Bagan to concentrate more on football

Glamour club Mohun Bagan plans to streamline its activities and concentrate more on football, now played round the year in the country.

"Football is no longer a seasonal sport and limited to the Kolkata Super League and a few big trophies," Mohun Bagan club secretary Anjan Mitra said on Friday.

Mitra said, "Football has taken a professional turn with the advent of the National Football League and we have to manage the club professionally to be in the big league. We cannot forget that we are a national soccer club. Parted concentration and splitting of resources among too many things will get us nowhere."

Bagan, besides running the country's premier football team McDowell Mohun Bagan, also have a cricket team which participates in the Cricket Association of Bengal-sponsored league and can boast of having had the services of players like Sourav Ganguly.

Bagan also had a hockey team that was a regular participant in the Beighton Cup. The team has, however, been disbanded.

Among Bagan's plans are the formation of a football academy in West Bengal, for which they have found an unlikely friend in the form of their traditional rivals East Bengal, though the response from the Indian Football Association has been rather lukewarm.

"We have started a nursery training club, ladies football team and also an -under-19 team. We plan to participate in the under-19 league,'' Mitra said adding, ''we are basically a football club and our supporters come to the tent to see the footballers and support the football team. So we have to put the strength were the patrons are."

Bagan took a giant leap towards achieving the aim of turning the football team into a professionally managed side when it tied up with the United Breweries Group, under the title of McDowells Mohun Bagan, to become the United Mohun Bagan Football Club Pvt. Ltd. The company has 50 per cent stakes in the football team.

Anjan Mitra said it had been urging the IFA since long for a ground which has not been made available to them.

"The IFA gets its sponsors because of the big three -- East Bengal, Mohammedan Sporting and Mohun Bagan. But they hardly pay any heed to our needs and problems. Actually, mostly run by the smaller clubs they fail to understand the problems and necessities of the bigger clubs like ours," he said.

The club is also planning to nurture a team from the nursery level and scout players from the district and block level. ''But all this needs money and infrastructure which we are building upon,'' Mitra added.

The secretary of the country's oldest club said: "We are not against any sport, we just want to put the energy in the right place. We play football with passion and want to add a professional element into it."

Last year Mohun Bagan had a budget of Rs 18.5 million and earned an additional 20 per cent of the prize-money from the tournaments they won, Mitra said, adding that the sponsor had no immediate plans of increasing the budget but wanted to go in for some innovations.

But, he added, that much like the foreign clubs, McDowell is talking with other corporate houses to be part sponsors of Mohun Bagan. The sleeves and the pants will sport different logos. Company sources said they had a very positive round of talks with some of the big corporate houses and were sure of a favourable response.

This year the club has already pocketed four trophies -- the Kolkata Super League, Federation Cup, Bordoli Trophy and Sikkim Governor's Gold Cup. They started their campaign in the National Football League on a right note defeating reigning champions East Bengal by a solitary goal.