How Bengaluru FC are becoming the most ideal club in Indian football

There are few clubs who do well in their first season, let alone win a national league title. And if I-League table toppers Bengaluru FC manage to do that — it will be a phenomenal achievement. Even when Roman Abramovich took over the reigns at Chelsea and pumped unlimited amounts of cash into the club, it took a couple years to win something. And this was despite the foundation of a training centre, scouting network and a good nucleus of players already being there. You can’t quite compare the two situations — Chelsea and Bengaluru FC — simply because the levels of competition are so different. Still, just because it’s the I-League, you cannot discount the fact that they’ve done a brilliant job in their debut season. And in the midst of it all is their manager Ashley Westwood — a former Sheffield Wednesday, Northampton Town and Wrexham player and a Manchester United trainee. Westwood’s philosophy was very clear — replicate the systems he’s seen in his playing and coaching career and implement them in India. [caption id=“attachment_1299105” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Bengaluru in action vs Dempo. AIFF[/caption] “I’ve had experience in England and tried to use it here. This includes nutrition, back-room staff appointment, fitness coach and goalkeeping coach. The systems, the calendar and the timings too.” Westwood also uses heart monitoring to gauge fitness levels and has a full-time analyst to assess his team’s faults. With whatever finances JSW (owners of Bengaluru FC) have given him and with the cultural change, he’s adjusted and made the most of it. While some may argue that a cut-copy-paste method is not something to be proud of, then that’s wrong — in sport, things and ideas are picked up from all over and in the case of Bengaluru, they’ve done brilliantly to implement basic European setups in the I-League. Westwood however, didn’t take anything for granted. When he was approached by JSW, he was very clear about what awaited him in India — apart from ‘cows walking on the street’. He was impressed by the ambition and the freedom the board were ready to give him: “The challenge to start something from scratch was exciting. But it wasn’t a situation where my reputation preceded me. Footballers are not stupid — they quickly judge managers. You can’t talk a load of rubbish to them.” But why India? “It’s a completely different dimension of coaching – a different environment where the owners were ready to set a benchmark. I wanted to prove myself that I can do well in foreign conditions too.” And that he has. After 14 games, Bengaluru sit on top of the league with 27 points (three losses, three draws, eight wins). They’ve conceded 14 and scored 23 goals. His emphasis, he says, is not on the basic stuff — it’s on fitness and getting the players to a top physical level. “If you ask me, there’s very little difference in ability when you compare the players here and abroad. It’s all about fitness and building that up. For the first three-four weeks that’s all we worked on, because if you get that wrong then you get injuries. To our credit, we’ve had just two injuries at a time throughout the campaign. It’s about training specific areas — in England players kept themselves fit even in the season break — here we had to put some work into that in the first month,” he quipped. Bengaluru haven’t been free-scoring or crushing opponents — one could however argue that they are the fittest team in the league and that’s working for them. You can play any system — 4-4-2 or a 4-2-3-1; if your players don’t have it in them to fill the holes, it won’t work. Westwood’s team are just physically at a much higher level than the rest of the teams and this is down to him being allowed to do his work with unprecedented freedom. “Be it about signing players or making first-team changes, the club has allowed me to put my system in place. I’m not criticising other clubs, but there are those who have more than one general making decisions.” Mustafa Ghouse, CEO of JSW Sports, seems chuffed to bits about the response. The club has become so popular in the city that it sees full-houses almost every other match — an unprecedented achievement for a club with no history. They’ve put good marketing tools in place and it’s working: “We can’t control the results. Only the effort,” he says before adding: “This is a chance to give something back to the sport. Raise the level of football in India.” But of course, it wasn’t easy: “We put a lot of hard-work into this, without a doubt. But the stakeholders were surprisingly easy to convince when we thought of starting a football club. It was then about the administration. It was so quick we didn’t realise…” Bengaluru’s coaching staff is fairly young and they’ve signed, according to Westwood, ‘players who others didn’t really want’. And their aim remains to supply players to the national team. It was a surprise when India’s star striker Sunil Chhetri signed for them — now he’s scored double the goals he scored last year — clearly he didn’t make a mistake. With a good manager, a hard-working staff, a board which has a long-term vision and ambition, a preference towards youth player development and excellent marketing — Bengaluru are on the road to becoming the ideal football club in India.