For the overwhelming majority of football enthusiasts in India, the Indian Super League (ISL) is their first encounter with a domestic tournament where the quality of play at times approximates international standards.Three weeks after its launch, ISL is very much work in progress. The debutante league scored on debut with its opening match garnering impressive numbers.
ISL's first match was seen by 74.7 million viewers on October 12, a rating of 1.81, considered by experts to be a decent number in a country where football does not enjoy high popularity barring a few states.In comparison, the first match of the Pro Kabbadi League (PKL), widely considered to be a success, was seen by 66 million. For perspective, the inaugural match of the 2008 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the first year of the Twenty20 cricket tournament, was viewed by 195 million people.Since then, the Indian edition of the beautiful game has struggled to pull in the numbers despite the presence of football legends such as Alessandro Del Piero (formerly, Italy and Juventus) who plays for Delhi Dynamos and Luis Garcia (Spain, Liverpool and now Atletico de Kolkata).From the TAM (Television Audience Measurement) peak of 1.81 in the inaugural match, the figure at the end of the first week had reached 0.54, averaging a TAM rating of 0.87. By week 2 of ISL, this had further slipped to 0.7.
The promoters of ISL, a joint venture between Reliance Industries and IMG, have set themselves the ambitious goal of raising the standards of Indian football so that the nation of 1.2 billion has a good enough team to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. India's current world ranking is a miserable 159. The current edition of ISL will run till December.What is going for ISL is the combined might of the Star television network, Reliance and global sports media giant IMG behind the league. Sponsors such as Hero, Maruti, Samsung, Pepsi, Puma, Nise Gel and Muthoot Group are on board, bringing in on-air plus ground revenues of around Rs 65 crore to the franchise. With more investment and better players drawn to the league, ISL could find firmer ground to stand on.
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