Dubai: At a time when the Indian Super League (ISL) is promising a positive outlook for Indian football, one of the country’s iconic clubs has decided to shut shop.
Mohammedan Sporting of Kolkata, which had been facing a severe financial crisis for years, decided to disband their football team at a working committee meeting on Saturday.
Sporting, along with Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, were known as the ‘Big Three’ and dominated the country’s football landscape for decades up to the 1990s.
According to reports in the Indian media, Sporting’s players and coaching staff haven’t been paid their salaries for the last three months, even though the club won both the Durand Cup and the IFA Shield as recently as 2013.
The club’s failure to meet its financial requirements had caused extreme displeasure among the staff and they felt it was no longer feasible to hold on to the team. It has been reported that the club had to let its foreign players leave after being unable to pay them.
Founded in 1891, barely two years after the birth of Mohun Bagan — who are acknowledged as the ‘national club’ of India — the black-and-white shirts had won all major trophies in the country’s game and held the record of being the first team to win the local league five times in a row, between 1934 and 1938.
The news has sparked strong reactions from football buffs on social media, with Ayaz Memon, a celebrated cricket journalist, describing it as one of the “tragic stories” of the year.
