The Indian domestic football season for 2017-18 will have the I-League and the Indian Super League (ISL) run simultaneously. The Asian Football Confederation's (AFC) approval came on Wednesday and was endorsed by the I-League clubs today.
The leagues are expected to start in November, after the Under-17 World Cup ends, and could last for four or five months. This will effectively be the first time since the ISL's inception in 2014 that the I-League will be expected to be a full-blown season-long tournament. The last lengthy league came in 2013-14, when 13 teams played from September to April. Even the ISL will get a chance to have a longer, better-spaced calendar after three years of back-to-back games packed in a little more than two months in the first three years.
What will this revised domestic calendar mean for the fans, the players, and the leagues themselves?
More opportunities for players
With the advent of the ISL, the Indian national team has gone higher up the FIFA rankings, especially with a number of young players getting a go under coach Stephen Constantine.
Defenders Sandesh Jhingan, Anas Edathodika, Arnab Mondal; midfielders Eugeneson Lyngdoh, Rowllin Borges, Jackichand Singh; and forwards like Jeje Lalpekhlua, Hollicharan Narzary were regulars in I-League clubs and had come up with good performances across teams for many seasons before the ISL came by.
What changed, which one cannot deny, is that the ISL gave these players greater recognition thanks to the superior marketing and visibility of the franchise-based league. Their best performances in the Indian team have been in recent matches, suggesting the ISL has only helped accelerate their development as footballers, and not necessarily kick-started it.
With two leagues running simultaneously, Indian football will now have 20 teams participating across two competitions, and this will help increase the scope for Indian players to turn out for different teams. The purchasing power of the ISL clubs could mean the best players turn out for them in preference to I-League sides, but that's where the opportunity for I-League clubs to develop young players should be seized on.
Will Indian football have the logistical capacity?
The idea has been to have concurrent leagues running with matches mostly over the weekends. The All India Football Federation (AIFF) and their marketing and commercial partners IMG-Reliance (IMG-R) are keen to ensure that most matches are played over weekends, under lights and televised.
But it is difficult to envisage how that will be done with the limited number of grounds, especially in cities like Pune and Chennai that will have teams in both leagues. Would there be matches kicking off on different days of the weekend, in case of the clubs from the same cities playing home games in the same round? Could there be a situation where both league matches are held back-to-back, which, if you think about it, could be a terrific situation for fans.
Imagine a football fan in Pune going over to the Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex in Balewadi on a Saturday, watching DSK Shivajians play Mohun Bagan at 5:30 pm and then hanging around to watch FC Pune City face off against Bengaluru FC at 8. It could be the best-case scenario for everybody associated with the two leagues.
The fans' dilemma
With two leagues, where does the fan loyalty lie?
The I-League will continue to have teams such as East Bengal and Mohun Bagan that have enjoyed a century each of support, but the key factor for ISL teams has been that they have played out in the past in a window without the I-League to compete with. The best Indian players might go for ISL clubs, but the fact that bigger international names could be missing this season owing to a longer ISL season and the related budgetary constraints should see a levelling up in terms of the actual drawing capacity of the two leagues.
India gets its due
The ISL has in the past thrown the Indian national team's international commitments into a flux, with two of the seasons (2014 and 2016) not featuring any international matches when the regular season was on.
In 2015, there was no escape from the 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign, and that saw a regular period of national team members going off to play matches during the qualifiers. The teams most affected by these were Mumbai City FC and FC Pune City, both of whom lost their early momentum and ended up missing out on the playoffs that year.
With a longer season, and the possibility of greater flexibility with a calendar, national team commitments might get bigger preference. There is talk of a Champions Cup to be held annually, which is meant to have its first edition organised in August this year, but even other than that India have Asian Cup qualifiers and friendlies lined up for the rest of the year.
With a robust domestic schedule in place, AIFF can organise a greater number of internationals on FIFA dates and weekends against good teams, especially in Asia in the months to come.