beyondbrics

The answer is: Hernán Crespo (left), the Argentinean striker who has knocked in a few goals in his time in Italy’s Serie A and the English Premier League. On Monday he became the top gem of India’s new Premier League Soccer , the country’s latest venture to bring football to the masses.

The seasoned striker was signed by Barasat – one of five PLS franchises – for $840,000, the highest bid in the players’ auction of the new tournament, which is modelled on the highly lucrative Twenty20 Indian Premier League of cricket. Other aging superstars who once lit up Europe’s big leagues also went for large sums. But can football take off in India?

The roster of past-their-prime icons included Italy’s 2006 World Cup-winning captain Fabio Cannavaro, who went to Siliguri for $830,000 and former France international Robert Pires (once of Arsenal), picked up by Howrah for $800,000.

Meanwhile, the former Liverpool legend and England international Robbie Fowler was secured for $530,000 by Kolkata and former Bolton Wanderers midfielder and Nigerian star Jay Jay Okocha was snatched for $550,000.

“The auction was a great success, in fact it did better than we had expected,” Bhaswar Goswami, executive director of Celebrity Management Group, which has signed a 30-year deal with the Indian Football Association for the league, told beyondbrics.

“This is only the beginning, I’m confident that the league will grow and will attract more and more international players,” he added.

The five franchises spent nearly $7m in the league’s first auction system – patterned on the IPL, which draws in international cricket stars for blockbuster salaries and generates a lot of money for team owners in cricket-mad India,

The first edition of the PLS – which starts on February 25 and will go on for seven weeks – will be based exclusively in the eastern state of West Bengal, where football’s popularity is on a par with cricket. But Goswami is hopeful that he will be able to spread the franchise to other Indian states in the second edition of the tournament.

Football in India is slowing gathering fans. Television viewership has risen sharply in the past few years, according to a report by TAM Media Research. “Among non-cricket sports, soccer is at number one in India,” says the report. “There are 83m football viewers in the country and 55 per cent of them watch domestic leagues.”

However, as beyondbrics reported before, few are convinced football will ever truly take off or come close to the popularity that cricket has unless an Indian player makes it in a big British or Spanish club.

Another fundamental challenge to boost the beautiful game in the country is the lack of any decent infrastructure: there are barely any decent grounds and coaching is dismal.

Goswami, however, has plans to address that as the league’s initial five teams will be required to set up under-13, under-16 and under-19 teams to nurture the game in India.

Whether he will succeed is open to question but the drive to turn football into the country’s new favourite sport has certainly began with a bang.

Related reading:
India – sport’s final frontier, FT
India’s fight league: it isn’t cricket, beyondbrics
Bayern Munich 4, Team India 0 – but will Indian football be the winner? beyondbrics
For sale in India: football’s Expendables, beyondbrics
Cricket: Game goes beyond the boundary of business dreams, FT