Quality of Football Coverage - is the Indian fan happy?

[devesh254]

Hi there,

I am new to the forum - my name is Devesh and I have recently moved back to India, having lived in the UK for the last few years. I am passionate about football and keen on seeing our team and domestic leagues grow in stature. Having supported Indian football from the sidelines, I am now keen on playing a more active role in helping our sport grow.

One key element to this in my opinion is increasing the awareness of Football, particularly the I-League and Indian National team, amongst the general public. To start understanding the current situation, I have designed a survey titled "Quality of Football Coverage - is the Indian fan happy?" goo.gl/zCZT6. I am keen to get as many participants as possible, and the findings are being analysed to go in to a paper titled "Football Media Innovation India - Maximising engagement with a growing Football Audience". Once the paper is in decent shape, I plan to present the findings to all of the major broadcasters and hopefully help with increasing awareness of football, particularly Indian football.

Being the most passionate group of fans in India, I would really appreciate it if you can participate in my survey. It will take 10mins max to complete and is here - goo.gl/zCZT6. Please pass it on to your football fan friends and family in India too!

Also if you have any ideas for better coverage on TV, Internet or Mobile, then feel free to discuss them here. I shall do my best to get your feedback consolidated and present it to the networks.

Thanks for your time. Feel free to contact me for any questions.

[devesh254]

All - an update:

Thank you for your responses. I have completed the research white paper I was writing, and it is available here - http://goo.gl/EmMt0

Feel free to contact me for any comments or feedback. Also do not hesitate to forward this paper on to anyone interested. If you have any contacts within the Indian Sports TV industry you can share with me, then that would be useful too.

[LIF2012]

Sorry, I might be a bit late to post my opinions here, nevertheless -

If by coverage you mean only live telecast, then the answer must be a straight "No". Only a handful matches are telecast live - mainly on some regional Bengali channel and NEO/TEN, that too, quality wise it can at best be described as average. However, of-late I can see a number of print and web media houses are giving a lot of emphasis on Indian football. In Bengal, Goa, Kerala and to some extent Punjab, the regional newspapers always publish previews/schedules/results of the state league/I-League matches and conduct regular interview of players.

On the world wide web, The Hard Tackle is doing an awesome job of covering all Indian football matches live. They do dedicated preview, match analysis of each and every Indian football game and their articles are of top quality. Besides, forums like IFN, blogs like LIF, Indian Soccernet do take Indian football seriously. I have also seen engrossing discussion about Indian football on a number of Facebook pages/groups.

So, to conclude, Quality of Coverage on Visual media is piss poor; while on print media it's decent and on web media - it's more than satisfactory. Here are some of the websites/blogs/forums which are all quality ->

The Hard Tackle -> www.thehardtackle.com
IFN -> www.indianfootballnetwork.com
LIF -> www.liveindianfootball.netne.net (managed by me)