WHY TOTAL FOOTBALL ?By Fans, For Fans?

Posted by Ruhi on May 15th, 2018

Total Football is a concept which came into existence with the idea that as an aspiring young kid who idolizes Messi/Ronaldo and sees himself to be at that stage, how does he go on to achieving it?

Well that kid is all of us who are a fan of this awe inspiring sport. In India, unfortunately the only sport the population follows is Cricket and the economy literally comes to a halt when India is playing and Sachin Tendulkar is batting. In this country cricket is more of a religion than sports, so everything revolves in and around this sport. So our effort was to make people realize is that all it takes is one ball to occupy 22 player.

Now what happens to football? What does that kid do who’s eyes are filled with ambition of playing at Camp Nou or Old Trafford. The main reason why people in this country don’t like this sport is because India hasn’t done well in Football therefore we don’t have players/team for a young kid to look upto, which we realized was a serious problem. But what is the cause for it?

Here is where Total Football comes in. We wanted to focus on Indian Football and football played at the grass root level. Why we haven’t been able to deliver at international levels. We occupied ourselves with finding the missing dots and wanted to connect all of them. As they would then provide us with all the answers. So our focus was in finding the sporting body, govt  academy’s, facilities, coaches, scouts whom we could access and interview so that it would help us assess where we currently are and how can we make our country come to same level of competitiveness as we are in Cricket.

We got answers, some on records and some off it and it didn’t paint a pretty picture of the sport. What we got to know is that the lack govt funding, lack of proper guidelines by the sporting body (AIFF), scarcity of technical staff and poor state of facilities was the main reason for the sports not doing well in our country as there has been a lot of compromises made by the govt for this sport. 

So once we got the answers our effort was to choose the right platform to showcase all the data we had collected and make it engaging enough for fans to stay updated and aware of the current status of the sport in our country. The best way to achieve that was with a website which would show all our videos pertaining to the interviews we had conducted, we came up with a section called “Training Ground” which was our attempt to teach the basics of football. We added few other fun sections as well including a shopping portal which would sell memorabilia a fan would easily associate with.

It is an extremely tough and a long battle to change the scenario of this sport in our country. Maybe with the coming of ISL people of this country will start appreciating the talent that we have and support this sport from the grass root level, a sport which has the capability to move millions by their feet.

Heartfelt gratitude to my team at Varya Vega who helped me achieve my dream of showing the love of football just how I had envisioned.