Heard on the Stands - Mohun Bagan close to mammoth sponsorship deal with Lagardere

A FRENCH MULTINATIONAL media conglomerate is reportedly close to completing a major sposorship deal with the most popular football club in India. 

In what is being described as the biggest sponsorship deal secured by any Indian football club, multiple local media reports suggest that Federation Cup winners Mohun Bagan are about to sign a deal with Lagardere Sports as their main sponsors.

While the 2016-17 season the sposorship amount will be Rs 10 crore, from the 2017-18 season onwards, when the Mariners are likely to play in the newly-cannonized ISL, the annual amount can rise to Rs 50 crore. 

Lagardere Sports will be able to sign up companies to display their logos on the Mohun Bagan jersey. They will also have one member in the 3-member board of directors that will take major decisions regarding the operation and future directions of the club.

Mohun Bagan have been one of the most successful Indian clubs in recent times, winning the I-League in 2014-15 and Federation Cup in the 2015-16 season. They also did well in Asia, beoming the first Indian club to win an AFC Champions League current format qualifier match and reaching the AFC Cup pre-quarter finals after an unbeaten run in the group stage.

But off the field the 126 year old club was going through a rough phase as their central sponsorship deal with McDowells was stuck in litigous limbo ever since Vijay Mallya offloaded his majority stocks in Unied Spirits Limited to Diageo. The club played the 2015-16 season without any logo on the prime position of their jersey, and the club president Tutu Basu had to step in with funds to clear the players' payments. 

This new deal is expected to put that difficult time behind for Mohun Bagan and project them as one of the major footballing forces in India as well as in AFC Cup.