Gartside's Indian Takeaway!

Ir seems that we are actively scouting in India now, Phil's just returned from there recently and this article is in todays (Indian) paper over here.


Football viewership in India has always been big. But only in recent times have we seen international clubs keen on tapping the playing potential. English club Bolton Wanderers is now the latest in this list. In partnership with OCE Professional Education, it is now offering 10-day camps for children in the age group 9-23 at Bolton with the long term view of granting scholarships for year long programmes. The Wanderers chairman Phil Gartside was in the city, outlining his plans for the same.

Excerpts:

Why India?

We have been offering similar programs in other countries for ten years. For India, we feel this is the right time. It has got a huge number of people with interest in football. It has traditionally been cricket, but we now see interest in football grow too.

What can they expect in Bolton?

Through OCE we are proposing to encourage students to enjoy football with the benefit of having some education attached to it. Fifty to sixty per cent of the time it will be football. In addition we will teach them life skills, professionalism, diet, nutrition etc. It’s about how to be a professional athlete as much as it is about playing football.

Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea are the most popular clubs here. Where does Bolton fit in?

We can’t obviously compete with them. We hope to do something unique by clubbing it with education. Education is a big part of producing a footballer. Like how to make a decision and when to make it and so on. Everybody thinks they too can play football. But being a professional one is the biggest challenge.

On your fight against the big money divide within the premiership and between the premiership and the championship:

It [the divide] has worsened. The amount of money you lose when relegated is unbridgeable. You can’t possibly prevent four or five teams dominating a league and garnering more revenues. But the rest of the competition has got to be balanced.

So will parachute payments help?

I don’t believe in it. If you consider the three teams which got money last year, two of them didn’t get promoted (Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers) and the other even got relegated further (Wolverhampton Wolves). So for me it’s not working.

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I offered Mo the chance to do a bit of scouting for Nuts but he flatly refused.

He wants to try scouting in this country first, which has seemed non existent for Bolton in the last decade or so.

Very ironic that Gartside doesn't believe in parachute payments. It'll be interesting to see the accounts in winter and imagine a £15m loss greater than is reported.

I don't see the problem personally. Ultimately it's about improving the Premier League. Clubs have been too cautious in the past about committing to making big signings for fear of getting relegated and being in a shit bargaining position that other clubs can exploit. I don't think you can blame Wolves, Blackburn and us having a crap season on the parachute payments. Although, we might have got rid of the players we should have got rid of without them.

I don't think this is a scouting mission at all but an attempt to sell a package to wealthy Indian parents.
Nothing wrong with that if it brings money into the club.

It explains the on-going plans regarding the school etc.

Good business sense and forward planning.

chipbutty wrote:I don't think this is a scouting mission at all but an attempt to sell a package to wealthy Indian parents.
Nothing wrong with that if it brings money into the club.

It explains the on-going plans regarding the school etc.

Good business sense and forward planning.

Agreed, but we've always known that India is a big emerging market so perhaps this should have happened years ago.