Indian Super League: The chaotic and strangely shortened ISL season presents a chance for the underdogs

During his two-decade-long career, Sunil Chhetri would have witnessed the many highs and lows of Indian football, though nothing quite like what has unravelled over the past 12 months.

He stepped out of retirement in 2025 to rally the national team, only for India to get knocked out of the AFC Asian Cup 2027 qualifiers without a win in a group that featured lower-ranked opposition. He then stared at the prospect of the country’s top flight tournament, the Indian Super League (ISL), getting cancelled, even putting out a video appeal for Fifa to step in.

The league is finally underway, but the 41-year-old now has to deal with the additional workload of a truncated season, where his club, Bengaluru FC, have managed to sign just two foreign players amidst all the uncertainties. Clearly, the best Indian footballer of this generation deserves better in what could be his final season.

The ISL that kicked off on 14 February was supposed to start sometime around September last year. At the heart of the five-month-delay was the end of a 15-year deal to run the league between the All India Football Federation (AIFF) and its Reliance-backed commercial partner, Football Sports Development Ltd (FSDL). Quite inexplicably, their tie-up was to come to an end in December, smack in the middle of the 2025-26 season. It meant that there could be no football until matters off the field were resolved.

Before the ISL season could commence last year, AIFF realised that FSDL wasn’t going to continue as its commercial partner. Since it couldn’t find another partner, the league was put on hold. The lack of clarity was befuddling for clubs that had so much at stake. Some like Mohun Bagan Super Giant and FC Goa had Asian competitions to look forward to and retained as many players as they could. The rest of the clubs wondered just when was the right time to start pre-season training; and what exactly were they working towards?

The season finally kicked off with the Super Cup in Goa in October—a tournament that’s usually played after the league ends—in order to give teams something to work towards. But clubs either pulled out or arrived with makeshift teams, some without adequate training or foreign players. In the time ahead, a few clubs suspended operations of the first team; others announced extended breaks for their players and salary cuts.

As the indecision over the ISL continued, some foreign players decided to bail out and Indian clubs had little choice but to allow them to play elsewhere. For instance, Goa lost Javier Siverio, Iker Guarrotxena and Borja Herrera; Adrian Luna, who had played for Kerala Blasters since 2021, moved to Indonesia on loan, as did last season’s Golden Boot winner, Alaaeddine Ajaraie of NorthEast United; Odisha’s Roy Krishna played in Super League Kerala, before choosing to return home to Fiji after six years in India.

It took the sports ministry’s intervention to set the ball rolling again this month. There was a mad scramble to complete squads, with players mostly signed during the January transfer window.

Given the short period over which clubs have had to get their act together, the advantage this season lies with those who know how Indian football functions.

The frontrunners are new Bagan coach Sergio Lobera, and Inter Kashi’s Antonio Lopez Habas, both of whom have lifted silverware in the past, and Goa’s Manolo Marquez, the former Indian national team coach and winner of the Super Cup in December. And for once, four Indian coaches, Bengaluru’s Renedy Singh, Mohammedan’s Mehrajuddin Wadoo, Chennaiyin’s Clifford Miranda and Odisha’s TG Purushothaman, will be able to call the shots at their respective teams.

The 14 participating clubs will have a lot on their mind, including revenue. FanCode was awarded broadcast rights—it kept digital streaming rights while sub-licensing the television rights to Sony Sports Network India. At ₹8.62 crore for 91 matches, each match is valued at around ₹9.5 lakh as compared to about ₹1.68 crore per game that the longer season guaranteed last year. The prize money too will see a considerable dip. Last season, the team lifting the ISL Shield received ₹3.5 crore, the ISL Cup winner and runners-up were handed ₹6 crore and ₹3 crore, respectively, apart from ₹1.5 crore for the teams finishing third and fourth. This time around, there’s just ₹1.25 crore for the league champions and ₹75 lakh for the second-placed team.

There is some silver lining in all this gloom however. Only three teams have filled their quota of six foreigners, which will mean more game time for Indian players. For instance, the first four matches over last weekend had only three sides that started with four foreigners. Apart from this, clubs can focus more on the league this season, as compared to the two additional prizes handed out since the 2019-20 season: the ISL Shield for the league topper and the ISL Cup for the team that progresses through the playoffs and wins the final.

The shorter season will feature just 13 matches for each side, and no home and away fixtures. Though the format is rather strange and makes the season an anomaly, the league is anyone’s for the taking. There’s little time to settle down and a good run of form could change the fortunes of underdog teams, which is more important this season where relegation is being introduced for the first time (clubs are still appealing against it, citing the circumstances under which the ISL has unfolded). It’s a significant change, making the bottom half of the table as exciting as the top for once.

Having retained most players from last season, defending champions Mohun Bagan start as favourites, and were dominant in their 2-0 opener in Kolkata against Kerala Blasters. They will be challenged by Bengaluru who have managed to keep their core bunch of Indian players and a young East Bengal side that made the Super Cup final under manager Oscar Bruzon.

A few aberrations from the first weekend saw Goa being held to a draw by the newly promoted Inter Kashi. Then, there was postponement of the fixture between Odisha and Punjab, since the former still hadn’t finalised a ground to play their matches. As of the time of writing, the ISL website’s latest update is from the Super Cup in December. Everyone is clearly overwhelmed by the flurry of activity witnessed over the past few weeks.

On 15 February, Chhetri made it evident that he still has the hunger to win. He rounded off Bengaluru’s opening win against SC Delhi with a goal and thus added another record to his name: the oldest goalscorer in the ISL. A league triumph would be the perfect sendoff for the legend. And perhaps, help him knock off the feeling that after all these years, nothing in Indian football has actually changed.

Shail Desai is a Mumbai-based freelance writer.