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Business News/ Industry / ISL must look beyond the razzmatazz
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ISL must look beyond the razzmatazz

Lessons for the Indian Super League from Japanese and Korean football leagues

ISL matches staged in traditional football pockets such as Kolkata, Guwahati and Goa drew almost full houses. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/MintPremium
ISL matches staged in traditional football pockets such as Kolkata, Guwahati and Goa drew almost full houses. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

Mumbai: Launched with fanfare and the avowed mission of popularizing football outside its traditional bastions in India, the Indian Super League (ISL) followed a predicable trajectory in terms of stadium attendance in the first week.

The matches staged in traditional football pockets such as Kolkata, Guwahati and Goa drew almost full houses (including the 65,000 who turned out to watch the inaugural game in Kolkata’s refurbished 70,000-capacity Salt Lake Stadium).

But in spite of the presence of Italy’s 2006 World Cup winner and former global star Alessandro Del Piero in their side, Delhi Dynamos’ home tie against FC Pune City in the cricket-obsessed national capital could attract only 16,500 spectators to the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium.

Del Piero was not the only former superstar in the match. Former French striker David Trezeguet, a World Cup winner in 1998 and a European Championship (Euro) winner in 2000, led the attack for the visitors on the night. Both were strike partners at Italian Serie A club Juventus for most part of the previous decade.

They had famously crossed swords in the finals of two high-profile international tournaments—Euro 2000 and the 2006 World Cup. Trezeguet had scored the golden goal in extra time to decide the Euro 2000 final in France’s favour. During the penalty shootout of the 2006 World Cup final, Del Piero scored and Trezeguet missed before Italy lifted their fourth title.

Though these are early days of ISL, it is evident that the goalposts have not shifted since the days leading up to the tournament. Del Piero—the highest paid footballer in ISL at a reported price tag of $1.8 million ( 11 crore)—and Trezeguet (reportedly paid some 4.5 crore) are well past their prime. However, their presence—added to Bollywood superstar Hrithik Roshan being the co-owner of Pune City —would have sufficed to fill the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium if the tournament owners had their way.

Tournament owners IMG Reliance and Star India Pvt. Ltd ramped up the razzmatazz element by packaging ISL before consumers and advertisers as a heady cocktail of erstwhile global football stars, Bollywood glamour, former global cricket legends and India’s current cricket superstars. The Indian Premier League (IPL) model, they reckoned, will work for football too in the country.

However, popularizing football in the country away from Bengal, Goa, Kerala and the North-East is a far tougher proposition. Merely emulating the IPL model will not help because a multi-sport culture is a pre-requisite for any society to take to a new sport without jettisoning the already entrenched one.

Del Piero’s presence drew in new crowds when he turned up for Sydney FC in the A-League, Australia’s football league, during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons. A-League authorities were even hopeful that football would supplant cricket as the country’s main summer sport. However, cricket made a grand comeback during Australia’s 5-0 Ashes win.

Generating buzz

Major League Soccer (MLS) in the US has also relied heavily on the presence of over-the-hill superstars such as David Beckham and Thierry Henry to expand to new support bases in a sporting culture wherein the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Football League(American football) compete intensely for eyeballs and fan following.

Kushal Das, general secretary of the country’s football governing body All India Football Federation, told football website ESPN FC that the federation—which is backing ISL—had examined the experiences of the leagues launched in the US, Australia and Japan, which brought in high-profile players at the end of their careers to draw fans and generate a buzz.

But achieving the stated objective of ISL appears to be a more uphill task. MLS, A-League, J-League (Japanese professional football league) and K-League (South Korea) were all beneficiaries of the performance of national teams of the four countries, which have repeatedly qualified for Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup from the 1990s.

South Korea even qualified for the 1986 tournament in Mexico—ardent fans of Argentina in Bengal and Kerala still cringe in horror and disgust at the physical approach they adopted against Diego Maradona in the eventual champions’ opening match of the tournament.

These four nations have even progressed to the semifinal (South Korea in 2002), quarterfinal (US in 2002) and the round of 16 (Japan in 2002, Australia in 2006) of the showpiece quadrennial event. With the exception of Australia, they have also hosted the most followed sporting event on the planet (US in 1994, South Korea and Japan in 2002).

MLS and the K-League, founded in 1996 and 1998, respectively, enjoyed the advantage of capitalizing on football’s growing stature following the national teams’ qualifications for the World Cup—a luxury which ISL can only dream about owing to India’s lowly stature in world football! The creation of the J-League in 1993, though, pre-dated the Japanese national team’s first entry in the World Cup by five years.

J-League example

The Japanese social structure is more comparable with urban India than the American or Australian ones—stronger social and familial obligations in Japan and India could potentially end up altering the individual leisure habit, and consequently the consumption of sport, more than it would in US or Australia. Therefore, it would be appropriate here to take a glance at the fortunes of the J-League over its two-decade lifespan.

The launch of the J-League, in many ways, was also reminiscent of the high-profile start of ISL. The launch PR strategy of the league was to package the tournament as an entertainment product to woo women and the youth, constituencies which did not share the love for baseball, the number one sport in the country at the time.

The J-League was packaged as the Shinhatsuhi, Japanese for the ultimate improvised product. The clubs’ jerseys were designed by Japanese sports accessories firm Mizuno Corp. and paraded in a fashion contest. The chromatic simplicity of traditional football shirts was abandoned for loud, brash colour combinations and huge abstract shapes were printed in front of the shirts.

Sony Creative Producers, which had designed children’s brands Sesame Street and Thomas the Tank Engine, created the league’s mascots and emblems to capture the imagination of kids and teenagers. A few global stars looking to wind down their playing careers were also part of the fray to improve visibility and impart valuable education to budding Japanese talent. Notable among them were Brazilian playmaker Zico, who is also part of the launch of ISL as manager of FC Goa, former England striker Gary Lineker and Germany’s World Cup winning midfielder of 1990 Pierre Littbarski.

The J-League management did not subscribe to a total break from its precursor, the Japan Soccer League (JSL) quite unlike the distinct identities, and hence a more disruptive relationship, between ISL and the I-League. The semi-professional JSL clubs, all works teams, mutated to being professional and representing a geographical region with organic links to communities of the region they represented. The newly created clubs were also allowed to continue with their linkages with huge corporations such as Nissan, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, which they once represented in JSL.

The J-League clubs were also asked by the league management to set up youth academies from the very first year of inception. It was in these youth academies that two successive generations of Japanese World Cup stars, led by Hidetoshi Nakata and Shinji Kagawa, respectively, cut their teeth. The J-League management, like its ISL counterpart, decided to create a financial level playing field by centralising broadcast rights, player contracts and sponsorship deals, and distributing revenue equally among its member teams irrespective of performance.

Fortunes see-saw

All this created an immediate impact—in the first three years, the stadium attendance went up from 4.2 million a season to 6.5 million in 1995. But interest then began waning, and attendances plummeted to 4 million in 2000. The hosting of the World Cup in 2002 and the national team’s exploits in the showpiece tournament had a spin-off effect on the J-League in the subsequent years. Attendances rose steadily year-on-year peaking at 9.4 million in 2009 following the back-to-back triumphs of Japanese clubs Urawa Red Diamonds and Gamba Osaka in the AFC Champions League, the elite continental club competition, in 2007 and 2008, respectively. But there were slumps again in attendances and television viewership from 2010.

In spite of adopting a centralized command structure, the J-League management has had to bail out a club from impending bankruptcy. In 2009, the league management decided to hand out a soft loan of $6.7 million to Oita Trinita, a club which had been relegated from the first division of the league the same season.

Though Japan has been the most successful Asian country in the AFC Asian Cup—the premier international competition of Asia—since the 1990s, winning the tournament four times, J-League clubs have played second fiddle to their K-League counterparts in the AFC Champions League. South Korean teams have won three of the last six editions and one was last year’s runner-up. Perhaps most impressively, out of 12 teams entered in the past three editions, only three failed to reach the quarterfinal stage.

Although the J-League is better marketed, gets more people through the turnstiles, and has a better youth programme, the quality of football in the K-League is better. The K-League clubs are statist in nature, almost entirely funded by the huge Korean chaebols (family-owned business conglomerates with close connections to the government) such as Hyundai, Samsung, SK Energy and Posco.

A K-League club, Seongnam FC, was taken over by the Seongnam city council earlier this year. The clubs were merely renamed when the league was created in 1998 under a rebranding exercise. It is unlikely that there will be any bankruptcies even if attendances are poor and sponsors do not buy air-time on television.

Baseball is still in competition with football in South Korea because of the shoddy marketing of the K-League unlike in Japan where football has swept way past the American sport in popularity. The all-South Korean AFC Champions League semifinal in 2006 between Jeonbuk Motors and Ulsan Horangi was not even televised live in South Korea! Yet, K-League clubs have won more continental titles.

There is, perhaps, a lesson to be learnt in this for ISL. Razzmatazz is great, but does not necessarily guarantee technical quality in an ecosystem devoid of stability and lacking a strong foundation.

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Published: 22 Oct 2014, 08:00 PM IST
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