The Indian Super League "will start on Sunday with typical Indian largesse, flinging together the social and celebrity elites and attempting to tap into the passion for the beautiful game in pockets across the nation," according to Saptarshi Ray on the London GUARDIAN's Talking Sport blog. The states of West Bengal, Maharashtra, Goa and Kerala "have had various versions of semi-professional football for decades, and everything that came with them: passion, partisanship, rowdy fans, the occasional lathi charge." But until this brainchild of the All India Football Federation and the sponsors the Reliance Group, "the current I-League format remains a disparate collection of mini-leagues." So "where does the ISL fit in?" The idea, similar to the North American Soccer League and MLS in the '70s and '90s, Japan’s J-League in the '90s and Australia’s A-League in the '00s, "is to get mature international players to pass on their skills, experience and attitude to a domestic pool of talent that is ready to take the next leap through a spritzed-up, eight-team national league." Mumbai City FC player Fredrik Ljungberg said, "There’s great excitement here, it reminds me a little of when I went to America -- Seattle didn’t exist as a club before I went so we tried to tap into the passion for the game in the north-west and they can get 40,000–50,000 per game now." Of course the creation of a "cash-rich, bombastic league in a country whose national team is embroiled in crisis, even facing a funding controversy before the current Asian Games in South Korea, may find sympathy among Premier League fans." But India’s problems "stem as much from lack of finance as a dearth of fresh talent." Its most prominent cricketers "stare down on mere mortals from gigantic billboards while many Indians would struggle to name their football captain, Sunil Chhetri." So the "razzmatazz of a new league leaves some ambivalent and it is easy to be sniffy," but the hope is there will be money pumped into the game, more training facilities and a raising of ambition and awareness. There also comes that word "universally loathed"-- the franchise. But then "is Kerala Blasters any more eccentric a name" than the Chennai Super Kings of the Indian Premier League? The hope is that, whatever entertainment the ISL provides this autumn, "the long-term benefits will drip down and inspire those boys nutmegging their way around the back streets of Mumbai, the parks of Kochi, the beaches of Panaji and the alleys of Kolkata, that there might just be more to life than cricket" (GUARDIAN, 10/8).
