CHENNAI: The beleaguered All India Football Federation (AIFF) had a meeting with all the stakeholders on Friday and submitted a proposal to run the Indian Super League. According to the discussions and document shared in the meeting, the AIFF has said that the league would be “Owned and Operated by the AIFF under the aegis of its new constitution”.
The AIFF has also proposed that all revenue share will return to them after every season. And the period of this arrangement would be for 20 seasons that would be calculated from June 1 to May 31 of the next year and after every season it is to be redistributed/re-tendered. The proposal also speaks of relegation.
The AIFF has proposed that each participating club would pay a standard participation fee of Rs 1 crore. “Each participating Club would pay the AIFF a ‘standard participation fee’ of Rs 1 Crore a year at the beginning of the season directly to the AIFF,” said the proposal. “This would be independent of any calculations of the ‘Central Operating Expenditure’, however, this amount would be fully reimbursable from the central revenue prior to distribution of ‘Net Revenue’.
As for the initial budget the proposed “total outlay for the purpose of the Indian Super League would be Rs 70 crore for the first season which would be invested into the competition as a ‘Central Operations Budget’”.
Apparently, the total participation fee for all clubs would be at 20 per cent of the central operational budget of the league. “In case the board decides to raise the ‘central operational budget’ by 10 per cent in the future, the ‘standard participation fee’ would proportionately increase,” said the proposal.
The AIFF would retain 60 per cent of the overall percentages at any given time out of which it would retain 10 per cent with the rest 50 per cent equally allocated amongst all participating clubs in lieu of a ‘League Membership Contribution’.
The remaining 40 per cent would be earmarked as ‘Fixed Revenue Share’ allocation that would be reserved for commercial investments. In case the League gets a commercial partner, they would in that case have three primary stakeholders as follows.
The stakeholder too have raised their concerns. They include operational expenses, salary cap and long term protection of investment. These will be answered on December 29 after a meeting. The ISL that was supposed to begin in October this year is yet to start and as things stand it will take come more time.
The ISL clubs have already raised their concerns regarding maintaining the teams despite not having any tournament as of now. There have been exits and salary freeze as well. With more and more uncertainty over the ISL, players have also started exiting.