The AIFF is striking the right tone and mouthing the right words, but the conflict between lucre and tradition will not be easy to reconcile. The question remains, will Indian football survive the battle?

On July 3, All India Football Federation President Praful Patel met with the representatives of the I-League clubs in New Delhi, where he said, “We don’t want to pack up the I-League. It should continue. But ultimately there should be a roadmap of Indian Football. Two Leagues cannot go on permanently.”

Indian football faces immediate uncertainties, concerns swirl around the question of which the top-division football league is in India, and the coming days will reveal if a crisis can be averted.

What are the issues?

At the heart of the matter are the All India Football Federation’s attempts to sideline and forcefully relegate an entire crop of clubs plying their trade in India’s top-division football and to facilitate the installation of the Indian Super League, a private tournament owned by Football Sports Development Ltd., as the sole premier football league in the country. An AIFF source, speaking to ESPN, said that the federation was contract-bound as per the ‘Master Rights Agreement’ signed in 2010 to make ISL the senior-most League in India and that the “AIFF has no way out of it”.

On July 3, Mr. Patel said he would approach the Asian Football Federation to ask for approval of the maintenance of the status quo in Indian Football while the stakeholders try to reach a consensus.

The AIFF, the national administrative body for the sport in India, has said there would be a decision on the matter after the next AIFF Executive Meeting, currently scheduled to happen on July 9.

What is I-League?

The I-League is the official top division football tournament in India. The tournament was started in 2007 by the AIFF, replacing the decades-old National Football League. Initially, it was broadcasted and marketed by Zee Network, the AIFF’s commercial partner at the time — this was a relationship that began in 2004 with a 10-year contract.

The I-League follows the Promotion/Relegation (Pro/Rel) system. In this format the bottom-placed team (points-wise) in the league at the end of a season is relegated to the lower division for the subsequent season and the winner of the lower division is given the opportunity to play in the I-League for the upcoming year. This format is in line with the majority of leagues worldwide and ensures that the top division is connected to the lower football networks in the country. The winner of the I-League also gets a spot in the Asian Football Confederation’s continental tournaments, namely the AFC Cup and AFC Champions League.

The I-League was beset by multiple problems from the outset. It faced acute lack of viewership, delayed payments from AIFF, and erratic TV coverage. Zee Networks broadcasted the I-League in their less popular and new Zee Sports channel instead of their more popular Ten Sports. Zee Sports was not available on most cable platforms at the time, and this hurt the league’s viewership numbers and promotion efforts. Not surprisingly, the AIFF-Zee deal didn’t last long and was soon dropped.

Master Rights Agreement Between FSDL and AIFF

In 2010, the AIFF announced an all-encompassing deal with IMG-RIL, a joint venture between Reliance Industries and IMG Worldwide. The deal was valued at ₹700 crore for a period of 15 years.

Agreement included the development of Football in India from the grassroots and creation of a sustainable platform. IMG-RIL got exclusive commercial rights such as rights to sponsorship, advertising, broadcasting, merchandising, IP and rights to create, develop and administer a new professional football league in India. The deal basically gave IMG-RIL extensive control over Indian Football including I-League.

The immediate effect of the MRA on the I-League was that the tournament lost its national broadcaster. I-League had no TV telecast for the whole of the 2010-11 season and though IMG-RIL later struck a telecast agreement with Zee Sports, the production quality was poor with lower number of cameras being used and reduction in the number of matches telecasted.

With no share in TV broadcast revenue, teams depended on other revenue streams such as shirt sponsorships and advertisements and these weren’t lucrative due to the overall condition of the league and sport. These issues notwithstanding, things were only getting much worse for the I-League.

ISL and I-League

IMG-RIL in 2013 announced the launch of a brand-new league called Indian Super League. Initially consisting of eight new teams, it was modelled on the highly successful IPL format with city-based franchisee rights being sold to the best bidders. The holding company of ISL is Football Sport Development Ltd (FSDL) and owned by RIL, RIL-IMG JV and Star Networks (IMG-RIL JV later sold their stakes to RIL). The Franchisees signed a 15-year agreement with FSDL in which they agreed to pay FSDL around ₹15 crore per season as Franchisee Fees (range between ₹12 and ₹18 crore) and in return FSDL assured them of high-quality broadcast, promotion and most importantly no Pro/Rel meaning unlike I-League the ISL didn’t relegate bottom-placed teams and didn’t provide a path to promotion for lower-tier sides. The ISL, for its first three seasons was a two-month sporting extravaganza conducted during the break period in between I-League campaigns. Star Networks also got the telecast rights of the I-League in this period.

The double standards in the treatment meted out by the AIFF and FSDL to these two leagues were soon apparent. On the one hand was the poorly treated I-League which was officially still the top division tournament in the nation. On the other hand was the well promoted Indian Super League which enjoyed much superior production quality and neat coverage despite not being recognised by the AFC and being completely private and closed.

AIFF’s road map to hell

On May 17, 2016, at a meeting attended by all the stakeholders, the AIFF unveiled a road map which proposed a 3-tier league system with the ISL at the top and I-League moved to the lower tiers.

The proposal was heavily resented by I-League clubs and immediately triggered the exit of three Goan sides, namely Dempo, Salgaokar FC and Sporting Club de Goa, for the upcoming season.

Salgaokar and Sporting Club in a joint statement explained the move: ‘’Not only does [the proposal] relegate the I-League to a second-tier league, but also does away with promotion, thereby replacing merit with a franchisee fee as the primary criteria for participating in the top league.”

In fact, the exodus of clubs from I-League had begun much earlier — Royal Wahingdoh, a club from Meghalaya, left after a successful debut campaign in I-League for the 2014-15 season along with two Pune-based clubs, Pune FC and Bharat FC.

The AIFF and FSDL couldn’t activate the proposal they floated; their proposal had called for relegation of I-League clubs before the start of 2017-18 season, but Aizawl FC threw a spanner into those plans.

In the preceding season of 2016-17, this small side from Mizoram, led by their coach, Khalid Jamil pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Indian Football history by winning the I-League. Aizawl FC beat overwhelming odds to emerge as champions, overcoming giants such as East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Bengaluru FC. This put AIFF and FSDL officials in a dock because implementing the road map now meant relegating the champions. Federation found it difficult to relegate the very side who qualified for AFC tournaments and was thus going to represent the country in Asian Club competitions without causing international ridicule and national condemnation. Aizawl club officials also threatened to fast unto death if they were relegated.

The AIFF petitioned the AFC that year to recognise ISL as National “Knockout Tournament”, discontinued Federation Cup (a 40-year-old club knockout tournament), and the winner of ISL was thereafter awarded a spot in the AFC’s continental AFC Cup. The ISL’s winning AFC approval and qualification helped convince Bengaluru FC, a highly successful and popular side in the I-League, to jump to the ISL. The newly-created Jamshedpur FC, owned by Tata Group, too was added to the ISL but the highly-popular Kolkata duo Mohun Bagan and East Bengal couldn’t make the cut. With these changes, the ISL was expanded to 10 teams and the tournament duration extended to five months.

I-League’s Resurgence

The I-league had long been seeing closely-fought title races and, starting 2016, it saw a previously unheralded side lifting the trophy on the last day of the league for three seasons continuously. Average stadium attendance jumped by nearly 50% to 10,280 in the season after Bengaluru FC left to join the ISL, proving that this wasn’t a blip. The I-League saw its attendance numbers remain the same in the next season but with a 33% growth in the cumulative figures due to an increased number of matches.

Lack of State representation was a long-pending issue which was finally resolved with the I-League featuring teams from ten different States, namely, Kerala, Odisha, Jammu Kashmir, Punjab, Bengal, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Manipur, Mizoram and Meghalaya.

The resurgence was driven by the I-League’s capturing of the market in India’s traditional football hotspots, some of which the ISL never catered to. Amidst these positive developments, I-League sides continued to suffer from second-class treatment in comparison with their ISL counterparts. Prior to the start of the I-League 2018-19 campaign, the AIFF-FSDL delayed the release of the schedule while the ISL clubs were formally communicated much earlier. An I-League club official I spoke to, who did not wish to be named, says that this affected the ability of the club to attract sponsors with the lack of crucial details such as tournament schedule from the federation, making their proposal less attractive to prospective sponsors.

These issues aside, the rise in viewership and exciting title races with unexpected results caused a rise in the I-League’s stock, which was in contrast with the diminishing reputation for the ISL.

Troubles with ISL

After reaching a peak average attendance of 27,111 in its second season, the ISL saw a decline for three years extending to the latest season, which was the lowest in its history with average attendance of 13,155. Since the expansion of the season duration in 2017, the attendance has taken a tumble for the worse and this was despite adding two popular sides to its rooster (Jamshedpur FC and Bengaluru FC). The ISL’s attendance issue has got to do partially with its TV-friendly format wherein most of the matches are scheduled for the weekdays, targeting the primetime evening TV slot.

We now know that at least three teams in the ISL are facing serious problems. Delhi Dynamos was reportedly considering a change in venues, though that now seems less likely. Meanwhile, Pune City and Kerala Blasters are facing financial troubles. Pune FC players Iain Hume and Ashique Kuruniyan have written to the AIFF, complaining about the non-payment of dues by the ISL’s Pune-based Franchisee. Shortly after this, came reports of Pune City FC winding down operations. But the club sought to quash these rumours saying that it was “in fact looking at relocating to a new city”. Kerala Blasters, in documents submitted to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, reported an upwards of ₹100 crore in cumulative net losses over the period of four years, with the loss suffered in the latest season being ₹30 crore. Bengaluru FC CEO spoke with ESPN back in March about the need for a unified League with Pro/Rel, stressing that the ISL teams were losing far more money than I-League teams: “We were in I-League two years ago. We know the numbers in I-League and we know know the numbers in ISL”. For a tournament set up to carry the mantle of nurturing Indian Football, these developments are highly concerning.

Halfway into the 2018-19 season, FSDL announced that they were not going to broadcast half of the remaining matches. This came as a bitter shock for I-League clubs since they had earlier been assured of full broadcast by the AIFF. This prompted many of the I-League clubs to band together in an alliance and renew the pressure on the federation to address their long-pending concerns. In February, they sent a letter to the AIFF requesting a meeting with the AIFF President. The letter elicited no response from the AIFF and this triggered the boycott of the AIFF-organised Hero Super Cup in March. The AIFF disciplinary committee slapped fines of ₹10 lakh for all the clubs except East Bengal, which was levied only ₹5 lakh, and Mohun Bagan, whose fine amount wasn’t determined because they didn’t register any team for the tournament.

Two weeks back, reports emerged that the FSDL was pressurising AIFF to declare ISL as the top division and to hike the fines imposed on I-League Clubs. Later it was confirmed that the AIFF did decide to hike the fines slapped on the clubs that boycotted the Super Cup. The AIFF has made a significant increase in fines, to ₹22 lakh for East Bengal and ₹27 lakh each for the rest of the clubs except Mohun Bagan whose fine is still undecided.

After the earlier media reports, I-League clubs viewed these developments as confirmation of the national federation coming under the pressure of the marketing partners. In a joint statement issued by the seven I-League clubs on July 24, they said, “[The] refusal of the President of AIFF to meet the I-League clubs in spite of several requests and subsequent vindictive actions specifically towards the I-League clubs, combined with coercive and blackmailing attitude of FSDL towards AIFF, combined with the coercive and black mailing attitude of FSDL towards IFF by refusing to make payments pushes the game to an uncertain future’’. These clubs have announced their intent to take the matter to the court should the AIFF’s decision go against them.

The rebel I-League club coalition had proposed a unified league consisting of 20 clubs from both the ISL and the I-League, but big questions exist regarding its viability, and it is unlikely that the FSDL will ever agree to that.

The proposals made during the AIFF President Praful Patel’s July 3 meetiing with the I-League Clubs show that the AIFF is concerned about the potential backlash from many sections in case of an adverse decision against the I-League. The AIFF has offered to try and resolve all the issues, including the complaints around broadcast and scheduling, that have plagued the I-league in the past few seasons. The AIFF is hoping to somehow soften the noise made by their widely expected move to elevate the ISL to top division status. The I-League clubs have been provided with a 24-hour timeframe to respond to the proposals discussed in their meeting with Mr. Patel. An AFC-FIFA report for Indian Football from 2018 had called for a unified league in the country and made it clear that the country can’t have two leagues running side by side. This means that should the AIFF install the ISL as the top division and gain the AFC’s approval, then I-League stands to be at real risk of extinction unless the AIFF convinces the AFC to make an exemption and buys more time.

What is certain is the fact that in the long run the AIFF’s decision will leave a deep impact on Indian football. As of now, the AIFF runs the risk of alienating and cutting off a significant section of the sport’s support base and ecosystem from the top level, meaning they have to tread carefully and take a decision that is only in the interest of the nation and not any single private organisation in particular.