The European Football revolution in India

All you Manchester United fans must have come across a certain video doing the rounds on social media of late. It is of an elderly gentleman (and Man United fan) at the Southampton game who breaks down outside the ground on being asked about his thoughts regarding the result. That is how much it means to these fans who travel regularly with the team. Yes, be it on a fiery derby game at the Etihad, or one of those cold, wet, and windy evenings in Stoke, these are the people who are present-day in, day out — singing their hearts out for the club they love. So when fortunes turn for their club for the worse, they are the most affected. The football team is more like a part of their lives, part of their daily routine, and that gets disrupted.

Over the past twenty years though, a new group of fans has emerged. These are the ones who are not regulars at the stands spurring their side on, they probably haven’t even visited the home stadiums of their favorite teams yet — but you dare call them any less of a fan, you will have a war on your hands. And I must say, it is justified. These fans are the ones who live in different corners of India — who love watching the game of football on tv and have picked up their favorites and follow them dedicatedly. There are Manchester United fans in Mumbai, Arsenal fans in Assam, and Bayern Munich fans in Bengaluru, who have been watching and following their teams for the past decade or so, and their passion is no less than that you see among the Kop at Anfield or at the vociferous Stretford End. Some of these fans are so brushed up on their knowledge of the teams and the game, they would put most locals to shame. But for most of them, it is only a dream to travel to the stadium to see their team live. Thanks mainly to the incredible ticket prices and the rather not-so-modest currency exchange rates, a passionate football fan in this part of the world (who has not been otherwise blessed by virtue of being born with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’ in their mouth) has to toil hard to save enough for that one pilgrimage to the stadium of the team they worship. Just to give you an idea, the total ticket prices for traveling to any major city in Europe from India is roughly equal to one and a half times the monthly salary that an engineer gets straight out of college into his first job here. And that is an incredible amount of dedication anyone can show for anything. To make things further tricky, the games are played at an altogether different timezone — with UEFA Champions League games ending way past 2 at night on weekdays!

This extreme passion has given rise to a whole new fan-club culture in the country. Over the course of the past five-six years, numerous fan clubs have opened up around. Whichever city you may visit — be it Kolkata in the East, or Kochi down South, you would come across multiple fan clubs of different European football teams. Now, these clubs are not just random groups of people coming together. Yes, of course, that also happens, but to get the status of being an official fan/supporters club, you need to have members who are actual members of the parent club. So, for instance, when the Kolkata Manchester United Supporters Club was named official, there was a condition that they had to meet — of having at least fifty members from their group who are official members of the parent club.

Right now, KMUSC has more than a hundred official members of their own, and they are not even the biggest in the country. So you can imagine. Similar goes for the other clubs around. They communicate through Facebook or WhatsApp and manage to form this incredible group of like-minded people, who are dedicated to expressing their love for their team, as well as the sport. There are screenings organized at pubs and cafes where you would find hundreds of screaming fans on match-days (lest the match is past midnight, by which time the venues would be closed in most places), there are football tournaments arranged where you form teams among yourselves and participate in an extremely competitive environment. Some of the clubs have come forward to play an incredible social role as well, with charitable football schools and academies being run, special fund-raisers arranged during disasters, and many more such. There are some groups on Facebook which have football fans, regardless of the club they support, and they do an incredible job in spreading the message of the game far and wide and unifying like-minded people all over the place. There is a group called ‘Football Is In Our Blood’ which has almost two hundred thousand members at present, and they are ever-expanding.

Groups like these unify the vast country of ours in ways that were previously unthought of. Social media and the internet has many flaws, but when used the right way — there couldn’t be a gift sweeter than this.

This passion is slowly being recognized by the parent clubs too. Being one of the most populated countries in the world also means one of the biggest markets they could crack into. Hopefully, someday, there would be European teams visiting this part of the continent as well during pre-season tours and interact more closely with this group of passionate fans on the other side of the world. You have already seen clubs wishing and greeting on Diwali or Eid on their social media and players like Juan Mata reaching out on a more personal level and traveling to Mumbai and open organizations for the underprivileged. Hopefully, this is an indicator of bigger things to come.

If we were talking of the football teams becoming a part of the lives of the local fans in Europe, over here it has been adopted to be one. No one needed to be so passionate about it, but they chose to be so anyway. In fact, they went out of their way to be so. The European Football revolution has well and truly struck a chord here in India, and we are loving it!

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