Vishnu Prasad By

Express News Service

MOSCOW: "I have nothing to say about this World Cup," Javier Ceppi warns in advance. "Just India."

But on India, he cannot stop talking. It has been more than seven months since he completed his duties as the tournament director of the U-17 World Cup and has since moved on to the senior version of the tournament. But the former tournament remains close to the Chilean's heart. "The landscape of football in India has changed and I think the U-17 World Cup has played a big part in it," says Ceppi. "Having more spectators than any other youth World Cup in the past is no easy feat."

"The Odisha government was never involved with football before," he says. "Now they have them hosting the Federation Cup and they are interested in doing more things. Then you had the UP government announcing that football is one of their priority sports. You have the governments of Telangana, Maharashtra and J&K showing interest. This is because we tried, with the Mission XI Million programme, to take football to every state in the country.”

The U-17 World Cup was that rare tournament in India that was not plagued by what Ceppi refers to as 'tournament-defining crises'. Sure there were glitches — people not having water to drink in Delhi and the rescheduled semifinal in Guwahati come to mind. "We planned quite in advance," he says. "We made sure that one of the members of our senior management was there at least once a week in each of the venues. We kept on working with the stakeholders and we were on the ground. It took us a while to convince people that we needed to work in advance to avoid situations that had happened in other tournaments, in terms of venues not being ready, of security preparations not being ready. It was never going to be a perfect tournament. But it was a very good tournament."

While the tournament largely succeeded in bringing together various stakeholders, there were a few that did not quite come on board. "We had good relationships with governments. We had good relationships with the state associations that wanted to have good relationship with us and were supportive. The state associations that did not want to have a good relationship with us, we kept a cordial relationship. If we invite a state association 40 times to a meeting and the president of the association does not acknowledge that, what else can we do?" Ceppi asks.

"This was what happened in Goa. We invited them to every meeting, we tried to make them a part of the World Cup. But apparently, they did not want to be involved. Why? I have no idea. Why did Elvis Gomes not come to any event? It shows that they would only like to be involved if they are in the limelight. It's a World Cup. The limelight should be on the players.”

The most consequential of the U-17 World Cup's after-effects was perhaps that it gave India a place on the footballing table. Ceppi says he cannot count the number of people in FIFA who've stopped him and asked him about India. "It gave India respectability in the context of world football, which is extremely important," he says. "FIFA keeps acknowledging that (it was a success). At the FIFA Congress, there was a dedicated slide at one of the videos on India 2017. That is them telling all FIFA members and every important football official in the world 'Listen, India 2017 was success'."