I-League on its own can never be successful with the current pace. Utopian ideas don't work. Indian football can try to hitchhike on ISL's promotional and entertainment potential and try to get some eyeballs, more importantly sponsors and stuff.
@lithinthomas, I doubt Kerala players will get chance to show their talents. Why? ... look at Kolkata Knight Riders team composition for answer. Only Bengali in the team is a Bangladeshi ... It will be similar in ISL
doesn't matter, still Bengali people support KKR (many of them). Also I don't see a lot of bengali players in East Bengal first XI, not many fans complain
ISL looks like "Santosh Trophy with Glamour". Where are the players? Football is a competitive sport and quality is important. You cannot have quality by telling records of owners who are cricketers. You cannot bring quality by bringing retired 40 year old players. It is Clubs and Academies who build the sport.
assuming good players will be able to join. What I can see, given the money and glamour many of the Indian footballers can easily be coaxed to join it and with the names involved I don't see IPFCA as a united entity anymore. I-League clubs won't be able to stand united anymore. And also assuming better foreigners can come on loan. Lot of assumptions, but given how things went and given the names involved, it doesn't look sham to me
@Rudra, what I meant is that we cannot bank on the ISL franchisees to groom local talents. Support is a different thing. Two months is very little time to showcase talent, they will go around with shopping bags (or dragnets, if I may say).
Also, I doubt teams will take the trouble of running academies round the year for a tournament of such short duration. Even if they open shop, those will be eyewash and only an exercise in PR. I do not think they will rear any footballer who will don the national team jersey.
For the sake of simplicity, I will agree with your logic. I was talking about pace of development as well. I-League started in 2007, and you are talking about two professional teams. PFC doesn't bring huge numbers, general people in Pune are hardly talking about PFC; BFC brings 8K and doesn't again say general people in Bangalore are going gaga over it.
Assuming PFC and BFC has done the necessary, we are still left with all these clubs, and trend tells us only new clubs are going to do this. We are still left with important teams from Kolkata and Goa and you can't expect huge revamps there, anyone from Goa or Kolkata can tell you that. Then what are we waiting for?
@Deb_Ban Every part of a machine does a different thing, everything is not for all purposes. ISL is no way aiming for youth development, even if some top notch guy says that. But if we want youth development we need money, sponsors, fan interests. AIFF, if well intentioned, can hitchhike on ISL back and try to keep up the the eye balls fixed and use it for larger goals
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Lot of assumptions, but given how things went and given the names involved, it doesn't look sham to me