NEW DELHI: The All India Football Federation has fixed July 3 as the date when the AIFF executive committee will meet to rubber stamp the decision to declare the Indian Super League as the top tier Indian club football.
“The AIFF’s executive committee will meet on July 3rd and the decision will be taken then. Ultimately, it is there in the contract and the committee will decide on what is to be done,” AIFF general secretary Kushal Das told Sportstar on Friday.
For the record, the AIFF had signed a Master Rights Agreement (MRA) with IMG Reliance in 2010 that essentially gave IMG-R the commercial rights to professional
football in India over the next 15 years. In return the IMG-R, committed to pay Rs 7 billion to AIFF over thee course of the rights tenure.
Crucially, the MRA had a clause that stated that a new league could be made the top division of Indian football and that the I-League could be reconstituted, replaced and/or discontinued (temporarily or permanently).
AIFF also granted IMG-R the “full and unfettered right and ability to establish the league and to decide upon the format, rules, and structure of the league and the teams and players which would compete in it”.
It was under this MRA that the Indian Super League was launched. Ahead of the ISL’s launch, the rights held by IMG-R were passed on to Football Sports Development Limited (FSDL) – a new three way joint venture that included Star India. It is pertinent to note that FSDL is now a joint venture between Reliance and Star, with IMG having no shareholding in the enterprise.
As far as the bigger implications of ISL being declared the top tier of Indian club football are concerned, as already reported, the I-League will be re-named as League One and the second division will become League 2. Both the lower divisions will follow a system of promotion and relegation, but clubs from neither division will be able to join the ISL through promotion. The ISL clubs will enjoy immunity from relegation, as promised in the 10-year contract they had signed ahead of the first season in 2014.
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