Borussia Dortmund not interested in Sunil Chhetri

Sunil Chhetri

First of all, let me say that Sunil Chhetri is not joining Bundesliga side Borussia Dortmund nor are the yellow-blacks seriously interested to sign Chhetri as certain people are spreading rumours after an article on a German football website mentioned the idea of BVB signing Chhetri for marketing purposes as part of a story on their new Armenian signing Henrikh Mkhitaryan.

Here is what the paragraph says translated in English:

The question arises whether it is really so easy to draw the attention of an entire country to a club. If yes, BVB should maybe take promising Sunil Chhetri under contract. The 28-year-old striker, who currently plays for the reserves of Sporting Lisbon would cost the club less than one million Euros, is popular in his country and in 61 international matches scored an impressive 36 goals – for India! There waiting around 1.25 billion (!) Potential BVB fans… (original article: http://www.reviersport.de/articles-239046.html)

Now just reading this paragraph makes it sound very interesting and could get people easily excited, but the article was in fact about the Armenian interest in Dortmund following the signing of Henrikh Mkhitaryan from Shakhtar Donetsk and not Indian football.

The article says that one in five views of BVB total livestream of the FC Basel vs Borussia Dortmund friendly was from Armenia, while the BVB website is getting massive traffic from the Eastern European nation; which it seems the club and their management did not foresee.

The author in his final paragraph, which is the one on Sunil Chhetri, in my interpretation then wants to say; if Mkhitaryan signing gets the 3.3 million Armenians interested in Dortmund, then signing Chhetri would interest 1.25 billion Indians. But marketing as we all know isn’t so easy, then Mkhitaryan is a world class player and has been signed as a replacement of Mario Götze, one of the best young talent in world football.

Foreign Clubs have tried to use Sunil Chhetri as a marketing tool for India without him having a real chance to play there. Though Chhetri is currently our best player, he is nowhere near the level of a Mkhitaryan or lets say a Shinji Kagawa (Japan) or Ji-Sung Park (South Korea), who were signed for their marketing value, but also are top level footballers. And my friend Chhetri knows that himself for sure.

The sad reality is that India has never produced a player of such high standard, but maybe that will happen one day. One soon day.

And also everyone please be careful on want you spread on social media. Read a full article or rather the original article, but don’t come to wrong conclusions. Here, the author just wants to be sarcastic and not seriously mean anything.