Abhishek Pawar was 22 when he became the top scorer and man of the tournament at the Santosh Trophy 2025-26, the senior national football championship organised by the All India Football Federation, held in Assam in February this year. He plays for Services, representing the Indian Army. But before any of that, he was just a boy from Gadhinglaj, a small town in Kolhapur district, kicking a ball around, figuring out what his future could look like.ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO“Coming from a small place, we have very limited job opportunities, some at micro industries, or farm work,” Pawar says. “But a platform like the Gadhinglaj Super League (GSL) gave me professional training at the right age. It helped me handle pressure. And eventually, it helped me get into the Indian Army through the sports quota.” Pawar’s story is not an exception. It is, in many ways, the whole point.A league before its timeLong before the Indian Super League brought franchise-format football, a group of senior players in Gadhinglaj were already thinking along the same lines. The Gadhinglaj Super League, now in its 13th year, was conceived with a straightforward purpose: give young players a competitive, structured, high-visibility platform, one where talent could meet opportunity.“We started GSL with the core purpose of creating a platform where talent meets opportunity,” says Deepak Kuppannvar, Secretary of the Gadhinglaj United Football Association (GUFA).“Every year, as summer vacations begin, youngsters are trained for around three weeks. After that, an auction is conducted, and eight teams are formed.”The auction, modelled loosely on the Indian Premiere League, is one of the league’s most distinctive features. Team owners – local businesspersons, senior players now employed elsewhere, or simply interested individuals willing to cover kit and other expenses – bid for players using a points-based system.“We don’t pay them money like in IPL, but points increase with each player’s performance,” Kuppannvar explains. “That increase motivates them to perform better.”Each team selects 14 players, who are then provided football studs and jerseys. The tournament itself runs for 10 to 12 days and features 9-a-side matches. Teams are deliberately mixed across age groups, Under-15, Under-18, and Under-21, so younger players train and compete alongside older ones. The player of the match in every game walks away with a pair of new football studs.Story continues below this adBuilt on contributionWhat makes GSL remarkable is not just its format, but its foundation. Public contributions fund the entire tournament. Villagers donate every year to keep it going. Except for a pause during Covid pandemic, it has not missed a single edition.“It’s entirely been conducted on public contribution,” says Prashant Daddikar, member of GUFA. “And we have 11 certified referees in the village who volunteer for every match. This helps us manage finances, because we run on tight budgets.”Gadhinglaj’s relationship with football, however, goes back much further.“The town has a football tradition of over 50 years,” says Suresh Kolki, President of GUFA. Since 2000, GUFA has also been organising senior national-level tournaments, held every year around Diwali. Teams travel from Kerala, Mangalore, Goa, Chennai, Hyderabad, and various districts of Maharashtra. And the audience across matches is anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people.Story continues below this ad“That reflects the love for football here,” Kolki says.Today, GSL has also begun attracting players from beyond Gadhinglaj, from Bengaluru, Pune, and Mumbai, who come specifically to participate.Addressing a gapGrassroots football in India faces several challenges: poor infrastructure, a shortage of qualified coaches, weak talent scouting, and fragmented youth development. GSL, according to Daddikar, was built precisely to address that gap, and the results, he says, have been “astonishing”.For many young players who come through GSL, the stakes are personal and immediate.Most come from rural backgrounds where career options are limited. The league that helped players to represent at the national level has aided them in getting into the Indian Army, Police, Income Tax department, and other government services, all through the sports quota.Story continues below this adVikram Patil is one such example. A senior player who came up through Gadhinglaj’s football ecosystem, he was recruited into the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s Chennai office and is now a senior auditor posted there. He still plays for CAG.“In a country like India, football doesn’t get much-needed attention,” Patil says. “But in Kolhapur, it is highly admired. Being trained by qualified coaches at a young age gave me a chance to see football as a career. The game gave me a job in a prestigious organisation. Also, the country has enough talent, but it just rarely gets shaped at the grassroots level. That is what GSL is doing.”Handling pressureFor Abhishek Pawar, the through-line from Gadhinglaj to the Santosh Trophy podium is clear. “I could perform at national-level tournaments because I learnt how to handle pressure during matches in Gadhinglaj,” he says. “Playing since childhood, this platform shaped my life.”Thirteen years in, a tight budget, a volunteer referee corps, and a village full of believers – the GSL is a reminder that the answers to Indian football’s grassroots issue may already exist in places most people have never heard of.