Bend It in Paharganj

Football enthusiast Debasish Roy, 40, has been trying to find avenues for talented footballers to play for a while now.

A new website offers football fans a chance to play tournaments and a chance to join foreign clubs right here in Delhi

Football enthusiast Debasish Roy, 40, has been trying to find avenues for talented footballers to play for a while now. One fine day, while leafing through the morning newspaper he came up with the solution; to create a common platform where football lovers, either players, coaches or managers could get together and play football tournaments. After investing Rs eight lakh and many sleepless nights, he set up magicoffootball.com, a one stop shop for aspiring footballers, coaches, referees, managers and sponsors to come together to play the game. “I was manager for two football clubs, Media Soccer in Delhi and Tarun Sangha in Kolkata. I wondered how to tap potential players, who lacked in confidence and I wanted to get in touch with sponsors as well,” says Roy, who describes his site as the “Facebook of football”. Roy, however, has never played football beyond the walls of his school campus. He also runs a consultancy, Royal Solutions, from his Dwarka home.

The site has been operational for the past four months and a runaway success as far as Roy is concerned. There have been 35 tournaments organised across the world through his site (eight in Europe, 11 in Indo-China, two in Russia, seven in Latin America) and seven in Delhi alone with names like Aloo Baingan tournament, Paharganj Petrifiers and Auto Riders. Anyone with a love for football or an interest in the game can use this website. “All you have to do is log on as a member and click on the ‘Join the tournament’ tab and select your profession (player, sponsor, manager, physiotherapist, ball boy) from the list. You can give a name to the tournament, select the venue, time and any special requirements if need be. Any random person can log in and choose to join the tournament, says Roy. Since the site is still barely six months old the tournaments are organized between three-four teams with six players on either side, for 30 minutes vis-a-vis the usual format of 11 players and 90 minutes. “This is not a professional league. You cannot expect 30-something executives to be fit enough to last a 90 minute game,” laughs Roy, who is now holding talks with schools in the city for similar tournaments.

The website has already registered decent success. Holding true to the site’s promise that you can ‘Work or play with a foreign football club within a year of registration’, two school boys from Kerala , Baby John, 14, and Ramesh Babu, 13, were picked by two football clubs from Chelsea and Aberdeen, the UK, to play. Even Abhijoy Basu, 37, an Asian Football Confederation certified coach,who was struggling to find new projects, says the site helped him. “I registered three months back. Within a week, I got an assignment to coach some businessmen in Noida for a fee,” says Basu, who works part time in a government job. With Roy currently running into losses, he hopes to start transactions on the site in the next three years. “People can sell various football related equipment on the site and I will charge them two per cent of the sales proceeds,” he claims. Move over cricket, football is here.

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