Professional Football Makes a Play for India

Pro Football Makes a Play for India

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

The Mumbai Gladiators held an off-season workout on Juhu Beach because the team does not have its own field.

MUMBAI, India - On a recent Saturday morning, nearly 20 players from the Mumbai Gladiators football team went through their weekly drills and scrimmage at the popular Juhu Beach, in the suburbs north of this sprawling city of 14 million.

Dressed in red T-shirts and black shorts, the players engaged in a 90-minute practice that resembled a touch football game among friends rather than a gathering of professionals chasing dreams of fame and fortune. Elderly people and families out for walks appeared confused as they passed by. One couple approached the men to ask what game they were playing.

So it goes for the hundreds of athletes trying to catch on with the Elite Football League of India, a new and curious venture aimed at introducing American football to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries in Asia. It is a perhaps quixotic undertaking, but it could prove to be lucrative should the game achieve some measure of popularity within the vast population of potential fans.

“When you first watch the games, it's laughable,” said Richard Whelan, one of the founders and co-chief executive of the league. “But if you watch it for more than five minutes, you want to know how it ends. It's an absolute joke compared to the N.F.L. But it's not a joke compared to anything else on Indian sports television, and that's all we're going up against.”

India has no indigenous version of football, but many of the players on the beach were successful athletes in other sports, including judo, basketball and kabaddi, a team sport in which players hold their breath and grapple with one another. Several Gladiators said they had been only dimly aware of football, though they knew of films like “The Longest Yard” and “Any Given Sunday.” None of them had played even so much as a down of the game before starting training camp a year ago in Mumbai and Pune, about 100 miles to the southeast.

“We didn't even know it was called American football,” said Linesh Mane, a 24-year-old defensive back and former basketball player. “We thought it was rugby.”

He added, “It's much more difficult than rugby.”

The players on the beach were actually on an off-season break, after the league's inaugural season, which was played over about six weeks in the summer and broadcast this fall. The team was working out at the decidedly non-gridiron-like setting because it does not have its own field. Shailesh Devrukhkar, the head coach and a former rugby player and former police commando deployed in sensitive situations like hostage negotiations, expected the team to rent one when it began preparing in earnest for next season, which is expected to begin in the spring. Investors Include Warner

Under Whelan's frenzied leadership, the league has raised $8.5 million from investors, including Kurt Warner, the retired N.F.L. quarterback, and Brandon Chillar, a former St. Louis Ram and Green Bay Packer of Indian descent, and he is confident others investors will come on board. To keep costs to a minimum, the league stopped paying its players in the off-season and, in the first season, dispensed with stadiums, tickets, tailgating and other trappings of the American football experience. Instead, the league's eight teams played an entire season's worth of games at a stadium in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which was chosen partly so the Pakistani team could play Indian teams without traveling to India. Hourlong tapes of each game were shown on television over a three-month period.

The Elite Football League of India will ditch that strategy in its second season, when games in several Indian cities will be televised live. Despite the low level of play, the league's founders claim that millions of people are interested in American sports and will watch if Indians and Pakistanis are competing, even though most Indians do not even know the league exists and cricket remains far and away the most popular sport in the country.

Whelan and his partners are not the first to try to promote Western sports in India, where most schools and colleges give short shrift to athletics. The N.B.A. opened an office in Mumbai last year and has sent stars like Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol to the country to promote the game. It recently signed a new broadcast deal to have its games shown in the country. The N.F.L. is still trying to secure a television deal, but it sells a subscription-based online package for fans who want to watch games.

Vikas Bajaj reported from Mumbai, India, and Ken Belson from New York. Neha Thirani contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 5, 2012, on page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Football Play for India.