AIFF: For God’s Sake Let Us See The Dance of the Peacocks!

There is popular phrase in Hindi “Jungle Mein Mor Nacha Kisne Dekha ?” . The phrase laments the fact that when peacocks dance in the jungle, none gets to see it. The phrase perfectly captures the sentiments of thousands of Indian football lovers in recent times.

The Indian team put up a spectacular performance during the recent ACF Challenge cup qualifiers, however none of the fans got to see it. Jeje’s explosion into the national football scene with 4 goals in 3 games was seen by none. The same story with the Olympic qualifiers. I waited for a day, two days and a few weeks, hoping someone would put up a five-minute video on Youtube, but none is yet to be found till today.

Can one imagine what even a short Video of the young Indian players gleefully shooting goals on the Pakistani net could have done to fire up the public on Indian football ? What a great opportunity wasted !

Yes, we can debate endlessly about AIFF not having signed contracts with TV channels etc etc, but in this day and age what prevents the AIFF from atleast using a hand-held HD camcorder to record the games and making a summary available to news channels and the internet ?

What prevents the AIFF from assigning two of the staff members that travel with the team this incremental job during the games? AIFF needs to be more imaginative in using all opportunities that modern media and technologies offers in making professional Indian football visible to the population.

I have the following suggestions to AIFF:

1. Purchase two HD Video camcorders for each of the national teams (Youth and Senior teams)
2. Assign two of the staff who travel with a national teams, the incremental job of recording the game (instead of twiddling their thumbs) near each of the goal posts.
3. Set a “video-news-release” group in AIFF.
   1. The group should be chartered to release a 5-minute video summary Indian football (National teams, I-league) etc to various media and news channels in addition to posting on AIFF website and Youtube
   2. The group should solicit video updates from various I-league teams and along with Videos from any national team events, package them into a weekly 5 minute summary of the football scene in India.
   3. The weekly summary should be released to news media, TV channels and Youtube every week
   4. Most of the work can be done by young passionate interns located anywhere in India using the Internet to communicate

While its all fine and dandy to wait for God to assign a lucrative TV channel deal to AIFF, people within the federation needs to think out-of-the box a little and exploit the many opportunities the Internet and new media technoligees offer to get the word out about Indian football even on a low budget. Some innovative Indian clubs like Pune FC are already doing this, AIFF needs to pick a leaf from such clubs.

I know AIFF is working hard and doing good work in recent times, but it needs to become more innovative in these marketing aspects of the game. Its about time the Indian public gets to see the Peacocks dance or may I say, see the Blue Tigers roar !!