Tendulkar, Ganguly Among Indian Soccer League Owners

 

INDIA, (Reuters) – Leading Spanish club Atletico Madrid and former cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly are among the owners of eight franchises of a new Indian soccer league set to kick off later this year, organizers said on Sunday.

La Liga leaders Atletico and former India captain Ganguly was part of the consortium that won the bid for the Kolkata team in the Indian Super League (ISL), which proposed to start in mid-September and run till the end of November.

The ISL is bank-rolled by Reliance Industries, controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, Rupert Murdoch’s Star India, and sports management group IMG.

“I am very excited to have won the Kolkata Franchise of the ISL and being the first international team to be directly owning a club in India we along with our Indian Partners and IMG-Reliance aim to revolutionize football in the country,” Miguel Angel Gil Marin, the owner of Atletico, said in a statement.

Former batting great Tendulkar bagged the Kochi team with PVP Ventures, a company that has interests in real estate, and media and also finances film projects.

The league, styled on cricket’s cash-rich Indian Premier League and backed by the country’s soccer governing body (AIFF), will also have a fair presentation of the film industry.

Leading Bollywood actors Salman Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, and John Abraham are co-owners of the Pune, Mumbai, and Guwahati franchises respectively.

Chennai-based Sun Group, which also owns the IPL’s Hyderabad franchise, bagged the Bangalore team, cable TV distribution company DEN Networks won the bid for Delhi while the Goa team went to a consortium including Indian conglomerate Videocon Industries.

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