Phil Brown was sipping a cappuccino in the shade of a beachside bar when he answered the phone.
Asked how life was going as he prepared for the start of his first full season in the Indian Super League, the former Hull City and Southend United boss says: “Life is fucking great.”
Pre-season training in Goa, the keys to a new franchise in Hyderabad and the excitement of being in at the start of something big.
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Yeah, that all sounds grand, Phil. But what’s the football like?
“Imagine you go to school until you’re 16 but you only start playing football in the last two years and then you’re told to go out and be a professional footballer,” says Brown, who played 652 league games in an 18-year career with Hartlepool United, Halifax Town, Bolton Wanderers and Blackpool.
“That’s where Indian football is right now. The basics are not ingrained. They’ve not practised for long enough.
“It’s funny, because whenever you hear Indian cricketers talk about their development, they go on about the basics, the process, and how they’ve been playing since they were five. But things are improving and I’m trying to get them caught up on the training ground every day.
“Indian football is also a bit like the wider society, with some very rich people at the top and then real poverty. There’s not much in the middle.”
Another way of putting that, though, is there is a gap in the market. The same gap that exists in China.
Except these gaps are more like chasms of almost unlimited opportunity and filling them is perhaps the greatest prize on offer for Europe’s clubs and leagues — because if you win here, winning at home gets so much easier.
This is why, later this month, La Liga will be staging El Clasico viewing parties across Asia, and Watford will be dishing out thousands of free footballs in one of Mumbai’s biggest slums.
“Rather than saying, ‘Dear India, send us your money’, we thought we would try something a bit different to heighten interest in Watford,” a club source told The Athletic.
“After all, why should a kid in Mumbai care about Watford if they’ve never heard of us?”
The numbers speak for themselves.
There are 1.4 billion people in China and about 50 million fewer in India, which is on track to overtake its fellow Asian nation by 2024. More than half of India’s population is under 25 and nearly two-thirds of it under 35. Together, the two countries account for more than a third of the world’s population.
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One of the best-attended sessions at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in London last week was a presentation by “the first lady of Indian sport” Nita Ambani.
A member of the International Olympic Committee, Ambani chairs the charitable arm of her husband’s conglomerate Reliance Industries, the largest company in India. Among its many high-profile assets are the Mumbai Indians team in cricket’s all-star IPL and a two-thirds share in the Indian Super League, the brash upstart which has just been recognised as India’s top football league.
She started by rattling through some bullet points — India is big and getting bigger — and explaining how her son’s love of football inspired her to launch the ISL five years ago.
Since then, she said, the India men’s team have climbed 70 places in the world rankings, the ISL has become the third most-viewed league there (behind the IPL and the English Premier League), millions of kids have received coaching and the league has expanded to 10 franchises.
Ambani pointed out that 800 million Indians watched sport on television last year and that the domestic broadcast rights for the IPL have grown from £750 million to £2 billion in a decade.
This was catnip to the executives in the room and Ambani’s speech was still being talked about over post-conference drinks that evening: instead of just one huge market in Asia to fight over, we’ve got two.
“There is something of a football turf war going on across Asia,” explains Professor Simon Chadwick, who teaches sports business at the University of Salford.
“European club websites now come in many different languages. The likes of Real Madrid have opened football schools, Paris Saint-Germain have a themed park in Shanghai — PSG Park is a fan experience zone complete with football pitches, a merchandise store and a club-themed restaurant and bar with big screens to show matches — and Manchester United are planning them all over China. Bayern Munich have invested heavily in a digital presence.
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“Such initiatives are part of wider strategies designed to catch a piece of the action in China and India, where economic growth continues unabated and there is a growing middle class populated by people who spend money on sport.
“The essence of what clubs are trying to achieve is fan engagement — in other words: ‘get them and keep them’. If they can induce people into looking at their Facebook pages every day or secure their spending on a new replica shirt each season, then clubs are helping fans on the first steps of a journey that will have lifetime value.
“And with European markets mature, and therefore delivering little revenue growth, the commercial opportunities being created in Asia are an enticing prospect.”
To get a sense of how enticing that prospect is, you only need to look at how hard Europe’s top clubs and leagues are working in these countries.
The Marco Polo of this story is the Premier League and it is fighting hard to preserve the benefits of its pioneering endeavours.
This summer’s Premier League Asia Trophy was the ninth edition of the biennial summer tournament and the second to take place in mainland China, with Manchester City, Newcastle United, West Ham United and Wolverhampton Wanderers doing the ambassadorial honours in Nanjing and Shanghai.
On the eve of the tournament, the league announced a new, three-year video streaming deal with Suning’s PPTV.
A week later, Manchester United beat Tottenham Hotspur in a friendly in Shanghai, much to the delight of their many fans, including United’s global mattress and pillow partner Mlily and Spurs’ shirt sponsor AIA.
Clubs from England’s top flight boast a wealth of commercial partners, with Asian-based businesses chiefly among them — for example, four of Manchester United’s 23 global partners are from China or India and they have a further five Chinese regional partners.
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The Premier League itself has youth development agreements with the Chinese Football Association and Chinese Super League, and it has been running a ‘Premier Skills’ programme in the country with the British Council. It has trained 5,000 coaches and referees since 2009.
And last season, the Premier League became the first European league to launch a Chinese-language app.
If this sounds like a distraction from the important business of what happens on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in England, that business would be greatly diminished without this missionary work.
The value of the league’s domestic rights for 2019-22, shared between Amazon, BT and Sky Sports, fell by £400 million from the previous three-year cycle to £5 billion. But this was offset by a 30 per cent rise in the international rights, which now add up to £4.2 billion. It is widely expected the overseas rights will bring in more than the domestic rights when they next go to market.
This has not gone unnoticed.
Five years ago, La Liga earned £800 million for its broadcast rights, with more than 90 per cent of that from Spain. It is now earning about £1.75 billion, with nearly £800 million from overseas.
“We have made a big push since (La Liga president) Javier Tebas came in six years ago,” Javier Ibanez, the spokesman for the league’s international development team, explains.
“We didn’t do any overseas development before — if people in Spanish-speaking countries followed our teams, we thought it was good but didn’t do anything proactive about it. But Tebas saw what the English Premier League has been doing and said, ‘OK, let’s go everywhere and see what opportunities there are.’
“China and India are big markets, big opportunities, but they’re complicated. You have to be there and you have to be patient. So, we’re influenced by the EPL and we’re trying to find our place in those markets. We’re closing the gap.”
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La Liga now has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, New Delhi and Shanghai, as well as another office in Singapore and delegates all over the Far East.
Jose Antonio Cachaza has run their New Delhi operation since 2016. He explained this was the rationale behind ditching La Liga’s previous broadcasting deal in the Indian region, which includes Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with Sony’s subscription channel and opting for Facebook.
“Digital is the future of broadcasting, especially here, where digital consumption by young people is amazing,” says Cachaza.
“The Premier League has been here for many years, so we have some work to do. But competition is healthy and it’s not like the Champions League final. Both of us can win.”
Just for comparison, the Premier League’s Premier Skills programme has been running in India since 2007 and claims to have “reached” 112,000 young people and trained more than 5,000 coaches and referees.
The league has had a memorandum of understanding with the ISL since 2014, again with a focus on youth development. It also has @PLforIndia Instagram and Twitter accounts, with content in English and Hindi, and a partnership with Bollywood star Ranveer Singh, a passionate Arsenal fan who helps to promote English football in India.
The decision to move from a traditional Indian sports broadcaster to Facebook is a bold move on La Liga’s part — it also has a regional deal with YouTube for the rights to the Segunda Division games — but also a reflection of the status quo.
“It’s possible that La Liga is finding a market via Facebook,” says Siddarth Saxena, chief football writer for the Times of India.
“It would be with the millennials, who are happier watching on their phones or syncing it to their smart TVs. I’m a La Liga devotee but I don’t think I’d take all the trouble to do that — maybe I’m too old!
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“Phone data is cheap in India and the younger generation are heavily into streaming. Netflix is all the rage but my age group, the first generation to watch live European football, would still rather switch on the TV.
“It’s also got a lot to do with the TV market here. Star Sports is the leader and it pushes the EPL aggressively, and Sony couldn’t match that. They’ve got the Champions League but people only really take interest in that in the knockout stages.
“English clubs are the most popular. Fans were invested in the fortunes of Manchester United at the turn of the millennium and then it was Arsenal under Arsene Wenger — Thierry Henry was popular. Then came Chelsea, briefly, and now it’s Liverpool that’s attractive to the youngsters.
“But parallel to that, there has always been huge interest in Lionel Messi and Barcelona, as well as his rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo, particularly in the Champions League. The TV channels have been really pushing Serie A games since he joined Juventus.”
This picture of the Premier League having the best shopfront on a booming high street, for now, is the same in China.
The Shanghai-based Mailman Group is an agency that has been helping western brands in Asia for 20 years and has tracked the football industry via its annual Red Card report since 2012. Its most recent report ranked Real Madrid as the club with the biggest digital presence in China, knocking Manchester United off the perch they had occupied for two years.
The Premier League, thanks to its presence on all the major Chinese digital platforms, was still number one in terms of leagues, with Ronaldo the top athlete, reward for his recent visit to China to launch a pair of Nike boots specifically for the Chinese market and lifestyle range of clothing.
Mailman boss Andrew Collins said United are still reaping the rewards of their “era of success” coinciding with the “proliferation of the TV market in Asia”, explaining that “those early fans got hooked and have now converted their kids into fans”.
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What keeps him busy, though, is the relative failure of any European club or league to hit the mother lode in China yet.
“Five or six years ago, there was a gold rush mentality,” says Collins. “The clubs thought they would come in, build an audience and collect the money. But doing business here is like doing business on Mars: different language, different ethnicity, different culture, different business system.
“China has historically rewarded foreigners who have shown commitment and patience, so the clubs and leagues have to build relationships and be patient.”
One of the key lessons, Collins believes, is how you value a fan in China or India, where they may follow half a dozen European teams, as well as one in their domestic league, and be more loyal to a favourite player than any club he plays for.
“Fans here don’t have those strong geographic ties — it’s more fickle,” he says.
Another complication is how you monetise your overseas fanbase, and Collins gives an example.
“Australia has a tiny population compared to China and AFL (Aussie rules football) is only popular in Victoria and southern and western Australia, so you’re only selling the sport to about half of the population,” he says. “And yet they’re still able to sell their rights for a billion Australian dollars (£540 million) over six years.
“The big Friday night AFL game might get a maximum audience of 700,000 viewers but those fans have real and obvious value — they can buy tickets for games and official merchandise, and the league’s sponsors can sell them things, too.
“I watched an NFL game this morning on Tencent and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Chinese audience was double what an AFL game would get in Australia but there’s no way Tencent is paying the NFL a billion dollars for the rights. The economics are not comparable.”
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Seven years ago, Manchester United claimed to have 659 million “followers”, about a tenth of the world’s population at the time, with 108 million in China and 35 million in India. The figure was derided for its loose interpretation of what it means to follow United but it does illustrate Collins’ point about fans at home being “worth 20 times as much” as an overseas fan, in terms of the bottom line.
For him, the successful European clubs and leagues in China are the ones who are embedding themselves in the country’s versions of Amazon, Instagram and Twitter, huge platforms such as TikTok (called Douyin in China), WeChat and Weibo.
“The big broadcasters are owned by massive companies like Alibaba or Tencent that have created their own integrated eco-systems, like the Amazon model,” says Collins.
“You watch the game: they push their food delivery service or banking platform at you.”
But he is less convinced by themed parks — “a lot of it is for show and, if you look at those investments, they nearly always involve a company whose boss is very rich and passionate about that club or athlete” – and he believes time and money spent on developing a Chinese app is probably wasted.
“Apps are dead here,” he says. “You would be better off investing in a mini-program within WeChat these days, like Borussia Dortmund have done, with great success.
“The Premier League’s app is impressive but it feels a bit too much, too late. United have an app, too, and it has replicated a lot of what is on the UK site, with information about the youth team and the women’s team and so on. That’s not going to cut through with a 25-year-old from Nanjing. He doesn’t really give a shit about that.”
One thing Manchester United have done well, though, is visit the place.
“The pre-season tours are fantastic and there is nothing more anticipated by Chinese fans than the chance to see their heroes,” said Collins. “They love it. Coming here is the most powerful thing the clubs can do.”
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That might be worth trying in India, too.
The Premier League staged one of its popular “Live” viewing events in Bengaluru two years ago, sending a group of legends, including John Barnes, Shay Given and Alan Shearer, to sign autographs and pose for selfies. The two-day event, which featured a screening of five games, a ‘kick lab’, where fans could test their kicking speed in comparison to Premier League stars, and free shirt-printing, attracted 40,000 fans.
“But there have been no summer tours to India worth their name, which signifies where India stands as a destination for these clubs,” says Saxena.
“It’s always Thailand, China, Japan, the Gulf and, of course, the US. I remember Emilio Butragueno saying that Real Madrid were thinking about India as a pre-season destination in 2003 — it made huge news but we are still to see them here.”
One area where the Spanish clubs have been active, though, is youth development.
Barcelona have an outpost of their FCBEscola academy brand in a rich suburb of New Delhi, while Atletico Madrid have linked up with Indian firm Tata Steel to start soccer schools across the country.
As mentioned above, the Premier League is also busy educating India, although not everyone is convinced this strategy is the right move.
Rowan Simons is the founder of ClubFootball Beijing and has spent the last 30 years working in the media and sports industries in China.
“All of the major European clubs and leagues are getting everything wrong,” he told The Athletic.
“In their rush to win market share and chase the money, they have denied their own histories and abandoned the fundamental principles that have underpinned their success in their own domestic markets for over 100 years.
“Rather than limiting their involvement to elite levels, they have seen the lack of a pyramid here as an opportunity to win market share at any and every level of the game. Rather than support the development of community-based grassroots clubs with local identities and loyalties, they have jumped eagerly into the yawning gaps in a blind effort to promote their own brands.”
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Simons, whose 2008 book Bamboo Goalposts is an entertaining account of his attempt to launch an amateur league in China, believes this “top-down approach” will only hinder the development of the “broad base of participation” that underpins all successful football nations.
To be fair to La Liga’s Cachaza, it is an issue the Spanish, at least, are sensitive to.
“We’re always ready to help Indian football develop with our knowledge but it’s not our responsibility,” he says. “As foreigners, we can help but developing football here is the responsibility of the Indian federation.”
For Simons, the best opportunity a European club could give to a Chinese player would be a place in the team… but only if they deserve it.
“The holy grail is still finding a Chinese star who can perform at the highest level in Europe,” he says. “Such a player would be bigger than (basketball’s) Yao Ming and would have a major impact on encouraging kids to participate.”
Several Chinese players have tried their luck in the UK — Sun Jihai with Crystal Palace and Manchester City, Zheng Zhi at Charlton Athletic and Celtic and Everton’s Li Tie had their moments but did not open the floodgates — and the current transfer of talent is more from West to East than the other way around.
But there is one Chinese player holding down a spot in one of Europe’s top leagues — and his club’s profile is soaring in the People’s Republic.
“When Espanyol signed Wu Lei in January, it was a sensation in China,” says La Liga’s Ibanez, while Mailman boss Collins believes it has given Barcelona’s ‘other’ club a huge boost in the world’s second largest economy.
The Chinese Super League’s all-time top goal-scorer, Wu has netted five times in 31 games for Espanyol, including twice in the Europa League.
According to the Chinese streaming service PPTV, 25 million watched Wu score his first La Liga goal against Real Valladolid in March. It was the first by a Chinese player in one of Europe’s big five leagues for more than a decade.
Brown, who took over as now-defunct Pune City’s manager for the second half of last season, is under no illusions about finding a Wu at Hyderabad FC this season. But he does not think it will take India long to catch up.
“The Indians are very resourceful — in the UK, we are proud of ourselves if we recycle something once. Here, they do it four or five times,” he says.
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“I think their football will be like that. At the moment, the ISL players are at about League One or League Two level in terms of tactics and technique but their work-ethic is Championship quality, and they’re getting better.”
And with that, he said it was time to start thinking about the day’s second training session — one early, one late, to avoid the worst of the heat — and the prospect of a start to a season that will see his new team play four games in 11 days.
“I can’t help thinking they should space the games out a bit more, to encourage people to actually go to the games,” he says. “But football is a TV sport here, so they want a game every day.”
China and India, two growing powerhouses that have grown up watching football on television.
Could it get much more enticing?
(Top Photo: Victoria Haydn/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)