Digambar Kamat and Mickky Pacheco, the MLAs from Margao and Nuvem, are way out of their league when they start demanding that the government should secure a 25 percent stake in the Indian Super League club FC Goa. Kamat reportedly stated that Goans should have a stake since the club is using the name Goa. He then went ahead and asked the government to force the owners to give it a stake. Mickky Pacheco too demanded something similar, asking that either that 25 percent stake be given to Goans or that he was ready to buy it. Be it a sense of patriotism towards Goa or perhaps a way to
garner admiration from doting FC Goa fans, both Kamat and Pacheco need to concentrate on their work as MLAs and leave the running of the football club to men and women more knowledgeable and experienced than them. This is football, not politics and any attempt to mix the two must be thwarted
by FC Goa fans.
FC Goa, for the past two years, was
owned by four entities. The Videocon
group and Virat Kohli have a
35 percent share, which they still
retain. The other 65 percent was
owned by Srinivas Dempo and Dattaraj
Salgaocar. After the recent
controversy regarding the incidents
post the club’s final loss to FC Chennaiyin
in December 2015, the two
Goan owners got disenchanted with the ISL and decided to
make an honourable exit. Their stake was then bought over by
Deltin Group head Jaydev Mody.
This, of course, means that FC Goa doesn’t have a Goan owner,
but what most people forget is that the Indian Super League
is a private league that has franchises across the country, Goa
being one of them. There is no legal standpoint from which
anyone can demand that the owner has to be Goan. Across
the world, football clubs are owned by people from elsewhere.
Paris St-Germain, Manchester City and Leicester City for example
are owned by Arabs and Asian businessmen. Of course,
there are clubs like FC Barcelona, which has over 1,50,000
stakeholders, but this is also part of a footballing culture that
goes back decades in Spain.
If Dempo and Salgaocar were approached by a Goan who was
willing to buy them out, they surely would have sold their
stake to him or her. But that’s irrelevant right now. There are
many issues that Goa is facing. The ownership of a privately
owned club in a private league is quite low down on the list of
priorities that need to be addressed by the Goa government.
Demands to ‘force’ the FC Goa owners to give the government
or the people a stake are in bad taste and should not be entertained.
