As the sun sets over the giant trees lining the football stadium, the young players are doing everything to raise the tempo of their game. The passing is fluent and the pressing intense. The coach of the team of younger boys knows he is winning, still shouts from the sidelines to keep the momentum going. The last of the sunrays, sometimes, reflect on the shiny jerseys and boots. More shouting from the coach. Welcome to academy football in India.
"Football is all about space and time," says Ankit Singh, the coach of the Bhaichung Bhutia Football Schools (BBFS) team, which is playing against the Dream FC team on a south Delhi school's grounds. Singh's team, BBFS's U-15 Elite Squad, is part of the academy's non-residential football programme for children. Founded in 2010 by former Indian striker Bhaichung Bhutia, BBFS today has more than 2,300 boys and girls receiving football coaching across the country.
Under the shadow of cricket for long, football is slowly drawing young people to become not only passionate about sports, but also develop talent and skills along with competitiveness and leadership. And football academies are having a huge impact on the game in India by providing high quality training coupled with a technical and tactical discipline that has been lacking at the grass roots level for decades.
Football fever
In Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, 3,000 boys and girls play football every year in a rural youth league. Hundreds of children under 16 years old sign up for trials in Maharashtra's Bipin Football Academy's youth tournament. A football and education programme run by social impact NGO Yuwa India in Jharkhand has 300 girls playing the sport. In Maharashtra's Thane district, a whopping 22 teams of school girls compete against each other every season.
Both homegrown and foreign football academies have contributed to the growing interest in the sport in the country. While the Tata Football Academy, the country's oldest football academy, and the Reliance Foundation Young Champs (RYFC), founded in 2015, are the biggest football schools in India, several smaller residential and non-residential academies have sprung up across India in the last one decade.
Among the foreign football schools are the Barça Academy, PSG Academy, Boca Juniors Football School and Arsenal Soccer Schools providing training to both boys and girls in major Indian cities. LaLiga India, the Spanish league body that arrived in India six years ago to promote its brand in the Indian market, runs a non-residential football schools project that was present in 14 cities training 4,000 children before the pandemic hit.
Today, LaLiga India football schools project, first launched in 2018 in collaboration with sports agency, India on Track, has crawled back to 10 cities with a training attendance of 3,000 boys and girls. The project's head coach is from LaLiga and follows the league's training method. "We also help in the development of local coaches," says LaLiga India's managing director Jose Antonio Cachaza. Kajol Dsouza, a LaLiga football school student, was a member of the Indian team that played in the recently-concluded U-17 FIFA Women's World Cup hosted by India.
Raising the level
The Khelo India initiative by the central government to promote sports at the grass-roots level has given an opportunity for young persons to approach their favourite games in a more organic way. Academies are taking advantage of the new-found natural inclination towards football. There is more focus today on fitness, endurance and handling of injuries combined with development of skill and technique.
The BBFS U-15 Elite Squad's coach receives every morning pictures of post-workout meals posted by students. Academy programmes have led to daily workout sessions, twice-a-day training (three-five days a week for non-residential students), better equipment and better coaches. "My positional knowledge increased a lot after I joined the academy," says Karthik Panicker, 19, a BBFS residential academy graduate who started his first season with Sudeva Delhi FC, which competes in the I-League, this year. "The pace of passes, where I am supposed to be, these small things make a lot of difference in football."
Lavanya Upadhyay, who represented India at the U-17 FIFA Women's World Cup, joined the Ballers Academy, a non-residential football school in Delhi, when she was 11. "The academy has helped me both on and off the field," says Upadhyay, who is now 16. "The full focus, not only in technical areas, but also in fitness, strength and rehabilitation helped me maximise my development," she adds.
Ayush Rayal, the Ballers Academy's 25-year-old founder, spends a lot of time on Google Meet every day comparing the progress of his trainees with his counterparts across the world. A former player and now certified coach, Rayal works with the academy's physios on increasing muscle power and lung power for resistance and recovery of his players. His academy charges each student Rs 3,500 per month (the average monthly fee for a non-residential student is Rs 2,500), but brings it down to Rs 1,500 if a player shows promise. "I want to make my students hungry for football," says Rayal.
Overcoming challenges
Rayal's philosophy of non-profit and diminishing fees is not the standard at academies across the country. Monthly fees for all age groups can go up from Rs 2,500 to Rs 15,000 for non-residential academies and annual fees (including academic fees, accommodation, food and competitive exposure) of Rs 500,000 or more for residential football schools. Many football schools have social projects that offer free training and education for children from poor families.
Football administrators reckon it is not the cost of coaching alone that will map out the journey of youth football in the country. While the two-tier league system for men and the lone league for women have contributed to the rise in the number of clubs in several states, families still dread the idea of their children pursuing a career in football. Having more football schools and academies may not be enough.
"I listen to parents and their questions every day," says coach Ankit Singh, who believes the approach of Indian parents towards sports as an option for their children needs to change. LaLiga India's Cachaza agrees. "The parents have to realise that to practice sports is positive for their children, for competitiveness, leadership, values," he says. Also the fact that sports and education combine well for keeping children physically and mentally healthy. The increasing number of children arriving at football schools in the country today indicates that the approach of parents may be changing.
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