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“Whatever the reason that people turn up, whether it is to see their favourite celebrities or to enjoy the music and atmosphere, our job is to persuade them to stay for the football,” says Knee. “And we encourage the owners to bring as many of their celebrity friends as possible to matches,” says Andy Knee of the IMG group that runs the ISL, whose games are prefaced by firework displays and punctuated by music to mark key events for crowds accustomed to constant stimulation. The Premier League is not the only prop being used to publicise the ISL, which also reaches for stars from elsewhere: the Dynamos, for instance, are managed by Roberto Carlos and begin their campaign on Saturday against Zico’s FC Goa and the club owners probably attract even more attention, with each ISL team backed either by Bollywood actors or cricketing icons such as Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly. Build on that success for the second season, which kicks off this weekend, and the ISL is well on the way to sustainability. On top of that was an average television audience of 29 million per match. The initial signs are promising: last year the inaugural ISL, campaign, in which Atlético de Kolkata won the title, enjoyed average attendances of more than 26,000, which, going solely on that metric, made it the fourth-best supported league in the world. The Premier League is enormously popular in India and the nascent Indian Super League (ISL) is unashamedly keen to profit from its reflected glory as it strives to embed a strong domestic championship.
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The club had staged a similar stunt the previous week in the run-up to the Manchester City-Chelsea match, when they trumpeted their recruitment of Florent Malouda. As the millions of Indian followers of the Premier League got psyched up for last month’s Arsenal-Liverpool match at the Emirates, the Delhi Dynamos announced the signing of John Arne Riise and, in case the vicarious prestige was not potent enough, the announcement was accompanied by footage of Riise being presented with his new club’s jersey by none other than Ian Rush.