Pune Edit: Kolhapur's gain is not Pune's loss

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the international governing body of football, has decided to gift an artificial football surface to the Shahu stadium in Kolhapur, rather than the Pune District Football Association’s (PDFA) stadium in Ghorpadi. Thus, the artificial surface would be installed in Kolhapur as per FIFA norms, at a cost of Rs4 crore. This would become the second ground of its kind in the state, after Cooperage in Mumbai.

Pune lost out to Kolhapur as Fifa wanted to set up the artificial surface on a ground with minimum 30 years lease, a condition that was fulfilled by the Shahu stadium, unlike the PDFA, which has a 5-year lease agreement with the Pune Municipal Corporation for the Ghorpadi stadium. Football enthusiasts in Kolhapur are naturally jubilant. Football is immensely popular in Kolhapur, next only to wrestling. The Kolhapur Sports Association conducts league tournaments in which more than 120 football teams participate through five divisions.

The Shahu Stadium also has an illustrious history, established as it was by Chhatrapati Rajaram in 1910, to organise matches against British soldiers. Unlike Kolhapur, Pune has a surfeit of sporting facilities and also has far greater advantages over Kolhapur in finding potential sponsors or attracting mega infrastructure projects in sports and other arenas.

Pune has always been very active on the sports front and, according to experts, the Fifa decision could have been swung in Pune’s favour had the city’s MP, Suresh Kalmadi, not been temporarily residing in Tihar jail. Notwithstanding this speculation, it is far more important that promising projects are not concentrated just in the Pune-Mumbai belt, but spread out to other parts of Maharashtra.