Hero ISL finalises 49 global players for inaugural season

Seven have been directly signed on by franchises while the rest 42 will be up for drafting on 21st August

The IMG Reliance- and STAR India-promoted football tournament, Hero Indian Super League, has finalised the 49 international players for the inaugural season. It has roped in Bojan Djordjic from Sweden. He has played for the Manchester United club. It also took Michael Chopra, a product of the Newcastle United Youth System, recently released by Blackpool.

Of the 49, seven have been signed on by franchises. The rest will be up for drafting on August 21. According to drafting rules of the ISL, clubs are allowed to sign a maximum of two international players. Delhi Dynamos FC (Mads Junker and Morten Skoubo), FC Pune City (Emanuele Belardi and Bruno Cirillo), NorthEast United FC (Isaac Chansa and Cornell Glen) and Atletico de Kolkata (Borja Fernandez) have signed up players.

The other 42 are from Spain (nine), France (eight), the Czech Republic (five), Brazil (five), Portugal (five), Colombia (four), South Korea (two), and one each from Argentina, Canada, Serbia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, England, Greece and Cameroon.

On the eve of the drafting, the clubs will participate in sequence selection. Their names will be put in envelopes.

A person from the league will pick envelops one by one. The team whose name is in the first will be allocated the letter A. The team in the second B and so on.

Once named, these will take turns in selecting players from lots of seven in alphabetical order. There will be seven rounds. The order will be reversed every round. Since Delhi, Pune and Northeast clubs have selected two international players, these will skip the first two rounds. Kolkata’s club will skip the first.

The costliest player in the international pool is priced at $750,000 (Rs 4.5 crore) for a season. In case of the Indian pool, Subrata Paul, Gounrmanga Singh and Nirmal Chettri cost Rs 80 lakh each.

The ISL clubs are to have a total of 22 players each (one marque, seven international and rest 14). The marque players from each team will be announced at the end of August.