Home Sports Football Why Kerala's love for football does not result in mass production of quality players

Why Kerala’s love for football does not result in mass production of quality players

In Kerala, footballing culture is still vibrant, as evidenced by the maniacal support for Sevens and ISL, but the presence in the national team is negligible.

A seven-a-side football tournament in progress in north Kerala. (Right) Kerala-based football clubs have lost their die-hard fan following, which is now transfixed on international leagues.

In the dimly-lit, smoky hall of the Friends Club in Mampad, an emergent town in Kerala’s football-crazy district of Malappuram, a group of men are pondering their next move. Afsal, the scraggly-haired errand boy, keeps refilling their steel tumblers with ginger-scented sulaimani from a clunky kettle, naively watching the deck of cards they’re discreetly guarding to their chests.

Suddenly, a tattered smartphone, belonging to one of the men, Rafi, crackles into life. The ring tone, an old Ricky Martin chartbuster, suffuses the room. Rafi starts negotiating, his tone condescending. They talk figures, visa expenses and flight tickets; before he abruptly cuts the call and tells his friends, “I told him we don’t want that Sudani. He’s demanding Rs 7,000 per game, plus free lodging and food. For that sum, we’ll get better players.”

Soon he opens a video file on whatsapp, and plays it over and over again, muttering to himself that the footballer on the screen, seen executing an acrobatic scissor kick, is not viable enough to be procured for the upcoming sevens football season.

By modern-day ‘Sevens’ pay-scale, Rs 7,000 is not pricey. At least not pricey for a Sudani—the collective usage for all Africans—the most sought-after stock in the Sevens League. The term ‘Sudani’ dates back to the medieval times when Arab traders ferried slaves from Sudan to Malabar. It has stuck on for centuries, and conveys no pejorative undertones.

But Friends Club Mampad has fallen on hard times and can’t afford to shell out that much for a third overseas player, which is permissible as per the recent guidelines. He calls the agent and tells him to find “budget” players. Afsal pours him another round of sulaimani and they reshuffle the sheath of cards.

The Friends Club ground is nothing but an unfenced, patchy land with two goalposts, houses almost hugging onto the ground. But S Rasheed, the club’s retired defender, says all that would change before the tournament. “We make makeshift galleries and floodlights. Last year, we got an electronic scoreboard and a juggler to entertain the crowd. Come in November, it will be like Thrissur pooram (a festival of crackers in Thrissur). It’s addictive.”

Kerala-based football clubs have lost their die-hard fan following, which is now transfixed on international leagues.

In the six-month season, book-ended by the retreating monsoon and monsoon, the 30-odd clubs affiliated to the Kerala Sevens Football Association end up playing more than 100 tournaments, 50 of which have KSFA’s approval. “An average player makes Rs 2,000-3000 a game, depending on his quality and the prosperity of his club. Rich ones like FIFA Manjeri give them around Rs 4,000 a game. A Sudani gets more, ranging from Rs 6,000 to 10,000. So if you play at least 100 games, you end up earning a couple of lakhs, which is not a bad amount to survive here,” says Rasheed.

The question of survival hardly bothers them or the clubs. There is a steady stream of patronage from NRIs, expats and local businessman. It’s a reason the Kerala State Football Association has envied Sevens football. They perceive—or rather perceived for a long time— Sevens as symbolic of all the ills in Kerala football—that they snatch the sponsors from them and the players, fed on sevens, were finding it difficult to adjust to the conventional version. It’s as hollow a gripe as accusing IPL for ruining the longer versions of cricket.

The bleeding reality was that they were immune to the changes around them and stuck up in a laid-back, archaic system. When they woke up, they found they lagged a few years behind several other states, a fact corroborated by their national presence. There hasn’t been a club in the I-League since 2012, the current national team has one regular from the state, Anas Edathodika, and a few fringe players; in the last five years, they’ve only had five different players in the squad. Even the junior squad has few Malayali players—the one that featured in the U-17 World Cup had only KP Rahul. Forget mass production, players come in trickles.

It fully captures the paradox of Kerala football—where the footballing culture is still vibrant, as evidenced by the maniacal support for Sevens and ISL, but the presence in the national team is negligible. Like most fallen empires, they are still basking in the afterglow of their long-departed golden generation, wondering how or when they can restore their glorious past, or produce the next Ancheris and Vijayans.

But K Salaudheen, secretary of the KSFA, snubs the Sevens’ skeptics instead: “If not for Sevens, football might have been extinct in Kerala. We managed to get sponsors because we entertained people and they sensed that they could get some mileage out of it.” The ties, though, are warmer these days. “Mutual understanding,” he says. Salaudheen was not exaggerating, as most players from Kerala have at one point in time or the other, plied the league, from Vijayan to Anas.

Rasheed, though, disagrees with the mileage part. For, some of them he says are just mad about the game. Like last year, a lowly club from Kottakkal managed to shell out a coupe of lakhs to procure an ISL player for just four matches. The patrons were a group of grade-four government employees, who borrowed the money from their friends. After hearing their story, the player turned up for half the sum. “It’s not always the profit or mileage but the spirit,” says Rasheed. Or rather a culture.

The profit-margin too is mostly slim. The biggest revenue is ticket sales, which are generally priced between Rs 40 and 80. Season-ticket holders get a concession. The prize-money, generally, is in the region of Rs 5 to 7 lakhs. “So after all the expenditure, the organisers are left with at the most a few lakhs. So you can’t call it a profit-making industry. It’s not yet a business or a capitalistic venture,” says Rasheed. Quite the opposite in fact, as it provides livelihood for a lot of youngsters, some of who have even started playing league football in the Middle East.

The “belt” comprises the erstwhile Eranadan and Valluvanadan fiefdoms, which encompasses western Malappuram and a few villages of eastern Palakkad. It’s one of the few stretches where the ruling left has a foothold in Malappuram, a Muslim League bastion. The affiliation blares out from the Che Guevara posters and Gauri Lankesh banners that hang from blooming Cassia trees.

The left party is another faithful patron of Sevens football, if not monetarily, certainly in terms of support. “They even consult us before calling hartals (strikes) in our villages, to ask whether it’s inconvenient for us. They’ll always come and watch the matches and support us. They also help us in erecting the gallery,” says Rasheed.

The party, too, has carefully nurtured the image of a football-loving class. There is story about a Kerala minister who bonded with Diego Maradona over Che Guevara, whose picture was engraved on the dial of the politician’s watch, at Jyoti Basu’s home in Kolkata. Before panchayat election, there’s clamour among candidates to use football as their symbol. An over-zealous one put the goalkeeper’s gloves as his symbol, only to realise it was actually a surgeon’s gloves. Needless to say, he lost.

As the evening unfolds, Rafi and friends pudge into an oil-dripping banana fritter, Ricky Martin crackles again. It’s the same agent. He has negotiated a better deal with the Sudani. Rafi shuffles another round of cards. Afsal pours another round of sulaimani.

In 2001, IM Vijayan’s debut movie, the critically-acclaimed Shantam, which is about a young man torn apart by civil strife, a role Vijayan executes with raw finesse, won the national award for the best feature film. A year later, the first professional club from Kerala, FC Cochin, was relegated from the national football league. Three years later, it was dissolved, a move which set in motion the beginning of the end of Kerala’s golden years.

The golden years, though, had ended much earlier, only that the realisation sank in late. Vijayan and Sharaf Ali were treading their sunset; Jo Paul Ancheri’s game digressed prematurely. Suddenly, there were staring at a vacuum. New Vijayans and Ancheris were not bursting forth, cruelly betraying the deficiencies of a shambolic structure. The descent in the subsequent years was as rapid as it was inevitable. In 2005, they last kissed the Santosh Trophy, the most romanticised piece of footballing silverware in Kerala, worthy enough an occasion for chief ministers to declare public holidays and shower rewards.

Then, those were times of stagnation in the state, both in the cultural and political spheres. The avant-garde movies didn’t hit the screens as commonly as the slapstick, maudlin types (there was a b-grade movie boom too; the eyeballs they garnered matching the superstars). The Congress party kept mutating, its ageing figurehead even launching a new party. The unity in left too was creaking. The famed experimentative writers turned social critiques. The once-throbbing public sector firms froze recruitment, which was a cruel blow for aspiring footballers, as several of them such as KSEB, Kerala Police, Titanium and KSRTC had strong footballing credentials and recruited players at least once in two years. Naturally, with players ageing and the firms pulling down recruitment, the league lost its competence and consequently lustre.

It was also the time IT firms began to sprout and satellite television intruded into even the remotest of villages. It brought European football and never-ending soap operas into the drawing rooms. The household footballing names were not Vijayan or Anchery, but Beckham and Zidane, Ronaldo and Giggs, the kids who could list out the Blackburn Rovers bench could hardly name half-a-dozen players of the Kerala side. Or even kick a football.

Apart from pockets in Northern Kerala, there was a sort of disconnect with the game, which Vijayan agrees. “Without a vibrant club culture, our football lost its place in the national league. We thought the next generation of Ancheris and Vijayans would just spring from the earth. it doesn’t happen always,” he says.

In this regard, Vijayan agrees with Salaudheen that Sevens played a big role in sustaining football in the state. Vijayan himself used to play in several of the leagues. “In fact, I began as a Sevens player. So has been most of the players to have emerged from Kerala in the last 20-30 years,” he says.

In FC Cochin’s place came Viva Kerala, but right from the beginning, its existence was uncertain. Every year, it would go from pillar to pillar for sponsorship, and the AIFF’s diktat that every club should have an outlay of Rs 500 crore stalled their I-League ambitions, before it was bought by the Chirag group and rechristened Chirag United. After the initial hoopla, they too found the going tough and quickly packed off in 2012.

By this time, it ceased to surprise that India played without any Malayalee player, unlike Vijayan’s time “when they played with five.” “At times, in national camps there used to be 9-10,” sighs Vijayan. Forget Vijayan, since his exit Kerala hasn’t unearthed a player half as glittering as him. NP Pradeep flickered for a while; Mohammad Rafi was talented; CK Vineeth and Anas offer considerable hope.

The script of football clubs in Kerala is eerily facsimile to Vijayan’s acting career, plunging after the initial promise. He hopes the same fate doesn’t befall on the new wave of I-League aspiring clubs such as Gokulam FC, bankrolled by prominent non-banking financier Gokulam Gopalan, or Kerala Evergreen FC, the first Indian club owned by a Singapore consortium, Myfirm Sports.

The scenes that preluded Kerala Blasters opening ISL fixture at the colossal Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Kochi were surreal. It’s owner Sachin Tendulkar, with a yellow Blasters jerseys over the traditional kasavu-mundu leading a sinkarimelam (orchestra of percussionists) into the middle of the ground, searching the 22-yard strip, now covered with thick grass, where he’d taken both his five-fors in international cricket and waving his hands at the audience. It was enough for the 80,000-odd audience to go berserk. There was a parallel percussion-orchestra in the stands, the Blasters’ flag waved furiously across the stands, and like in his heyday, chants of ‘Sachin, Sachin’ filled the stands.

It sure was a grand recipe from the start—the concoction of the most adulated Indian sportsman of this century, a brigade of over-the-hill but familiar European league veterans and the odd sprinkling of local flavour. It was the genesis of a new identity, which dusted up the the state’s old romance with the sport and promises to resuscitate its reduced contribution to the national team. Ardent fans from Northern Kerala would cram into the second-class compartments of the Malabar or Maveli Express trains, shell out insane sums to buy tickets and wouldn’t bother sleeping on railway pavements or congested waiting rooms.

For all the cynicism that surrounds the league, especially the lazy grouse that it devalues the I-League and exaggerates the financial disparity between the clubs of both leagues, Vijayan is chaffed with the league’s resounding success. “Those who are cursing ISL are plainly jealous of it. It’s the best thing to have happened to Indian football in a long time,” he says.

Now the Blasters are planning to open 25 football schools and an academy in the state. If Blasters manage to open at least half of it, Kerala football will stand to gain immensely. But Vijayan calls for patience.

“The results wouldn’t be immediate, but the ISL has lifted the sport’s profile in the country. I’m sure more youngster will take up the sport and will get better opportunities and exposure. All the teams have scouts travelling across the country and state to find young talent and there is no shortage of talent in the state. Only that they need to be groomed. If we can produce one hero, the rest will follow, as it was during our days,” he says.

But even Vijayan nurses a grouse against the ISL. That it was two decades late. “Otherwise, I could have played,” he says, unable to resist his chuckle. Maybe, it would have prevented noughties slide too.

A few months after the 1990 World Cup, noted Malayalam writer NS Madhavan, while working as an IAS cadre officer in Delhi, published his most acclaimed short story, Higuita, named after the eccentrically colourful Colombian goalkeeper. The story is about a football-crazy, Higuita-smitten priest, who using his physical powers to save a tribal girl from Jharkhand from the clutches of a pimp. The name Higuita stands as a larger image of a hero breaking his comfort zone.

Surprisingly, it’s one of the fewest works in Malayalam literature premised on football, or in this case a footballer. Higuita metaphor couldn’t have been more appropriate for these times in Kerala football—they need a hero to come out of the comfort zone and be the game’s redeemer, when the applause for him exceeds those for Tendulkar and the over-ripe veterans.

📣 The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines

For all the latest Sports News, download Indian Express App.