Kerala Super League


Kerala Super League is an upcoming professional football league organized by Kerala Football Association and CMG in the state of Kerala. The league, designed on the lines of successful Indian Super League. The association is considering holding the inaugural edition of the KSL in 2016-17 season. Kerala is the first State football association in the country to have a franchise-based super league. Dutch footballer Ruud Gullit has been the brand ambassador of the proposed Kerala Super League.

Structure

Kerala Super League will feature eight teams based in eight cities in the state. The whole teams will be run on a franchise-based model like Indian Super League. The matches will be held on home and away basis. Each franchise will have an icon player to make the club popular among fans. Overseas players will be an added attraction. Each team will include four foreign players, picked by the CMG from second division leagues in Europe and South America. Each teams will have a mandate to play U-23 and U-20 players in the team. The clubs will also have prominent personalities as team ambassadors.

Teams

On 5 December 2015, In a function involving former England international Goalkeeper Peter Shilton, it is announced that the bidding for the teams are on and out of 8 franchises,4 were finalised. Those 4 franchises were Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Thrissur and Kozhikode. Rights for Thiruvananthapuram was taken by Carpus Synergy Consortium while Muvattupuzha FC, an already running professional football club based in Muvattupuzha, won the bid for Ernakulam Franchise. Kolkata Giant Mohammedan SC along with WorldCom Media Solutions bagged the Thrissur franchise and Nabeel Najeeb, an NRI based in Oman, outbid all others in the race for Kozhikode franchise which is his hometown.
On 14 April 2016, Bhaswar Goswami, the Executive Director of the Kolkata-based Celebrity Management Group which will run the KSL for the Kerala Football Association, announced that The Muvattupuzha and Thiruvananthapuram franchises have been terminated from the State’s new ISL-style Kerala Super League.

Sponsorship

The promoters of the Kerala Super League will be the Kolkata-based Celebrity Management Group Pvt Ltd.