You saw the debt, but failed to see the gold!
Now, you have been reading about Indian football bringing Brazil, Uruguay and Panama to India, while running up a deficit of ₹85 crore. Brazil came here and played. It was the real Brazil. Yet, you argue, what is the point of all this? We need academies. You keep talking about academies. Do you know India has a total of 142 star-rated academies? Of these, 16 have four-star and five-star ratings.
– Saif
India owes approximately $34.35 billion in loans to the World Bank’s IBRD and IDA. That translates to nearly ₹3,19,455 crore. So, what exactly is the problem?
Chelsea Football Club Limited owes £2.0241 billion to its parent company, BlueCo 22 Limited. That amounts to approximately ₹24,289 crore in Indian currency. Its debt to entities outside its ownership structure stands at around ₹16,600 crore.
Barcelona's debt stands at approximately ₹35,000 crore. The game of debt is pretty much the same everywhere. The bigger the organisation, the bigger its borrowings.
Take Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya, for instance. If even a fraction of the money they borrowed could be distributed among people like us, several lakh families could live happily. Don't we take loans to buy our own flats and cars? We have repaid the car loan, but by the time we finish paying off the home loan, we will probably be old!
There are financial deficits everywhere. The demands of life and the resources available to fulfil them rarely match. This is how a young man, earning ₹10,000 a month at some company that may or may not exist tomorrow, ends up buying a bike. More than half his salary goes towards EMIs.
A passionate photographer spends money on four wedding assignments, buys a block lens and a cinematic camera, and commits to monthly instalments. By the time the five-year repayment period ends, a newer version of the camera has already hit the market! Can you really expect him to stop?
You cannot dismiss everything as greed.
A migrant family takes on debt up to its neck and builds pillars on a small plot of two cottahs. One must know how to dream. Constantly worrying that everything is falling apart will get us nowhere!
Now, you have been reading about Indian football bringing Brazil, Uruguay and Panama to India, while running up a deficit of ₹85 crore. Brazil came here and played. It was the real Brazil. Yet, you argue, what is the point of all this? We need academies.
You keep talking about academies. Do you know India has a total of 142 star-rated academies? Of these, 16 have four-star and five-star ratings.
I am not getting into a debate about the quality of these academies just yet. Let us look at the numbers in comparison with a few other countries. These are countries that are far ahead of us in football, although population differences must also be taken into account.
The number of federation-recognised, star-rated academies:
India – 142
Germany – 58
France – 32
Spain – No specific figure available
Switzerland – 7
Japan – 4
Qatar – 45
These are the numbers of federation-recognised academies in those countries. In the case of China, a country with a huge population, the available figures are 15 plus 3. No higher number is available.
Do not take India's figure of 142 lightly. Earning these stars requires meeting specific AFC criteria. These standards are not decided by someone sitting in Kalighat or Nagpur. And I haven't even included the neighbourhood football camps run out of sheer passion by people like Dibeda and Shivada.
Now comes the big question. With so many football academies in India, where are the players?
What exactly is football? Does kicking a ball automatically make someone a footballer? If that were the case, why is there such a massive gap between us and them?
Why don't we examine this difference scientifically for a change?
We have discussed enough. It's time to look at the facts.
