Three decades ago, soccer for most Indians was still about East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, and the Goan clubs. Sure there was the legendary Pele whose very presence on a football pitch in Kolkata in the mid-1970s drew over a 100,000 manic Bengalis to the ground. The Bengali, and most certainly the Goan, have always seen themselves as Brazilians in spirit, if not quite in style. In the paras of Kolkata and the beaches of Margao, football has always been a spiritual as much as a
physical experience, the stadium was a shrine, a place of worship where the men in yellow and blue were demi-gods. And yet, while the Peles and the Maradonas were always part of the Indian footballing consciousness, the reality of the game was still defined by domestic soccer. East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan detemined the market price of the next day's eelish maach and chingri just as much as the quantity of rum in Mumbai's Catholic heartland depended on whether Dempo or Salgaocar had reached the finals of the Rovers Cup.
Our heroes too were home-spun. How lovingly we cut out pictures of the Habibs, the Ranjit Thapas and the Brahmanands from the centrepage of sports magazines, to paste them up on our whitewashed walls of pre-liberalised India, photos that yellowed and crumbled under the probing fingers of time and mothers! Those photos were part of our romance with the game. The closest we came to sampling international soccer flavour was when a group of Iranian students led by Majid and Jamshed Nassiri, to be followed by the Nigerians, played for the domestic football clubs. The Iranians and the Nigerians of the time were decent footballers, but if they stood out, it was largely because of the embarrassing state of our own football talent. And yet, the mediocrity never seemed to concern us. It was almost as if we were happy to be cocooned from the rest of the universe in the only truly global sport.
All that has changed rather dramatically in the last few years. My son has little knowledge about the star Indian players. He knows of Baichung Bhutia, perhaps the only contemporary Indian footballer of any star value. But the rest of his football heroes are all shaped by the western world. He has bought a Frank Lampard shirt from the local market, has registered on the web to become a member of the Chelsea supporters club, has a large poster of John Terry on the wall, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the teams playing in the English premier league. As he and his friends play out a Premiership match on Play station, its obvious that their passion for football has moved well beyond Dempo and East Bengal. At the heart of the addiction: satellite television.
Ten years ago, the social conservatives in the country railed against what they saw as the corrupting influence of daytime soaps like the Bold and the Beautiful. They need not have worried. Today, the family soap is the ultimate desi cultural phenomenon, the saas-bahu sagas having pushed out American serials to the margins of the television watching viewership. Ditto with the news channels, many of whom have localized content to such an extent that there seems little space for world affairs in the 24 hour news wheel.
However, if there is one niche in the television business which has been actively globalised it is sports. Sure, cricket remains the ultimate sporting religion , but increasingly other sports - most notably soccer, and even more remarkably Formula One - have begun to compete for mindspace and airtime like never before. Just to share one example: on CNN-IBN, we have twelve sponsors for our football coverage, four for the cricket series. Its almost as if football has become a symbol of the power of the new economy: the sport is universal, and for the multinational brands in particular, it
provides the perfect stage to establish the connection between the Indian middle class consumer and the global marketplace.
Indeed, a fascinating change in the social geography of Indian sport has begun to take place. Cricket, the unquestioned emperor of the country's sporting nationalism, has moved out of the big cities to the small and medium towns. In the cricketing context, satellite television has ensured a certain "democratization" of the sport, nurturing the hopes and ambitions of parents and children from Ranchi to Kochi, who genuinely believe that if Dhoni can make it, why can't
they. From being the original princely sport, cricket's reach has now moved beyond even the middle class heartlands of a Shivaji Park or a Gymkhana Club and firmly placed itself in the maidans of the small town. But while in cricket, television has strengthened the local appeal of the game, in football just the opposite has happened. The weekly coverage of world soccer matches has meant that the Indian metropolitan viewer is now sharing a global experience. You can sit in
Gurgaon and feel the buzz in Manchester. In the process, the stark mediocrity of Indian football has been cruelly exposed like never before.
No longer can we celebrate in the achievements of our domestic teams because we now know just how far behind the rest of the world we really are. To be ranked 118th in the world, and to watch tiny Trinidad and Tobago - a country that will fit into the pocket of any city suburb-perform so well in the world cup, is a wake-up call. It exposes the hollowness of our football administrators who for years had tried to convince us into accepting that our failure to reach the ultimate global event was because we were obsessed with cricket. Now, we know the truth: our being soccer zeroes has less to do with cricket's dominance but more to do with the fact that we are simply not good enough at a game that demands the highest level of physical and technical skill.
It's a bit like the wake-up call Indian industry, protected for years by the licence-permit raj, has received in the last decade. And like industry, if India wants to share a space on the world soccer stage, the game's organizers need to change their mindsets and compete in a professional environment. You cannot play a global game while running the sport with the mind of a local chieftain, distributing largesse to only a select group. Its happened, with even more tragic
consequences, to Indian hockey, but football is no different. Fifteen years ago, Japan, then a country on par with us in global soccer rankings, embarked on an ambitious long-term soccer training and talent spotting programme. The Japanese league was professionalised, foreign coaches and players were brought, and the entire domestic structure was overhauled. Today, Japan is an Asian superpower that competes with the best in the world.
Past history suggests that India is unlikely to replicate the Japanese experience despite all the claims made by the administrators. Which is why so many of us football fanatics have given up on ever seeing India in the world cup soccer finals. Maybe, my 11 year old has got it right after all. So much better watching a Beckham bend it for England than a Venkatesh struggling to do likewise for a Mahindra United. About the AuthorRajdeep Sardesai Rajdeep Sardesai was the Editor-in-Chief, IBN18 Network, that includes CNN-IBN, IBN 7 and IBN Lokmat. He has covered some of the biggest stories in I...Read Morefirst published:June 26, 2006, 13:16 ISTlast updated:June 26, 2006, 13:16 IST
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28 years ago, the world cup soccer experience entered my life courtesy the crackle of the radio. Buenos Aires 1978s was the cup of Mario Kempes, the legendary Argentinian with the flowing mane who, for a while, enabled an entire country forget the trauma of dictatorship and state sponsored killings. In a time without live television, football's images were conjured up in the imagination of a teenager obsessed with sport in the black and white photos of the next day's newspaper. 28 years later, my pre-teen son is experiencing his first world cup fantasy. The only difference is that for him the sporting spectacle is in real time: round the clock coverage on television and the internet has transformed the face of , not just the soccer world cup, but the game as we knew it.
Three decades ago, soccer for most Indians was still about East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, and the Goan clubs. Sure there was the legendary Pele whose very presence on a football pitch in Kolkata in the mid-1970s drew over a 100,000 manic Bengalis to the ground. The Bengali, and most certainly the Goan, have always seen themselves as Brazilians in spirit, if not quite in style. In the paras of Kolkata and the beaches of Margao, football has always been a spiritual as much as a
physical experience, the stadium was a shrine, a place of worship where the men in yellow and blue were demi-gods. And yet, while the Peles and the Maradonas were always part of the Indian footballing consciousness, the reality of the game was still defined by domestic soccer. East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan detemined the market price of the next day's eelish maach and chingri just as much as the quantity of rum in Mumbai's Catholic heartland depended on whether Dempo or Salgaocar had reached the finals of the Rovers Cup.
Our heroes too were home-spun. How lovingly we cut out pictures of the Habibs, the Ranjit Thapas and the Brahmanands from the centrepage of sports magazines, to paste them up on our whitewashed walls of pre-liberalised India, photos that yellowed and crumbled under the probing fingers of time and mothers! Those photos were part of our romance with the game. The closest we came to sampling international soccer flavour was when a group of Iranian students led by Majid and Jamshed Nassiri, to be followed by the Nigerians, played for the domestic football clubs. The Iranians and the Nigerians of the time were decent footballers, but if they stood out, it was largely because of the embarrassing state of our own football talent. And yet, the mediocrity never seemed to concern us. It was almost as if we were happy to be cocooned from the rest of the universe in the only truly global sport.
All that has changed rather dramatically in the last few years. My son has little knowledge about the star Indian players. He knows of Baichung Bhutia, perhaps the only contemporary Indian footballer of any star value. But the rest of his football heroes are all shaped by the western world. He has bought a Frank Lampard shirt from the local market, has registered on the web to become a member of the Chelsea supporters club, has a large poster of John Terry on the wall, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the teams playing in the English premier league. As he and his friends play out a Premiership match on Play station, its obvious that their passion for football has moved well beyond Dempo and East Bengal. At the heart of the addiction: satellite television.
Ten years ago, the social conservatives in the country railed against what they saw as the corrupting influence of daytime soaps like the Bold and the Beautiful. They need not have worried. Today, the family soap is the ultimate desi cultural phenomenon, the saas-bahu sagas having pushed out American serials to the margins of the television watching viewership. Ditto with the news channels, many of whom have localized content to such an extent that there seems little space for world affairs in the 24 hour news wheel.
However, if there is one niche in the television business which has been actively globalised it is sports. Sure, cricket remains the ultimate sporting religion , but increasingly other sports - most notably soccer, and even more remarkably Formula One - have begun to compete for mindspace and airtime like never before. Just to share one example: on CNN-IBN, we have twelve sponsors for our football coverage, four for the cricket series. Its almost as if football has become a symbol of the power of the new economy: the sport is universal, and for the multinational brands in particular, it
provides the perfect stage to establish the connection between the Indian middle class consumer and the global marketplace.
Indeed, a fascinating change in the social geography of Indian sport has begun to take place. Cricket, the unquestioned emperor of the country's sporting nationalism, has moved out of the big cities to the small and medium towns. In the cricketing context, satellite television has ensured a certain "democratization" of the sport, nurturing the hopes and ambitions of parents and children from Ranchi to Kochi, who genuinely believe that if Dhoni can make it, why can't
they. From being the original princely sport, cricket's reach has now moved beyond even the middle class heartlands of a Shivaji Park or a Gymkhana Club and firmly placed itself in the maidans of the small town. But while in cricket, television has strengthened the local appeal of the game, in football just the opposite has happened. The weekly coverage of world soccer matches has meant that the Indian metropolitan viewer is now sharing a global experience. You can sit in
Gurgaon and feel the buzz in Manchester. In the process, the stark mediocrity of Indian football has been cruelly exposed like never before.
No longer can we celebrate in the achievements of our domestic teams because we now know just how far behind the rest of the world we really are. To be ranked 118th in the world, and to watch tiny Trinidad and Tobago - a country that will fit into the pocket of any city suburb-perform so well in the world cup, is a wake-up call. It exposes the hollowness of our football administrators who for years had tried to convince us into accepting that our failure to reach the ultimate global event was because we were obsessed with cricket. Now, we know the truth: our being soccer zeroes has less to do with cricket's dominance but more to do with the fact that we are simply not good enough at a game that demands the highest level of physical and technical skill.
It's a bit like the wake-up call Indian industry, protected for years by the licence-permit raj, has received in the last decade. And like industry, if India wants to share a space on the world soccer stage, the game's organizers need to change their mindsets and compete in a professional environment. You cannot play a global game while running the sport with the mind of a local chieftain, distributing largesse to only a select group. Its happened, with even more tragic
consequences, to Indian hockey, but football is no different. Fifteen years ago, Japan, then a country on par with us in global soccer rankings, embarked on an ambitious long-term soccer training and talent spotting programme. The Japanese league was professionalised, foreign coaches and players were brought, and the entire domestic structure was overhauled. Today, Japan is an Asian superpower that competes with the best in the world.
Past history suggests that India is unlikely to replicate the Japanese experience despite all the claims made by the administrators. Which is why so many of us football fanatics have given up on ever seeing India in the world cup soccer finals. Maybe, my 11 year old has got it right after all. So much better watching a Beckham bend it for England than a Venkatesh struggling to do likewise for a Mahindra United.
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