AIZAWL: After winning the nationals in 2014, the state has now become a powerhouse of talent. A look at what keeps the game alive and kicking hereThis is the off-season in Mizoram. But if you weren't told that, you'd think otherwise. There's a Mizoram Premier League play-off being fiercely contested at the Assam Rifles' Lammual Stadium and it's being telecast live across the state, in HD no less.In between the two legs of the series, the ground staff is meticulously re-marking the touchlines and penalty areas with fresh white paint -the Santosh Trophy (senior Nationals) qualifying round will be kicking off soon and that is serious business for the locals here. A double-header with arch-rivals Manipur will be the main draw.Football is everywhere in Mizoram. In 2014 when they won the senior Nationals surprising all observers, TOI was the first to highlight this silent revolution in the state, and how Mizoram could be the flagship example for all of the northeast. A closer look reveals a well-oiled assembly line.Every afternoon, you can spot kids trooping in to do all that a kid with a ball would do, under the benign gaze of the academy coaches. Mizoram is the pilot project under FIFA 's Grassroots Project and in startling egalitarianism, Luangmual stadium's artificial turf set up in 2011, belongs to simply everyone who wishes to make use of it.Elsewhere, Aizawl FC is swiftly getting accustomed to life in the big league. They've just sacked their Spaniard manager Manuel Retamero Fraile for the little-known Jahar Das . Then, as the results still don't come, they jettison Japanese striker Atsushi Yonezawa for Nigerian Sunday Ayeni. The club has just hosted Shillong Lajong, and awaits Mumbai FC almost immediately.All this activity, undertaken with a missionary zeal, takes some getting used to. In another world, clubs are shutting down, fans bases and corporate sponsorships dwindling.And in all this, seemingly unaffected by it all, is Mizoram, proving the exception to the trend. To think that they have been successfully conducting a highly-popular semiprofessional league since 2012, with an investment of a mere Rs 25 lakh per season, flies in the face of the argument that modern-day football needs huge investments.But Mizoram didn't realise just how good they were until they saw themselves on television. The Mizos, short and sprightly, always knew that they had the ability but seldom found themselves within a shouting distance of their neighbours, most notably Manipur which was, at the turn of the century , ‘exporting' quality footballers to the mainland by the dozens.Today, Mizoram can claim to have surpassed the pioneers. At the time of writing, Mizoram had edged out a strong Manipur to make the finals of the Nationals in Nagpur. That's not all. As many as 42 Mizo footballers featured in the line-ups of the nine I League teams this season -a good 20% of the player-share. This is in addition to the slew of National titles -they followed up the 2014 victory with a semifinal finish last year and are favourites for this edition in Nagpur -and top-four finishes in all age groups that Mizoram have notched up since 2010, making them the most sought-after footballers from a single region in the country. Today, they regularly send their youngsters to be groomed in academies in Pune, Chandigarh and Goa.In the 800-odd villages across its eight districts, you can be sure to find a football field, a church and a well-fed sow behind each house. Patches of forest would have been cleared, in some cases, gorges cut and levelled, to create space for a football field and two goalposts. Crucially, these are all clay or mud fields since Mizoram has no natural grass and this is where the state government stepped in and created artificial turfs across the state. Six in all, two are actively operational in Aizawl alone.For over two decades, Mizoram's youth had little to do in the afterhours. Aizawl shuts down each day at 6pm (more than half of Mizoram's 1.2 million live in the capital city). The evening ennui coincided with the explosion of cable television -soaps, Korean and Burmese, were translated in the local Mizo language and ran on primetime. Football needed no translating, and so as the sun set on the Mizo hills, the European leagues came to life, hooking an already-football crazy race further on the game.This is where a group of local youngsters, fresh out of college in Delhi, hit upon the idea to create an eight-team league, to be commercially owned by the local TV cable company , Zonet, partly owned by the state association, and the matches telecast on prime time. The Manipur Premier League can be a case study in how to run a football league, a micro-economic success story.“It helps that numbers -population and finances -are small. We were able to carry out our experiment because of Mizoram's manageable size," say Lalnhinglova Hmar, honorary secretary, Manipur Football Association and LV Lalthantluanga, GM, Zonet Cable TV, in unison. The two are the brains behind the success of the MPL. For a prize money of just Rs 5 lakh and an average player's salary of Rs 10,000 per season, both agree this is a win-win situation, adding that even the meagre Rs 500 spot rates for local ads is an incentive.Football continues to remain a community exercise in Mizoram. A club is usually locality-based and thus, carries strong local affiliations and identity. A season's budget of around Rs 10-15 lakh is met by contributions from local patrons, or in most cases, a team of fund-raisers who go from door to door. "Sometimes it's Rs 500, sometimes it's Rs 5," says K Lalenghluna, club owner of Ramhlun Sports FC."But even the Rs 5 counts."