Why Tata Group is back in Indian club football after being away for 30 years

KOLKATA: A new football league has made the Tata Group change its policy of staying away from the commercial aspect of sport to doing the opposite. And up investment in football from around ~1.7 crore annually on the Tata Football Academy (TFA) to nearly ~50 crore this year.

“The ISL (Indian Super League) provides the kind of platform that was not there. And it has got better over three years. So, what we did not do earlier seemed right now,” Sunil Bhaskaran, vice-president corporate services, told Hindustan Times in Jamshedpur recently.

So, nearly three decades after the football team of the Tata Sports Club was disbanded — one which was runners-up in the Rovers Cup thrice and had Olympian SS Narayanan, former India captain Shabbir Ali and Pradip Choudhury among others on its roster — in Bombay, Jamshedpur FC (JFC) will debut in the Indian Super League (ISL) from a city where the group’s presence can’t be missed.

In that time, the Tatas created a residential football academy, one that in 30 years has given India teams 137 players. But even after winning the second division of the National Football League in 2005-06, the Tata Football Academy (TFA) opted out of the top tier the next season. That is because club football was not their thing, grooming players was.