Indian football blog bags prestigious award

Football Paradise, an amateur football blog, upset the odds at the International Football Blogging Awards at Old Trafford, Manchester, by winning the prestigious Judges’ Choice Award, becoming the first from India to ever achieve the feat.

The Mumbai-based website was handpicked by judges from the BBC, SKY networks, CNN, The Guardian etc as the world's Best International Football Blog for 2016.

Football Paradise , an amateur football blog, upset the odds at the International Football Blogging Awards at Old Trafford, Manchester, by winning the prestigious Judges’ Choice Award, becoming the first from India to ever achieve the feat.

The Mumbai-based website was handpicked by judges from the BBC, SKY networks, CNN, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ESPN, BT Sport among other major news and media publications, as well as former legendary footballers, as the world's Best International Football Blog for the year of 2016.

The finalists of the International Football Blog category were Adam Joseph (Australia), Anything Palmeiras (Brazil), Football Paradise (India), Omar Momani (Jordan), Phil Mac Giolla Bháin (Scotland), Sempre Inter (Italy), The Home of Caribbean Football (West Indies), among others. Over 300,000 fan votes were cast with over 2,000 blogs nominated from five continents stretching from Europe to Oceania.

Started in the summer of 2008 as a small blog based out of Mumbai, Football Paradise is the brainchild of Gaurang Manjrekar, a senior consultant with Ernst & Young, New York. Football Paradise has been critically acclaimed for their thought-provoking, passionate and insightful feature pieces on European football, book reviews, and interviews.

After receiving the award, Gaurang said, “I feel incredibly humbled that we’ve been recognised for our efforts. We’re a group of full-time professionals – engineers, consultants, copywriters, editors, MBA students, and MS students – and have been pursuing this as a project of passion for the past 8 years because all of us believe in the lost tradition of storytelling. In an era of clickbait websites and increasingly short attention spans, we’ve kept our focus on the art of creating quality football literature which is at par with anything rest of the world can offer, and more.”

The editor of the website, Srijandeep Das, formerly with Hindustan Times , was quoted, “This is a tip of the hat by the global football community towards the quality of reportage and journalism that India has to offer. This acknowledgement is a victory for every child growing up back home who loves the game of football, and dreams of someday pursuing it in any capacity, in a country biased towards cricket.”