For the coming season Mumbai Football will see a complete change: MFA General Secretary Sudhakar Rane

by Chittu Shetty March 28, 2022

From 8 month-long Women’s football league to organizing Beach Football, MFA General Secretary Sudhakar Rane shares the association’s future plans for Mumbai Football

In an interaction with the football counter, MFA General Secretary Mr. Sudhakar Rane spoke on Mumbai Football association’s plans on promoting women’s football, the new Youth Leagues format, additional cup competitions for various divisions of Mumbai Football, Referee education programs along with the introduction of Beach Football and Futsal.

Extended Women’s League

Speaking about promoting women’s football, Mr. Rane emphasized majorly on the plans of creating a two-tier competition, i.e. the existing MFA Women’s League will have two divisions – Women Premier League and Women’s Super League.

“There has been a lot of Interest among Mumbai clubs wanting to field their own women’s team in our league. So we are planning to have an 8-month long season for the girls. We will have two divisions, the existing top 10 teams of the city will be playing Women’s Premier League while the new entrants will get to participate in the Women’s Super League which will be the 2^nd tier. We are expecting more than 20 teams this year” said Mr. Rane

Training Programs for Youth

“We further plan to have regular U14 and U16 tournaments for boys and girls in 5v5 and 7v7 format. There will be special training programs for these kids with good fitness coaches and Nutritionists at Bandra every Saturday and Sunday where they will be trained under licensed coaches” explained Mr. Rane. “The aim is to create a strong team to represent Mumbai in the age group as well as senior teams for inter-district tournaments as well as All India Tournaments” added Rane.

MFA is also planning to have more exchange programs with fellow districts and state teams. These programs will also include referee training workshops with the aim to catch young referees. Train them through underage tournaments experience and gradually promote them to the WIFA referees association.

YPL, Futsal, Award Nights and Others

“We are planning a knockout tournament for every division of MFA. Other than that we are also going to have a longer season of Yuva Premier League with a different format. We hope to make it an 8-month league with live streaming on OTT platforms or Youtube.” Said Rane. “There are plans to introduce and organize Futsal and Beach football tournaments.”

MFA plans to bring back the Award Night, where they award the best teams and players of all divisions of Mumbai Football. MFA Awards Nights was a regular thing before Covid put a hold on it for the past two years.

“With the support of our President we are also trying to get more grounds. We will also reveal Harwood League Champions with four to five teams from corporate & private divisions playing a straight league once all our divisions are played. We will also look to introduce a zonal tournament with 16 teams” added Rane.

Surely there seemed to lot in store for Mumbai Footballers and fans will be hoping MFA does come through on these plans at the earliest.

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Also Read: MFA announce first set of fixtures for MFA Elite League

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