ISL: Football with a Bollywood kick

Flux in India's popular culture lets me club two subjects closest to my heart this week. The first is Bollywood, an area I have been writing on for years without excuse. The second is football, an area I wanted to write on for years but was too lazy to find an excuse. The flux pertains to new-age professional football arriving in this country by way of Indian Super League.

Everything here has always been about Bollywood and cricket, isn't it, so when football gave an authentic full-on shot at wooing India last Sunday, it did seem like a new twist. Over the course of the first round of matches, though, one thing has become clear.ISL will not wholly be about football just as IPL was never intended to exclusively be about cricket. For a start, football is clearly piggybacking on Bollywood and cricket for its big bang in India. The teams have all been mostly picked up by Bollywood stars and cricket superstars (along with a couple of noted European clubs such as Atlético de Madrid and ACF Fiorentina, but that would hardly be of interest to regular viewers here). More importantly, trends at ISL are underlining what IPL already told us.

We live in an era when the name of the game is television sport. On and off the pitch, everything has to be served to ensure TV ratings do not fall. So, IPL lets cricket be reformatted into a Twenty-20 slim-fit that does not make the game seem too bloated for Gen-Now patience. The right media footage ensures the frenzy is as much about Shah Rukh Khan engaging in a fracas with guards at Wankhede or Preity Zinta accusing ex-beau Ness Wadia of molestation at a match, as it is about performances of the various teams. On cue, ISL too promises to mix football with Bollywood, cricket and all the drama that the combo promises. Ranbir Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan, John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan will be prime draws on the ISL screens along with Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli. All of them will be regularly visible in the stands because they co-own some team or the other. Plus, be sure there will be the starry appearances once in a while (MLB style movie promotions on the pitch would seem a lucrative idea).

For special occasions such as what we saw on the opening night there is always Priyanka Chopra - or whichever top heroine has free dates to allot - to shimmy shake through a live show. It all makes for feisty television, a new sort of circus coming straight into your living rooms to serve a cocktail of sport and glamour. The cocktail of course is meant to stoke the dormant prospects of football in India, something that the I-League has failed to do. The whole ISL experiment of putting a smattering of retired superstars (some have cruelly dismissed them has-beens of world football) in the same team shirts as the desi boys is supposed to raise the bar on football quality in our country. Doubtful if anyone is honestly thinking about that bit, though. For now, television has found a new ploy in football to woo quick ratings.