What links Vikram Batra, a hero of the Kargil War, former army chief Gen JJ Singh, international cricketer Barinder Sran, and international footballer Sandesh Jhingan? Chandigarh's Minerva academies, which include a pre-military training school, and similar facilities for budding cricketers and footballers. The Minerva group has a history going back more than 60 years and has enough accomplishments under its belt but this Sunday will be taking its first step in a very special venture: Minerva Punjab Football Club, an offspring of those academies, will make their I-League debut.
The match, against fellow debutants Chennai City, will not be about just their reputation. They have earned their place in the top tier by finishing runners-up in the second division, but the significance of their achievement goes beyond that. When Minerva play, they will represent Punjab, a traditional footballing centre recently fallen on hard times and without I-League representation for the past six years.
"Having a club from Punjab playing the I-League is a very big deal," says India goalkeeper Gurpreet Sandhu, a Minerva alumnus. "It is a great platform for the youth of the state who didn't have a lot of opportunities."
No pressure, then.
Minerva Academy has been producing 'India's finest' - as a board above one of the buildings on campus says - since 1955. But that refers to military cadets; it's one of the best-known finishing schools for those wishing to join the armed forces - and in this part of India there are few who don't.
The football came long after. First came the Sharks, a team set up in the 1970s when Punjab was still home to top teams and players. The team comprised players of the Minerva Public school, run by Col IS Deol, who founded the original academy. The school shut down in the 1990s and the team with it but Deol's grandson Ranjit Bajaj kept the flame alive. As a player, Bajaj had represented the country as a goalkeeper at the U-19 level. He says he too had dreamed of playing club football. "I played for India around the time that JCT (based in nearby Phagwara) had signed high-profile players like Baichung Bhutia, IM Vijayan and Jo Paul Ancheri. But by the time I began playing, JCT had begun shutting off the money in their team. I didn't want to play for some team in Goa or Bengal and so there wasn't really any choice but to give up playing club football," he says.
Bajaj set up the Minerva Cricket Academy - which produced several India internationals including Sran, Gurkeerat Mann, Mandeep Singh and Rishi Dhawan - in 2003. Finally, in 2005, he started the Minerva Football Academy with a simple goal in mind.
"Football in Chandigarh was almost dead at that point. I started a club simply so that I would have a team to play with," says Bajaj.
Of course it wasn't simple. The initial set-up was informal and no salaries were paid. The infrastructure available thanks to the military and cricket academies helped (and still does, with Minerva's footballers using the academy's facilities for their practice in close proximity to the army hopefuls).
"We selected the best players from Chandigarh without paying them any money. But they did because we were providing an opportunity to play," he says.
There was no shortage of talent willing to sign on, and several players once associated with the club in its early days have gone on to bigger things. Five - including Jhingan, Sandhu, the first Indian to play in an Europa League game, and striker Robin Singh - are regulars in the Indian senior team.
In 2015, Bajaj said he decided to try to compete in the I-League. "We had played perhaps 40 tournaments without losing a game so I felt let's take this further because we're good enough. I started thinking, kaisa tareeka hai upar jaane ka (what's the way ahead)," Bajaj says. He realised that Minerva already had a lot of what was needed to run a football club. All the infrastructure required under the AIFF licensing criteria - training grounds, coaches, Under-16 and Under-18 teams, a residential academy - was already in place at the Minerva Academy campus.
Entry to the second division of the I-League required them to win their state tournament, which Minerva also fulfilled. The sanction to participate in the second division came two weeks before the tournament started, but it didn't seem to impact the team, which came second. The junior squad would do one better winning the AIFF's U-15 tournament. And four of those boys -- Shubham Sarangi, Manvir Singh, Givson Singh and Narendera - have been called up for the Under-17 World Cup preparatory camp.
Placing second was not enough to guarantee promotion, though; they had to apply through a tender process and meet the AIFF's financial norms. Those rules state that a club seeking to play in the I-League must have backing worth Rs 500 crore or provide the AIFF a Rs 100-crore bank guarantee. "We told them we aren't worth Rs 100 crore, so how can we give you a bank guarantee worth that much?" says Bajaj. Thankfully the AIFF offered an alternative: a commitment by the club to spend Rs 15 crore over five years. This worked for Minerva, because the club had already spent Rs 11 crore of that amount that year itself - for converting three acres of farmland owned by the Academy into playing fields and other facilities for the youth set-up.
"The AIFF saw that our youth program works. We have 110 kids staying in our residential academy. We are not a corporate house, we don't have that kind of money, but what we have is footballing pedigree," says Bajaj.
Welcome to the big league.
The average cost of running an I-League club for a season, Bajaj says, is Rs 15 crore. To win the league you need to spend not less than Rs 45 crores. The Kolkata clubs spend around Rs 30 crores. "The clubs from the north-east have controlled their expenditure to about Rs 6-7 crores," he reckons. Minerva FC ran on a budget of Rs 2.5 crores the previous season and Bajaj plans to run the I-League campaign on the same amount.
The club's late entry to the I-League - participation was confirmed less than a month before the league's scheduled start - hasn't helped. "I have hardly one or two sponsors for kit and that sort of stuff. There was no time to look for sponsors because I had only 14 days," says Bajaj.
Indeed instead of having a commercial logo emblazoned on their jerseys, Minerva has the emblems of the three armed forces, the Sikh khanda symbol and the profile of the Roman goddess after whom the Academy is named.
But heritage and pride don't pay the bills. So Minerva, which probably pays the lowest salaries in the I-League, has a workaround structure. "The players coming in from ISL and I-League should be confident of making the team. If they do, that's where the money comes in, with bonuses for a win, goal, assist, per match start. So if you have a good match and you score a goal, assist in another and start, you have made Rs 25,000 on top of your salary. But if you don't do well and ask for Rs 1 lakh, I can't pay that."
The staffing is kept to a minimum too. Until last year he coached the U-15 team, while also holding a full-time role with the Minerva Academy, which remains the main contributor to finances. His wife Henna helped out with organizing the travel. The club has advertised for a chef but, for the moment, players eat off steel thalis (plates) alongside the Academy students at the communal mess.
The players, though, seem to have bought in to the belief. The trade-off they make for lower pay and simple living conditions is a better chance of getting playing time, according to Anirudh Thapa, an India U-19 international who was part of the ISL Chennaiyin FC club this season. "In the ISL you see massive crowds and you stay in the best hotels but that makes no difference unless you get a chance to play," says Thapa, who made just one appearance for Chennaiyin. Vinit Rai, who turned out for Kerala Blasters in the ISL concurs. "At our age, what we want the most is playing time. You can't get better unless you are on the field. If you only sit on the bench, you will only get worse."
What will also help is that it's the only top club in the region. "You have so many players from Punjab who don't want to travel away from familiar surroundings to play football. You want to stay at home and that's true everywhere. Players from Bengal would prefer to stay at a Kolkata club," says former East Bengal and Indian international striker Manandeep Singh.
Or take the example of Marcus Lopez. He's come all the way from Guam, in the Pacific Ocean, because he sees this as a stepping stone to the big time. He was originally drafted for the Durand Cup in October and was paid Rs. 70,000 for the tournament; his return ticket from Guam cost Rs.2 lakh, and he paid the difference as an investment on his future. "I wanted to start playing professional football in India and Minerva showed interest. It's a small team, which means it can grow. I will get more opportunities and I need that to make my name known," says Lopez.
Where the club hasn't cut costs is in player development. "I don't save costs in training," says Bajaj. "We had hired a hydrotherapy center which is India's best. We had a fitness instructor (Sagar Diwan) who is among the best in the country." The club has also tied up with the high performance center set up by Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, who Bajaj says is a family friend. "Abhinav is planning to hold talks with our boys and mentor them during the season."
So how could the season pan out for them? One clue to that is on Bajaj's emphasis on youth and the long-term picture. That can be seen from their coaching structure; head coach Colm Toal had a seven-year stint as chief coach of various age group teams for India while his deputies are Surinder Singh, who was the assistant coach with the Pailan Arrows, the AIFF youth team that played for two seasons in the I-League, and Biten Singh, who coached the U-14 team for three years at the IMG Academy in Florida. All three have been part of the development of nearly all the youngsters in the Minerva team.
The club's core squad is perhaps the youngest in the League. Just six of their players are older than 23. Indeed more than serving as a vehicle for Punjab football, the club prides itself on giving opportunities to youngsters. At the DSK Cup, organized earlier this year, Minerva beat I-League outfit Mumbai FC with a squad that included two 13-year-olds for the U-14 team. Indeed if the club had not got promoted to the I-League this season, Bajaj says he would have pulled it out of the I-League altogether and spent his resources on the U-16 and U-18 programmes. "My target isn't the senior squad. My aim is for my youth players to form the bulk of the Indian team who will take part in qualifying for the 2022 World Cup," he says.
There's little doubt, though, that the learning curve will be a steep one. India's footballing landscape is littered with the remains of clubs who came with good intentions and promised hope but vanished soon after. "It's not easy running a football club," sighs Surjeet Singh, longtime coach of JCT Mills, the last club from Punjab in the I-League. "You need time to create a team. A new team needs sponsors who won't back off or pull the plug if the team struggles early on."
"When we (JCT) started in the 1970s we had a player like Inder Singh (in his prime one of the best players in Asia) who was able to lift the team single-handedly. But it's rare for a new team to get this sort of player."
Minerva FC will have to hit the ground running, almost literally. Not only will coach Toal join only a few games into the season, their first four games will be played on the road with just four days between games.
Winning will be hard enough. Creating a successful football club will also require building communities. A poor start to the campaign could be decisive. "Nobody wants to see their team lose. If in your first year you go and lose to all the big teams, you make sure you won't get any fans," says Bajaj. Picking up fans would have already been made harder by the AIFF's decision that Minerva's home games will be played at Ludhiana's Guru Nanak Stadium, which fits the criteria, rather Chandigarh's Sector 17 ground where the team sometimes trains. With a capacity of 15,000, the Ludhiana ground even in JCT's heyday, developed a reputation as one of the most desolate in Indian domestic football.
But the club believes they can bring in spectators. Their history of being a feeder to the military helps. "No matter where we play in India, we always get a few fans who once trained with us," says Bajaj. Indeed they even managed to pull in fans at Ludhiana. "By the end of our campaign we were able to get some 2000 people to the stadium. JCT could never get more than 500," boasts Bajaj.
As the season draws ever closer, Bajaj admits the challenge is a big one. That's why he involves himself in running the minutiae of the club. "It's an advantage that I've actually played alongside many of these players. Normally the owners are in a position where they have to rely on people's advice. But if they make a mistake you have to pay for it. I can't afford to make mistakes," he says.
The fact that the club has come up through the ranks is also crucial, he feels. "It's not about playing small tournaments or big tournaments. It's about producing teams. Two years ago we were playing the lowest level of club football. I realized what the requirement was for a next level and we were able to get there. We kept doing that and today we are at the highest level. Hopefully, I can do the same thing here," he says.
Bajaj, though, believes the club must go on to bigger things than just the I-League. "The goal is to get a system in place that talent is not wasted in Punjab. We want to create a model where football is sustainable," he says.