Barcelona Will Play A Friendly In India.

Barcelona will come to India with its trio of Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr. and Luis Suarez to play a friendly in India, Josep Bartomeu confirmed. However, it will still take a couple of years as Barcelona has a tight schedule as of now.  

In an interview with Indian journalists, Bartomeu said that the club is planning to open Barcelona Schools in India to teach ‘The Barcelona Philosophy’ to young coaches. He also stated that the club wants to come closer to the Indian fans and he knows that Cricket is the most followed sport in India but there are also a large number of football fans in the country.

Barcelona already has two centres in the nation and wants to increase the number by a large amount to teach young talents and make them capable of playing with the ‘big boys’.

According to Josep Bartomeu, India has a very large amount of talented players but they are not getting the required exposure and Barcelona wants to take a step forward in this context.

Barcelona have doubled the Indian fan base in the last couple of years, thanks to the brilliance of Lionel Messi and the club wants to take advantage of the situation to promote the game with further interest of importing the talent.

Lionel Messi will not visit India for the first time, as in 2011, the Argentina Team played a friendly against Venezuela in Kolkata.

Indian Super League (ISL) has been a great success in India so far and Indian players are getting a chance to play along some of the well-known names of the game. ISL has further increased the popularity of football in India and has acted as a platform for the Indian players to showcase their talent at international level.

31 Oct. 2016
Rohan Jaitly