NEW DELHI: Newly elected All India Football Federation president Kalyan Chaubey on Sunday stressed on the importance of engaging in dialogue and finding solutions in order to prepare and implement a “time-based roadmap” for Indian Football.
Earlier, on Saturday, in his maiden interaction with staff members at Football House, Chaubey stressed on the need to place accountability, transparency and efficiency at the heart of AIFF’s operations.
Reminding them of the urgent requirements to take Indian football ahead, the AIFF president asked each staff member to prepare a detailed report of the assignments taken up by them in five years previous to pre-Covid time and highlight the progress achieved with supporting documents.
“Indian football is like an extended family, we all are members of it. We all want Indian football to achieve greater heights. So, all of us would work together to reach the goal,” Chaubey said.
The federation president held a detailed discussion on the system of registration of footballers and the mode to attract more youngsters to the Golden Baby League (GBL) run by the AIFF. He issued instructions to create a database having all the details of the 140,000 registered footballers and close to 35,000 players in the Baby League, which is being restarted after two seasons.
Chaubey said he always believed in the highest level of transparency and wanted the AIFF to set an example of it in the football administration. He told the concerned officials to prepare the balance sheets of the last five years and the provisional balance sheet of the current financial year.
For smooth functioning of the AIFF administration, the federation president announced his plan to actively engage the executive committee members.
“I have decided to assign two executive committee members each for every department of the AIFF administration. It will not only help in smooth functioning of the department, but will bring all stakeholders together and ensure better understanding of the challenges from all angles,” Chaubey said.
As for Chaubey’s pitch for a “time-based roadmap” for Indian football, he made the comments while speaking at the third edition of Global Soccer Conclave in Mumbai.
The event, sponsored by Tech Mahindra and Amazon Web Series and powered by the Government of Odisha, FICCI and sports edtech platform Sportz Next, was attended by 100+ global football experts and senior AIFF officials.
Chaubey said, “India is a diverse country and therefore, the solutions for the betterment of football must be specific as per our need. No cut and paste clarification is available for that. Therefore, the most important part is to engage into inclusive dialogues to identify usable solutions for our own football-centric challenges.”
“AIFF will facilitate the process and ultimately strategize a time-based roadmap to ensure empowerment of football ecosystem in every state,” Chaubey continued. “Youth development, quality human resources, and above all accountability can ultimately bring winning performance inside the pitch as well as outside.”
The AIFF president further said, “The challenges can be tough, but the newly elected committee has the necessary experience to take up the challenges and reach the destination. The problems don’t have quick-fix answers. But I can promise that there will be sustainable solutions, and they will bring results. I assure you that we have already started moving towards that direction by creating various high-power committees to suggest the solutions that we are looking for.”
