some as a revolutionary moment for Indian football. India has "become", it was said more than once, a footballing nation. The host team's debut became a "winning billion hearts" story, carefully side-stepping the awkward contrast - how fellow debutants Niger (80% Sahara desert) got into the knockouts and New Caledonia (population 278,000), also in their first World Cup, got a point off Japan.
Software, in this context, is what is considered Indian football's priorities - the width, depth and longevity of our competitive footballing calendars across ages, our rather midget-sized (in duration and number of clubs involved) nationwide leagues, the shortage of qualified coaches on the ground and professionals in administration and the mindsets of a good number of the powerful running the sport at different levels.
At one point during the Under-17 World Cup, I was given a copy of a Masters dissertation by a 23-year-old student of Mumbai's Tata Institute of Social Sciences. It was about India's football cultures in an age of the newly-created leagues. The dissertation posed a very important question about the "new developments" taking place in Indian football - that is Indian Super League and the world U-17 World Cup. It asked, "Are these developments indicative of the betterment of the game or the betterment of the market of the game?"
There will be many who know the answer to this one. Indian football's flawed software means the two - the betterment of the game and the market for the game - remain completely disconnected. Hosting big events makes for feel-good, momentary distractions from the mountains that remain to be climbed. These are found everywhere.
Travel around Indian football and you see, broadly, two extremes: one, privately run grassroots programmes that get no love from their state associations but still push on to send village kids into decent livelihoods and jobs through football. Then there are senior state officials who cannot be bothered to work with clubs to reorganize and strengthen their state leagues so that there are competition pathways for the young footballers coming through. FIFA's own financial and technical assistance programmes set up in 2015 across seven states in India - Maharashtra, Kerala, Mizoram, Goa, Delhi, Assam and Bengal - had to shut down in Goa, Assam and Delhi.
Beyond the leagues is the question: what do we do with our young? Should the national federation be running fundamental developmental academies? Or should it focus on creating a coherent, inclusive, longer-lasting league and focus, like England has done at St George's Park, a high-performance centre which focuses only on those at the very top who come through the private academies run by clubs? Seven players from the 21 on the under-17 team came from private academies who were picked after they stamped their presence against the official India under-17 team. What you wonder, is the AIFF's definition of scouting?
Planet Football must have many nations with similar problems - a lack of quality governance, funding, shining stadia - and still they tend to produce a larger number of quality professional players earning decent wages in footballing countries. When Indian football fans hear about Japan's 100-year-plan to win the World Cup in 2094, we are awestruck and staggered at what one Indian football person described as its "ridiculous selflessness."
Now that the Under-17 World Cup is over, it is hard to pin down an Indian football plan outside of two dozen under-17 players, a few AIFF-run academies and the dream of hosting the next big event. Mission XI Million was a bunch of photo-ops, information around a Centre of Excellence is nebulous and no one barring Mizoram has got stuck into any formal steps towards the Baby Leagues. The only widely-publicized option is the flashy league offering big wages being the way to develop Indian football. Go top down rather than bottom up. Indian football's software has a powerful virus in it.
The crowd and media response to the World Cup would have given the FIFA event itself quite a boost. Maybe this means that India is now the new staging post for more bigger, grander revenue-generating, headline-grabbing FIFA events. A notch lower than Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Singapore but still there or thereabouts. In terms of marketability of football, Indian football could very obviously be the global game's new golden goose. But no matter how golden, you would hope, no one wants to be a goose.
https://thefield.scroll.in/856542/praful-patel-in-quotes-alternate-history-tall-claims-and-massive-delusion
Delusions and alternate history: How Praful Patel fooled football fans, one quote at a time
The ex-president of the AIFF clearly doesn’t know the history of Indian football and the true facts surrounding the sport.
It is all well and good commending the spirit of the team but it is important to be aware of the situation and comment accordingly. In Indian football, denial and delusion start at the very top.It's been an eventful week since the completion of the U-17 World Cup, the first FIFA event hosted by the Indian subcontinent. While the headlines since then have been dominated by the court ruling that removed All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Praful Patel from his post, there's a need to look beyond the immediate and see what the World Cup did for India and where Indian football can go from here.
So can the World Cup make a difference?
Santosh Desai, columnist and CEO of Future Brands sounds bullish on the future. "There will be two kinds of people -- those that recognise that football is the number one sport in the world and by being on the ground floor now, eventually India has to be part of it," says Desai. "Others may not support it because of our football standards. But I would think a majority will take the optimistic call on this."
"Although football has been played in India for a long time, there has only been a realisation in the last couple of years that you would like to do more," he says. "The passion is growing; the access to the sport on TV is growing. The idols are more visible so there is more of a dream. People want to participate more and that is what the AIFF will have to pick up (on)."
Martens believes the need of the hour is to cash in on the "euphoria" around the World Cup right now. "That's both the opportunity and also the pitfall of the situation," he warns. "A lot of investment has gone into the team and this event and that is great because that needed to happen. But now those who have invested in it need to keep investing in it."
"This World Cup could be a turning point. But it is interesting how turning points go. It can turn upwards but also turn downwards," says Martens. "If you look at the experiences of what happens here, take it as a point of reference and assume that you will get the same results every two years without making any structural changes or actions then it might be a disappointment."
What's the issue that needs to be addressed first?
Put simply, more football, more leagues. "To impact a wider set of players you need to target coaches, facilities and leagues," says Ajax Coaching Academy manager Corne Groenendijk. "From the top down, you need to make things available. I think you need several leagues. A national league from U-13 will be the best because it will be the first time you play serious competition.
"But you will need a lot of money so there you will need to find sponsors. That is an advantage that smaller countries have," says Groenendijk, citing the example of how the junior teams of Ajax only need to travel short distances to get successive games against big clubs like Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven.
"You need to work top-down and bottom-up. Bottom-up means more competitive opportunities for kids at the lower levels. The number of games has to go up and the season has to get longer, six months and eight months a year. Competition will drive the sport to develop a football culture in general. It might not happen in all areas of the country but make sure it is happening in sufficient areas of the country," he says.
Groenendijk contests that exposure tours, such as the ones undertaken by the U-17 team in preparation for the World Cup, are not enough. "In India, if you have 10 ISL clubs, these clubs need to have a youth academy system and they need to play each other frequently. They will gain a lot of experience and game time (that way)."
It is a thought impossible to argue against; England's U-17 World Cup winnerand right-back Timothy Eyoma was defending against Spain's forward Cesar Gelabert in a UEFA Youth League game between Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid in Enfield on November 1 -- just four days on from a physically and mentally exhausting World Cup final that the latter started. Gelabert would score the first goal for Real in a 3-2 defeat, but the experience of playing varied levels in different competitions will do a world of good for both.
Next on the priority list?
The coaches. Patel has spoken of a desire to set up a National Centre for Excellence within the next two years, supported by at least six football academies around the country. One of the key thrusts behind some of the decisions from here on is to enable a wider ecosystem around the sport in India, not just for players.
Henry Menezes, former India international and deputy chairman of the AIFF technical committee, for instance, says the thought behind extending the contract of U-17 coach Luis Norton de Matos was to create a "second line" of coaching. Matos' support staff at the World Cup was conspicuous by the absence of any Indian but he will now work with India's Floyd Pinto, who has been with the India U-19 team for a while.
Menezes says the World Cup has taught India to both embrace modern methods, and yet find an Indian way. "The emphasis on sports science, psychologists, physiotherapists, nutritionists and trainers is so high in this sport now, that we must use every scientific method available, and from the age-group level itself," he says. "We can't just copy Germany or Japan, we have to adapt to our own system."
The good news? AIFF has started a U-13 League, which will be played across zones this season, and more and more of India's recent internationals are seeing the benefit of getting into coaching. Among the eight coaches who successfully cleared AFC's B license course in July, two are Mehrajuddin Wadoo and Gouramangi Singh, former India teammates and regulars in all seasons of the Indian Super League (ISL).
Finally: Don't get carried away
Desai warns of the potential error of comparing football in India with cricket's Indian Premier League (IPL) and other leagues that have been reasonably successful in commercial terms. "The thing to get cautious about is that it is easy to overprice something easily, especially in the era of the IPL. IPL worked because the format was there and it works, and kabaddi worked because there was no frame of reference. If the denominator is kept under check, football can work as a brand. But we must not get too far ahead of ourselves," he says.
In Manipur, ‘Football the only way out of the mess’
Things can go south in Manipur if Indian football cannot capitalise on the inroads made in a state where violence and its memories used to bookend lives in past years.
Hype vs Reality Check Part 1: 13,47,143 Indians shattered the record for largest attendance at the FIFA Under-17 World Cup. With India making its presence felt on Planet Football, it’s time to take stock and make a sobering assessment of where the game is headed. Wiser after their travels to the six World Cup venues – Guwahati, Goa, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi – The Indian Express reporters find out how older nurseries at traditional centres have gradually rung hollow. And, football in metros is all style – weekend at EPL sportsbars, FIFA on Playstation and ugly takedowns on Whatsapp – and little substance.