NEW DELHI: The Municipal Corporation of Delhi is planning to create its own version of soccer and cricket leagues for the city’s young crowd. It claims to create a grassroots sports ecosystem across its zones, with the glamour of league circuits attached to it. The agency seeks participation from every locality within the municipal limits across all 12 zones of the civic body.
“Based on the concept of sports clubs, the league will have around 80 teams, among which 12 teams will be from the MCD and the rest will be from other schools, institutes, etc.,” an official noted.
The project, which still awaits a formal go-ahead, seeks to activate schools, communities and neighbourhoods to create an inclusive platform for sports participation and talent identification. Once approved, the league is expected to be conducted around September or October this year.
Initially, the initiative will focus on two sports—football and cricket—and will organise competitions for boys and girls in the Under-9 and Under-11 age categories. According to the officials, the project envisions the league as a community development programme designed to promote physical fitness, teamwork, discipline and local engagement among schoolchildren while also creating a structured mechanism for identifying young sporting talent from the primary educational ecosystem.
Among the key features of the programme is its zero-cost participation model for MCD schools. Under this project, more than 1,500 municipal schools across the 12 zones will be integrated into zonal clubs without any registration or participation fee for schools, teams or students. The basic intention behind this is to remove financial barriers for underprivileged children and ensure that talent is not excluded because of economic constraints.
However, private schools, sports academies, institutional clubs and neighbourhood community teams within the city’s municipal limits will be permitted to participate through a structured entry and management fee.
Most importantly, the revenue generated from these registrations, along with corporate CSR partnerships, will help meet operational expenses of the league. Any annual surplus is proposed to be invested in upgrading sports infrastructure in identified MCD schools, the proposal stated.
Further, the league will follow a four-tier competition structure consisting of Diamond, Gold, Silver and Bronze divisions, with promotion and relegation between leagues.
The officials also mentioned that the league will be managed through a digital sports management platform that will help enable a paperless registration system, age verification, tournament scheduling, and automated match statistics as well as the creation of digital athlete profiles for long-term performance tracking.
The project also proposes some capacity-building programmes for physical training instructors and ground staff, and the initiative is intended to contribute to long-term grassroots sports development through a sustained pipeline of young athletes.