Indian Super League

[jayakris]

That indicates that it is a professional team now. Most of the top professional leagues get the best players they can afford from wherever they can find them. Overall a professional league should improve the standard of football in India provided sufficient number of Indians get to play in the professional league. That appears to be case except for strikers and forwards who mostly appear to be foreign. So, we lack quality strikers and forwards but our midfielders and defenders are probably better as they regularly play against better players than if it was a purely local players only league.

Yes, our overall level football has certainly improved in the last decade, and it shows in the national team too. The ISL has payed a part in it. We just need a striker or two to emerge...

[PKBasu]

So, looking at the 'Mohun Bagan Super Giants' line-up, it seems that its forwards are all foreigners (Demetrios Petratos of Australia, and fellow-Aussies Jamie Maclaren and Jason Cummings). There is one Indian forward (Suhail Ahmed Bhat) but he rarely starts, while the other 3 start almost every match.

Cummings has played a season for Nottingham Forest (in the English Championship, i.e., the division below the Premier League, implying effectively the second tier of English football), and two seasons in the Scottish Premiership (with Hibernian, who got relegated at the end of that season, and Rangers one season on loan). He has played two international matches for Scotland, and 3 for Australia (scoring a goal against NZ in one of those). So a proper professional, who was in the 2022 Australian squad for the FIFA World Cup.

Maclaren is the all-time top goal scorer in the A-League, Australia's top tier football league. He won the Golden Boot (most goals) in the A-League five times (the latest being two seasons ago, when he was 30 years old and scored 24 goals). He barely made the Australian squad of 23 for the 2018 FIFA World Cup (getting in only after one of the original squad members was injured), but was also in the 2022 World Cup squad. (Basically, most of the Australian team members play professionally in Europe and occasionally in Asia, so the A-League is for the Aussie players who can't quite get those big professional contracts).

Petratos won one A-League team title with Brisbane Roar (out of a total of 4 seasons there) and played two seasons for Sydney FC in the A-League. One of the highlights of his career was scoring a goal against Liverpool for Brisbane Roar in July 2013. He was in the Australian squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. He is 33 years old now.

Two other foreign players are Scots. Greg Alexander James Stewart, who has played 7 seasons for various clubs in the Scottish Premiership, including winning the title with Rangers four years ago. He is now 35, has never played internationally for Scotland, but is among the next tier of Scottish professional footballers. Thomas Michael Aldred has played two seasons on loan for teams in the Scottish Premiership, but otherwise has played in the second and third tier leagues in England, before playing several seasons in the A-League in Australia.

Perhaps the most shocking member of the squad (and perhaps a reflection of the actual quality of the ISL) is 32 year old Alberto Rodriguez Martin, who has played most of his football in the FIFTH tier of the Spanish football system. The highlight of his career was playing two seasons at Lugo (in the second division, just below the Spanish La Liga); in the second of those seasons 2022-23, Lugo finished near the bottom and were relegated to the third tier for the next season. Rodriguez moved to Indonesia (where his team finished as team of the season!!) and then to Mohun Bagan Super Giants. Really bottom-fishing in Spanish football.

[PKBasu]

My dad always wanted to be a footballer, cricket being his secondary interest. (Similar to Sourav Ganguly in school). But his college football coach told him he didn't run fast enough to be a serious footballer, to his great regret. He played a bit of second division football, but played league cricket in one of the middling teams of the Calcutta first division cricket league. His English/Scottish colleagues in the tea gardens always used to say that Mohun Bagan, East Bengal, etc. were playing at the level of the Third Division of the English FA. (This was in the 1950s and 1960s). Chuni Goswami won the Asiad gold, and apparently got an offer from Tottenhum Hotspur, but we can't be sure if this was genuine as he didn't take it up -- switching to cricket instead! (As Jay would say, 'take a look at his skinny legs', could he really be an English football pro ? ).

Basically not much has changed. Perhaps we fell even lower in the 1980-2010 period, but the ISL has put us back to slightly below where we were in 1950-61.

[PKBasu]

What we can conclude from looking at the ISL winning squad is that we basically have a few top level just-past-their-prime strikers from Australia's A-League (for Australians who are on the fringes of the Aussie national team, i.e., in the squad but rarely starting; that national squad primarily comprises players who play professionally outside Australia). And a couple of Scottish players who have played in the Scottish Premiership (which is about the quality of the second tier of English football, the level below the EPL). Plus one Spanish player whose career highlight was making it to the bottom club of the second tier of the Spanish system. Basically, our best ISL club is like a third or fourth tier club in the Spanish system, or a third-tier club in England. (Indonesia's league, if anything, is worse!). Sobering!

[arjun2761]

That jives. Baichung Bhatia was moderately successful in the 4th tier of English football with Bury FC. Sunil Chettri was a substitute for Sporting CP’s reserve team which was in the Portuguese second tier.

[prasen9]

I hate quotas. We should have as many foreign players as possible in the XI our football leagues but we need a protectionist clause that says that every team should start an Indian striker and play them say on the average 60% of the game ... or something like that.

[PKBasu]

They may not formally be considered strikers, but some of Mohun Bagan's Indian players did score goals this season. Subhashish Bose was the third-highest goal-scorer, netting 6, Manvir Singh scored 5 goals, Liston Colaco 3, and Lalengmawia Ralte and Dippendu Biswas 1 each (Ralte's one is in the video above from Jay). 29 year old Bose is a defender, the others mentioned are mid-fielders.

('Super Giants' indicates that the team is now partially or wholly owned by the toxic Sanjiv Goenka, whose public upbraidings of KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant -- the captains of the Lucknow IPL team of the same name -- are notorious).

[jayakris]

^^ Subhashish and Manvir Singh are on the older side, both around 29, to be considered of potential to help India, and Ralte (Appuiah) is mostly a midfielder. Ralte is very talented though. Liston is very good too, but even he is 26 years of age. Still need some young talent to come through as a pure forward for India.