After the huge success of various sporting leagues promoting hockey and kabaddi, bringing the games to the mainstream once more, The Roots Premier League (Spring Season 2018) aims to promote amateur football in India. What’s more, it has even introduced a women’s league this year!
Founded by Santino Morea and Harpreet Baweja, the unique Roots Premier League (RPL) is managed like a professional league, and this time, they have roped in corporates, CEOs, lawyers, actors, TV hosts, models and more to support the initiative. The idea is to promote amateur football in India and create a community-based sporting event.
Interestingly, RPL has garnered the support of celebs like Vidhyut Jhamwal, Dino Morea, Gabriella Demetriades, Shibani Dandekar, Rannvijay Singh, Pratiek Babbar, Mandana Karimi, Lisa Haydon, Sapna Pabbi, Bruna Abdullah, Upen Patel, Ananya Birla, Nandita Mahtani, Arjan Bajwa, Siddhanth Kapoor, Rohan Shrestha, Aparshakti Khurana, Samir Kochar, Jacky Bhagnani, Adhuna Akhtar, Bhavna Pandey, Amrita Puri, Mandira Bedi, Aditya Roy Kapoor and others to promote the league. Some of them are also the owners or players in the league.
The Modus Operandi
The premier league runs for a 3-month, 14 game week period, in an 8 vs 8 game, with each team having a roster of 14 players. Roots runs four leagues concurrently for the spring season. The leagues culminate in a championship knockout stage within the city, with the four top teams from each league battling it out against each other. There is also a Plate Knockout for the bottom four teams. The city winners go on to play each other for the mantle of Roots National Champions.
Good news is that, next year, Roots looks to extend itself beyond Mumbai and Delhi to other major cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Pune as well.
This expansion does not stop with the men’s league. Now, the focus will also be on the women’s league and women empowerment through sports.
About Roots Football Academy
The Roots Football Academy was set up three years ago in 2015 with a vision to become pioneers of the Amateur Indian Football Industry and build a nation-wide programme. However, the league was only launched a year ago. In one year, RPL has grown from 66 players and 6 teams to 400+ players across 32 teams.
Bold Outline spoke to the Harpreet Baweja (Co-Founder and CEO) and Santino Morea (Co-Founder and COO) and Gaurav Assomull (Partner) about their venture. Here’s what they had to say…
The Origin
Harpreet Baweja – We started getting a few people to play football. We didn’t have any space to play the game, but as soon as Andrew’s (Mumbai) opened the turf, we tied up with them. We started with a weekend tournament, Then, we asked people around us if they wanted to do a league. Some people liked the idea, so we went ahead and took a risk. This is the third season.
Gaurav Assomull – The league started because Harpreet, Santino and I got together and wanted to create something fun. We never really started this league with any anticipation of it getting as competitive as it has gotten. It was done merely for building the community. It has taken off from the last one year and we have now expanded to four leagues and are planning to expand to five leagues by the end of this year.
Celebrity Quotient
Gaurav Assomull – Celebrities are always looking for places to play and be really involved in the community. Getting them on board is great for the league. It gets publicity, and in some strange way, they too like it because it gives them a sense of normalcy when they play.
Santino Morea — The celebs we roped in in our first season are the celebs who used to play with us. We didn’t approach them, they joined us on their own, and we just got lucky because of our common friends. We started with the Bandra league, post which people staying in South Bombay loved the idea and jumped in along with people from Juhu.
Was it easy, or was it a task?
Harpreet Baweja – It was a massive task. It wasn’t easy at all. In the beginning, we really had tough time getting people together as nobody was used to playing community sports. Then, we started building WhatsApp groups to get everybody together and only then we got enough people to play.
Gaurav Assomull – It was difficult, but we have celebrity friends who had heard about Roots Premier League last year and said they would like to take part. I think, next season, we will have more celebs.
Women’s League
Harpreet Baweja – We want to popularise the sport within women. We found a lot of amateur women football players who wanted to play but were slightly apprehensive about playing football. So, we wanted them to come out and participate, which is the reason why Roots funds the entire women’s league.
Gaurav Assomull – The women’s leagues are enjoying far more than the men’s league. They probably never had the chance in the past to play, the men’s league has existed for a while, whether it was semi-professional or amateur and community based. I think men and women should have equal rights and the opportunity to enjoy whatever sport they wish to play.
Santino Morea – We started asking people around us if they were interested to have a league and we got 6 teams with 40 players. We decided to start the first test league to see how it was received and once that grew, we decided to start the women’s league by bringing in influential women so that it would help the women in India, who wanted to play and grow. Through this, we got eight teams and even now that number is growing. We have been approached by someone who coaches the NBFA girls’ team and she has said she can bring on board 400 female players.
