Indian Super League

The Indian Super League is the name of a new,

proposed football league in India by IMG-Reliance (a joint venture of IMG
and Reliance Industries, Star India and the All India Football Federation. It
is set to kick-off in 19 September 2014 and finish its first season in
November of that year. The league is expected to run along the lines of
the Indian Premier League and Major League Soccer of the United States.
The Indian Super League (ISL) has formed a partnership with the English
Premier League. The agreement will allow the ISL to leverage the
renowned league's expertise in building a high quality football
competition. ISL has been announced to create some buzz around the
game of football. About Rs 400 crore is set to be pumped in to popularise
the game in the country. Cricketers and film personalities like Sachin
Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Salman Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and John
Abraham co-own franchises in the ISL. This will surely add glitz to the
league.
The league is expected to have eight franchises with each team featuring
one major marquee player. Unlike IPL, there won't be any player auctions
but franchises will pick up players by "Draft System" modelled on the MLS
Draft. The tournament has been criticized by many observers for the
threat it poses to India's premier football division, the I-League.
Franchise auctions
The eight cities which were selected to host teams
are Bangalore, Delhi, Goa, Guwahati, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and
Pune. IMG have said that merely spending huge sum of money in bidding
is not going to win a club for the bidder, rather the bidding party should
have plans to operate international standard grassroots football program
in their club based region. IMG have laid out strict guidelines for the
bidding parties to follow in order to win a bid for a franchise team.
The reserve price for each city except Kolkata team is Rs 12 crore per year
for 10 years. For team Kolkata it is 18 crores.

Rs 2 crore must be spent in the first year on developing football at the

grassroots level.
On 13 April 2014, winners of bidding process were announced. Eight of the
nine cities and their franchise owners were declared in the
announcement. Chennai is the city which lost out on franchise interest for
the first edition when its chief bidders the sun group went for Bangalore
franchise instead and a consortium headed by indian cricket icon Sunil
Ghavaskar did not follow through with their proposal to bid. The winners
and their franchise teams are mentioned below:

City/Team

Stadium

Atltico

Salt Lake

de

Stadium

Kolkata
Bangalore Sree

Owners

Sourav Ganguly, Harshavardhan Neotia,

Sanjiv Goenka, Utsav Parekh, Atletico Madrid
Sun Group

Kanteerava
Stadium
Goa

Fatorda

Venugopal Dhoot, Dattaraj Salgaocar, Shrinivas Dempo

Stadium
North

Indira Gandhi John Abraham, Shillong Lajong

East

Athletic

United FC

Stadium

Kerala

Jawaharlal

Blasters

Nehru

Sachin Tendulkar, Prasad V Potluri

Stadium
Mumbai

DY Patil
Stadium

Ranbir Kapoor, Bimal Parekh

Pune

Shree Shiv

Salman Khan, Wadhawan Group

Chhatrapati
Sports
Complex
Delhi

Jawaharlal

DEN Networks

Nehru
Stadium
Format
The 2014 season will be competed among eight franchises. Each team
would have a squad of 22 players each which would contain 1 Marquee
foreign player,7 foreign players, 14 domestic Indian players, and 4 local
Indian players.