Indian Premier League football offers a final payday for stars

FOOTBALL has a new retirement home for ageing stars looking for one final pay-day... India. With the traditional habitats of the once-great footballer,

America and Australia, becoming ever more unwelcoming thanks to rising standards and the development of local talent the former international star has now been thrown a lifeline.

After seeing how the jazzy Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket tournament captivated the subcontinent, a group of entrepreneurs have decided to try and create a similar buzz, this time with the hitherto obscure sport (at least to the locals) of football.

The footballing version of the IPL has been organised by a body called Celebrity Management Group, which has signed a 30-year agreement with the Kolkata-based Indian Football Association to run the event.

It will feature six teams and will run for just six weeks between late February and early April. Just like the cricket equivalent there will even be an auction before the tournament to see who plays for who. Each team will be handed a budget of $2.5m and the big players can expect to command a large slice of it.

Among those set to take part are Italian world cup winning captain Fabio Cannavaro (38), Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler (36) and former Arsenal man Robert Pires (38). They will be joined by other old stagers Jay-Jay Okocha (38), Argentinians Hernan Crespo (36) and Juan Pablo Sorín (35), Portuguese Maniche (34) and Spain striker Fernando Morientes (35).

After signing up, Pires gave a pretty clear insight into the thinking behind his decision to move to India, where he could earn a cool $600,000 in two months.

"I am proud to be the first Frenchman to go and play there," he told L'Equipe. He then tellingly added: "And eight weeks is nothing... It is a lot of money. I'm not going to complain about that am I? But I'm not going there as a tourist. It's a new adventure."

The inaugural competition will be run in the eastern state of West Bengal, which is one of the few places in India where football is popular and big games can attract up to 100,000 people.

And Bhaswar Goswami of CMG revealed that there had been some strategic thinking behind the idea. "We saw the hype and buzz around players' auction in IPL and feel it can be an equal success," he told Reuters. "It's a brilliant concept. We expect owners to make profit much earlier than the IPL franchises.

"We are also in the process of finalising television rights for live broadcast across south-east Asia."

India may have the second biggest population in the world but it lies in 162nd place in the Fifa rankings. However, there have been moves to increase the profile of football in the country of 1.2 billion people. In September Kolkata hosted a game between Argentina and Venezeuela and the locals proved that they know a thing or two by going mad for Lionel Messi.

Most big western clubs are also fighting hard to establish their brands in the subcontinent, which remains one of the biggest untapped markets for the likes of Arsenal and Manchester United. ·