Football community protests BMC move to redesignate football ground as exhibition centre

The protest, organised by the Mumbai Football Association (MFA), comes amid concerns that one of the city’s few dedicated football grounds could be lost

MUMBAI: The city’s football fraternity staged a peaceful protest on Sunday against the BMC’s Improvements Committee’s recent decision to delete the reservation of the Neville D’Souza Football Ground at Bandra Reclamation and redesignate the plot as an exhibition/ convention centre.

Mumbai, India - June 28, 2026: Players, parents, and football enthusiasts stage a peaceful protest at Neville D'Souza Football Ground, Bandra Reclamation in Mumbai, India, on Sunday, June 28, 2026. (Photo by Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times) (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT Photo)

The protest, organised by the Mumbai Football Association (MFA), comes amid concerns that one of the city’s few dedicated football grounds could be lost. The ground, named after Indian football legend Neville D’Souza, has served as a major venue for competitive football in Mumbai since 2011 and is used by nearly 10,000 footballers every year.

The site was allotted to the Mumbai Football Association by MHADA in 2011 and a portion of it operates as a football turf. Under the BMC’s sanctioned Development Plan (DP) 2034, the MHADA-owned plot is now designated as an existing amenity and reserved for a playground and sports ground.

MFA vice-president Ryan Menezes said the demonstration was aimed at protecting a vital sporting asset. “This ground has been in existence since 2011 and was given to us on an allotment basis by MHADA to conduct official games,” he said. “We have a complete football structure here, including first, second and third division leagues as well as the Super Elite competition.”

Menezes added that the association represented nearly 300 football clubs, making it one of India’s largest district football associations. Affiliated to the Western India Football Association and the All India Football Federation, the MFA organises senior men’s, women’s, youth, grassroots and division league competitions across Mumbai.

The MFA vice-president said that they had “a proper pyramid structure that provides a pathway for players to progress”. “Footballers from our association go on to represent clubs in the Indian Super League, I-League, the state team and even India,” he said, adding that while they charged participating teams a competition fee, students were allowed to play there for free. This claim was, however, contested by local residents who said their youngsters were not allowed inside.

Henry Picardo, an ex-India football player, said there was no football ground in the vicinity of this size. “We have thousands of students undergoing training at the national and international level, and our request to the state government is to save this ground from this convention centre reservation,” he said.

The venue is named after Neville D’Souza, one of India’s greatest footballers, who represented the country at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. The Mumbai Football Association is currently headed by president Aaditya Thackeray.

According to the BMC’s DP department, Bandra Reclamation originally formed part of the Bandra-Kurla Complex notified area under the planning jurisdiction of MMRDA. In 2015, the state government made the BMC the planning authority of the area.

BMC officials told HT that under the original Bandra Reclamation layout approved in 1983, a larger adjoining plot near the Bombay Art Society had been earmarked for a convention complex spanning around 2.58 hectares. However, while preparing the Draft Development Plan 2034, the site was shown as an existing sports ground since it functioned as an informal football field.

Following a request from MHADA, the DP department concluded that restoring the site’s earlier intended land use was justified, noting that there is currently no convention or exhibition facility in the immediate vicinity. Since the sanctioned DP 2034 does not contain a specific reservation category for a convention centre, the civic administration has proposed redesignating the land as an “exhibition centre”.

The proposal cleared last week at the civic improvements’ committee sought to delete the existing sports ground amenity covering approximately 6,897.4 square metres and the playground reservation spanning around 1,552.6 square metres. In all, nearly 8,450 square metres of land has been redesignated as an exhibition centre.

The proposal had already drawn strong criticism from the Shiv Sena (UBT) and Congress corporators during the BMC Improvements Committee meeting on June 24, who opposed the conversion of one of Mumbai’s few dedicated football grounds into an exhibition facility.