Difficulties with ground availability have caused the delay of the newly proposed – and potentially lucrative – Indian Premier League soccer tournament in West Bengal.
Tournament organisers had planned for the event to start on 24 March with a grand final taking place on 6 May. This has now been postponed because of scheduling clashes between the Indian Football Association (IFA) and the West Bengal Government sports department.
Joint organisers Celebrity Management Group (CMG) are certain that the tournament will go ahead once the venues are made available and that it will take place as planned in West Bengal.
CMG executive director Bhaswar Goswami said: “No new dates are set yet but it is definitely going ahead. It is a government problem with the venues and the IFA need to sort it out because they have to provide the turf.”
He added: “The IPL will go ahead as planned in West Bengal as it is not logistically possible to change states.”
The tournament is scheduled to take place over a seven-week period with a round-robin system similar to the IPL cricket tournament. Six franchises – Kolkata, Howrah, Barasat, Durgapur, Siliguri and Haldia – will play each side home and away, followed by a knockout format, for a total of 35 matches.
Each franchise will feature one icon player, one icon coach, two overseas players and one overseas player of Asian origin. The rest of the squad will be Indians made up of six U-21s, six catchment or local players and nine-14 top Indian stars.
An auction took place at the end of January for the icon players that saw $7m spent on some of the best names in soccer now in the twilight of their careers.
Former greats who fetched the highest bids at the auction were Hernán Crespo ($840k), Fabio Cannavaro ($830k), Robert Pires ($800k), Jay-Jay Okocha ($550k) and Robbie Fowler ($530k).
Icon coaches who topped the list were Fernando Couto ($240k), Samson Siasia ($210k) and the trio of Teitur Thordarson, Peter Reid and Marco Etcheverry fetching $200,000 each.
