Despite the huge success of the recent, inaugural Hero Indian Super League and a healthy sporting culture, India remains a nation that has not taken to the beautiful game.
The world’s leading cricketing and hockey country is currently ranked 158th by FIFA yet the potential remains, and as such some of India’s biggest corporate companies came together with the All India Football Federation (AIFF) and a host of India’s celebrity elite to fund the Hero ISL.
With eight teams, three months of matches, and over half a dozen legends, the move pushed aside the I-League, India’s current domestic league, which will continue to run but no longer under the AIFF banner.
The ISL looked to convert a billion people into football fans similar to the North American Soccer League venture of the 1970s, which saw backers attempt to sell football to the American public by bringing ageing superstars such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and George Best to the States.
Looking to have even more of a celebrity pull, each team had to have a marquee signing and a celebrity board member as Indian talent made names for themselves on a world stage.
As the reigning ICC World Cup holders keep a nation glued to every given Audio/visual outlet available in the sub-continent, football, soccer, 'the beautiful game,' whatever you wish to call it, is still in it;s embryonic stages, as a major entity in India, but the project is very young, in the grand scheme of things
So whether the GIFs was awash with past-it stars recapturing former glories, or whether there was adequate description of what was shown for the first time, from October 2014, if the nation embraces what was before them, in the ISL, no amount of money would be enough to put a stop to it's phenomenal growth.
