Indian Super League Auctions: Revisiting Purana Bazar

When Sunil Chhetri was picked by Mumbai City for Rs 1.2 crore in July, he became the highest-paid Indian player in the Indian Super League. The biggest transaction involving an Indian footballer took place on live television, in front of his teammates and with complete transparency. The ISL, which kicked-off on Saturday, has attempted to introduce a semblance of professionalism by auctioning players to clubs. The staid and silent TV proceedings are in stark contrast to the way “transfers” in India have generally operated. Here is a look at the evolution of India’s transfer market.

The squeaking of a rat woke him up. Groggy and his head heavy, Narayanswami Ulaganathan found the surroundings unfamiliar. It was a tiny, dingy room with a broken toilet door, from where a strong odour emitted.

He tried opening the main door, but realised he was locked inside. He peeped out of a tiny ventilation trap. At some distance, he could spot Paradise Cinema. “I was relieved that I was still in Kolkata. I panicked but tried to recollect how I landed there,” Ulaganathan, now 63, recalls.

The previous evening, he was playing cards at the Mohun Bagan mess with some of the club’s hockey players. Later, he and a couple of his teammates decided to go for a stroll. Being Sunday evening, traffic was relatively thin. They must have walked a few hundred yards when a taxi pulled over next to the footpath and a couple of men armed with knives and a gun pushed him inside the car and took him to an undisclosed location.

Ulaganathan’s ‘crime’ was he scored goals. At will.

It’s the summer of 1974 and the Bangalore native is the most sought-after player. A month ago, he scored all three goals in Mohun Bagan’s 3-2 win over JCT in the final of the Durand Cup. It made him the first Indian to score a hat-trick in the country’s oldest Cup tournament. The winger was Bagan’s hero in the semifinal as well, scoring the winning goal against arch-rivals East Bengal.

He had been in Kolkata only a few months, but Ulaganathan’s reputation had grown rapidly. His every movement on the field – and also off it – was closely monitored by rival clubs who were keen to sign him. Unfortunately for him, he was followed too closely for his comfort. A couple of hours after he was ‘kidnapped’ a few metres away from the Mohun Bagan mess, Ulaganathan sat face to face with his ‘kidnapper’ – Mohammedan Sporting president Irfan Ahmed.

Flanked by the gunmen, the winger was ‘requested’ to sign the contract at almost triple the salary he was getting paid at Bagan. His mind numb, Ulaganathan asked for some time. Ahmed agreed, and kept him at a ‘safe-house’ that night.

Sitting close to that tiny window, his mind went into overdrive. He had to figure out a way to escape before the club officials came to pick him up again. “There was a window in the toilet which was big enough. I climbed through it and managed to escape unhurt. It was just one floor, so it wasn’t that tough,” Ulaganathan says. He went straight to then Bagan president Dhiren Dey’s house, described the episode to him and signed a new contract with them. The maidans of Kolkata are replete with such stories.

Over the years, the international transfer market has evolved into a billion-dollar industry, sometimes more exciting and intriguing than the football itself. Who’s signing whom, who’s selling whom is a major part of the off-season debate, which has its own share of dribbles and dummies. Then there are some bargains, a few fair deals and some ridiculously expensive buys, even by football’s inflated standards.

Somehow, though, India’s transfer season has never gained such traction. Unlike an agent-driven, money-spinning roulette that the international market is, Indian clubs have had their own unique ways of poaching and approaching a player. There have been only two instances in India where money was exchanged between the clubs to sign a player, what is otherwise the most common approach for a ‘proper’ transfer. The Indian Super League, which kicked-off on Saturday, tried to introduce a semblance of professionalism by auctioning smartly-dressed players at a plush hotel.

But football trade in the country has never been this jazzy. Far from it, in fact. Indian clubs have had their own unique ways of signing players, in extreme secrecy and at shady hotels. It reeked of unprofessionalism but as the old-timers put it, there was also an unbridled charm to it. “Earlier, there used to be a 15-day inter-state transfer window when most clubs completed their signings. Since Kolkata was the hotbed, every player wanted to play there and most of the action used to take place there as well. No other city in the country had a structure financially as strong as Kolkata. So the big three clubs called the shots,” says former Mahindra United assistant coach Arshad Hussain.

Romance, fan letters

If kidnapping was the norm in 1970s and 80s, player-poaching has been rampant till date and, on some occasions, also because of the romance.

Former India centre-back Sudip Chatterjee was a Mohun Bagan legend in the mid-80s when he faced an unexpected hurdle. The girl he wished to marry belonged to a family who were East Bengal fans. When Chatterjee met the girl’s parents, they turned down his proposal. Left with no other choice, he then met with his club officials, requesting them to release him to join rivals East Bengal.

East Bengal officials, meanwhile, convinced the girl’s father to accept the marriage proposal. After several weeks of cajoling, the father agreed and Chatterjee was transferred from Bagan to East Bengal, for whom he played as a central-midfielder. Chatterjee, unfortunately, died aged 47 at his Mandirtala residence in Howrah after a piece of guava choked his respiratory tract.

At times, a player was signed on the fans’ word. After playing domestically in Iran, Majid Bishkar joined Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) for further studies. Back in the day, AMU’s football team comprised mainly of foreign players and hence dominated inter-varsity tournaments.

At one such tournament in 1979, a group of East Bengal fans set their sights on Bishkar. These were pre-YouTube days so the clubs relied a lot on word of mouth. The fans wrote to East Bengal officials, informing them about the ‘outrageously talented’ teen from Iran. The club honchos were quick to act. They watched him play and immediately offered him a contract. Bishkar would go on to become one of the best foreigners ever to play in India. (The only casualty later would be that Kolkatans would have trouble pronouncing his name. Hence, Bishkar became Bhaskar.) Another Iranian legend, Jamshid Nassiri, was spotted the same way the following year.

But not all transfer stories were so endearing. Nigerian Chima Okorie was studying civil services in Vishakhapatnam when he was picked up by Chandigarh Football Club. In 1985, he was kidnapped by Mohameddan Sporting and, like Ulaganathan, was kept in a safe-house until he signed the contract. He was paid Rs 3 lakh for a season, considered to be a huge amount during those days.

The story goes that when Okorie wanted to join East Bengal the following season (what in today’s world would be called handing in a ‘transfer request’), he was denied by his bosses at Sporting. Furious, the otherwise accurate Okorie skied a penalty in a local league match, which cost his side the win. Back in the dressing room, he was beaten by the club officials. He emerged from the locker room with bruises on his face. When questioned by the waiting media about it, the club said he slipped inside the dressing room toilet to hush up the matter.

1990s is when player poaching actively gathered pace. Again, most of the action took place in Kolkata considering all top players wanted to play there since the clubs paid hefty salaries which no other teams in the country could afford. “We used to lure players by giving them hard cash, lump sum. Sometimes, it used to be a bag-full of bundles of hundreds and at times, there used to be stacks of Re 1 and Rs 2 notes amounting to Rs10-15,000. That used to be the token money. The players used to get tempted looking at that kind of cash together,” says a East Bengal official.

However, the clubs’ ambitions were scuttled in 1998 when Vijay Mallya-owned United Breweries became the sponsors of both East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. UB introduced a non-poaching pact between the two clubs.

Ending Kolkata’s dominance

The Kolkata giants were further troubled by the emergence of Mumbai-based Mahindra & Mahindra (later rechristened Mahindra United). Till then a mid-level club, Mahindra upped their ante in the late 90s with an intention to lure the cream of the talent outside Kolkata.

They first poached East Bengal’s Abhay Kumar. The midfielder was at the India camp at Kolkata’s SAI Centre when Mahindra officials approached him. They fixed up a meeting at a nearby hotel. East Bengal officials received a tip-off and, led by the club’s de-facto secretary Debabrata Sarkar, rushed to the hotel.

East Bengal’s entourage tried to force their way in and in the process got into a scuffle with Mahindra officials, who turned to Mohammedan Sporting for help. The club’s secretary Mir Mohammad Omar organised ‘protection’ outside the hotel for Kumar and the Mahindra officials, and ensured East Bengal officials stayed away. The next morning, Kumar – who stayed at the hotel under an alias – took a train to Jamshedpur and from there another train to Mumbai, where he was unveiled as a Mahindra player.

FIFA formalized the transfer market in 2002 but it hardly mattered to the Indian clubs, who were busy playing their own games. Mahindra would return to haunt East Bengal again in 2003. The red-and-gold brigade was hoping to return to a grand reception when they emerged triumphant at Jakarta after winning the Asean Cup. Upon landing in Mumbai, though, five of their players went missing. It later emerged that instead of travelling further with the team, the players — Mahesh Gawli, S Venkatesh, Surkumar Singh, Sandip Nandy, Kuluthungan — were ‘picked-up’ by Mahindra officials from the airport and were taken to a nearby hotel, where they signed the contracts. “The biggest worry was East Bengal officials had kept the players’ passports with them. After a lot of haggling, we managed to acquire them,” says a former club official.

Mahindra would also become a nuisance for Mohun Bagan in their quest to re-sign Brazilian striker Jose Ramirez Barreto in 2005. Barreto, who already had 180 appearances for Bagan between 1999 and 2004, was with Malaysian side Penang FA when the two giants were chasing him. Both clubs had sent their officials to Penang to convince him. When he landed in Mumbai, Bagan officials waited for him at the arrival hall. Mahindra, meanwhile, had already managed to sneak him out of the airport from another exit and signed him for one season. Bagan, however, were successful in poaching him from Mahindra the following season.

While the Mumbai and Kolkata clubs were busy playing their cat-and-mouse game, the Goans started to play the game smarter than most. Churchill Brothers and Dempo started offering players long-term contracts with hefty salaries plus added incentives. It was a trick that worked as Dempo retained their core group of players for close to six seasons between 2006 and 2012. “Money has never been an issue when it comes to player salaries. In the 80s and 90s, players used to get paid in lakhs by the Kolkata clubs. Since 2000, other clubs around the country started doing the same. For us, it was always about who gave us more money,” says a player.

During this period, the National Football League gave way to I-League and the new clubs that came into the fray brought with them a new way of doing things. In 2012, money was exchanged between the clubs for the first time to acquire the services of a player when Pune FC sold their attacking midfielder Lester Fernandez to Kolkata’s Prayag United for Rs 20 lakh. “Till then, the clubs directly dealt with the players. In this case, there was transparent communication between the two clubs. Prayag’s management was keen on signing Lester and we were happy to release him for a transfer fee. In the end, everyone benefitted from it,” Pune FC head of operations Chirag Tanna says.

Though a first, it failed to set a trend as most clubs continue to indulge in dealing directly with the players. This year, Bengaluru FC paid Dempo Rs 15 lakh to sign midfielder Pranoy Halder.

There is some method to the madness now. As per the rules laid down by FIFA, all transfers have to be recorded on the Transfer Matching System, which makes it difficult for the clubs to make secret signings or hold players in safe-houses. The Player Status Committees too have been active in protecting their interests.

When the ISL auctions took place last month, the sea of change that the Indian transfer market has witnessed was for all to see — from shady deals in shady hotels with undisclosed amounts to auctions in five-star hotels in a transparent manner and with lucrative deals.

Sitting in the comfort of his house in Kolkata, Ulaganathan smiles at the mention of the auction. “It sure helps in players earning more money. But there was something charming about those days,” he says. “Now when I think of it, getting kidnapped to sign for a team isn’t that terrifying. It showed pure passion.”