If you were a foreign footballer playing for an Indian club in the late 90s or the early noughties, chances are you were either Brazilian or African. But not anymore! The signing of former West Ham academy graduate Billy Mehmet by Goan club Dempo is an indication that it may now be the turn of Europe-based players to dominate Indian football.
The transfer is not the first of its kind. It has only been a few months since former Arsenal and Tottenham midfielder Rohan Ricketts first joined Dempo in a blaze of publicity and then left under acrimonious circumstances. Shillong Lajong loaned Blackburn Rovers’ Portuguese starlet Edinho Jr while Sporting Clube de Goa signed former Malaga striker Juanfri and Spanish defender Angel Berlanga.
Irishman Mehmet believes that more Europe-based footballers are going to follow him to India. “The truth is many Europeans don’t know too much about the Asian leagues and the quality out here. All the Asian leagues are growing and I think within the next few years they will develop at a faster rate than others around the world. That is when you will see more European players try out the Asian Leagues.”
Foreign footballers plying their trade in India is almost as old as the country’s history as an independent nation. One of the earliest foreign sensations was Fred Pugsley, a Burmese striker who donned East Bengal colours in the 1940s. Fans took to him so well that he was allowed to represent Bengal in Santosh Trophy.
By the late 1970s, most of Indian football’s foreign recruits were students coming to study in various universities across the country. Dennis Williams, a Nigerian studying in Chennai, played for a number of clubs in Kolkata including East Bengal and Mohammedan, while Majid Bishkar and Jamshed Nassiri, two Iranian students studying at Aligarh Muslim University, took Indian football by storm in the eighties.
The advent of the 1990s set the scene for the African invasion of Indian football and one man is often credited with opening the floodgates. In 1984, Chima Okorie landed in Visakhapatnam to study architecture and by 1991, he had become the first ever foreign player in the history of Mohun Bagan. Chima left for Europe soon, but came back in 1999, by which time another footballer was doing for Brazilians, what he had earlier done for African players.
Jose Ramirez Barreto started out at Brazilian club Gremio, which had produced the likes of Ronaldinho, but his career only took off after he shifted to India and joined Mohun Bagan. He scored over 200 goals for the club.
Meanwhile, the I-League also became home to a number of Australian players as well. AIFF rules allowed clubs to field an extra Asian player along with their quota of three unrestricted foreigners and ever since Australia became part of the Asian Football Confederation in 2006, players of that nationality have proved to be a hit with Indian clubs.