CHENNAI: An animal who tends to roost wherever he stays. That was how Steve Coppell chose to describe himself two decades ago, when he was being announced as the Manchester City manager. Granted, he followed that up by quitting City in 33 days, but this is the man who spent eight years at Manchester United as a player, managed Crystal Palace for nine straight years after that and Reading for six. Coppell clearly prefers the long-term approach.
Yet now, he finds himself in Indian football, that shrine to short-termism where football officials often make things up as they go, where players are sometimes fired a week after they’re hired and where managers are given a couple of months to sort out a bunch of players they’ve never heard of before. It doesn’t take Coppell’s degree in economic history to see things are less than ideal.
“As far as I’m aware, nobody knows what’s going to happen next year,” he says. “The one thing I have understood about Indian football is that until it’s actually set in stone, then it has not happened. They should have more concrete planning as to what the season’s going to be, what are the goals, what are the ambitions. You know, people tell me there’s going to be a supercup this year. We’re three weeks away from the end of the season and nothing’s been formalised.
“To retain the services of the people the teams want to retain, the players as well, that needs to change,” Coppell says. “How can you plan for next year when you don’t know what next year’s going to be? It’s not an ideal way. An awful lot of the international players have a huge affection for their teams and would like to commit. But until you know what you’re committing to, it’s a very dangerous scenario.”
It’s not that the Jamshedpur FC coach’s view of Indian football is all doom and gloom — he believes that the ISL has led to a drastic improvement in facilities, that it has aided players. But he believes this is about as good as it’s going to get unless things change — a longer league, better facilities, more coaches. “Football in India is at the crossroads at the moment,” he says. “You have the I-League, the ISL. What’s the future of that relationship? What’s going to happen with the number of teams in the league? I think there should be a definite plan, which can be flexible. But the intention has to be to have a longer league with more teams.
I would hope that a longer season with more games can only benefit the Indian national team. Stephen Constantine has done a great job getting India to the 90s, but to go further, they have to have more competitive games over a longer season. Players should be playing for 7-8-9 months a year.
“I’ve compared, on a number of occasions, India to Iceland. Iceland have got 3,30,000 people and yet they’re playing in the World Cup. India have over 1.2 billion people and they’re not. It’s purely because in Iceland they have great facilities and they also have the highest ratio of coaches per person. There has to be an improvement in facilities so that six-year-old kids can go play with their friends on top quality pitches. There has to be an exponential growth in the number of qualified coaches in India, so what’s being taught to six-year-old kids is the best available information.”
Dick Knight, the English businessman who hired Coppell as chairman of Brighton in 2002, once described him as ‘probably the most analytical mind brought to football management for many a year’. Indian football would do well to listen when he talks.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com