Satadru Dutta, a football nut not known to delegate
Satadru Dutta's mismanagement of the Messi tour echoes past issues, including a delayed 2012 match. Critics cite his inability to delegate effectively.
Kolkata: With the GOAT Tour headlined by Lionel Messi, Satadru Dutta may have flown too close to the sun but this wasn’t the first mismanaged tour on his watch.
In 2012, a match involving a string of World Cup winning footballers from Brazil and Colombian goalkeeper Jose Rene Higuita, famous for his scorpion kicks, ran into trouble. Then joint-director of a different sports management company, Dutta had promised a match between a Sports Ministers XI and a Brazilian Masters XI at Salt Lake stadium. Leander Paes was one of the stars in the minister’s XI.
Along with his new teammates, Paes warmed up at the Salt Lake stadium but the other team did not show up for nearly one hour after the scheduled kick-off. Reports of payments not having reached the Masters XI were never confirmed but it needed the intervention of then West Bengal sports minister Madan Mitra to get the players to the pitch. They did and a crisis of the kind on Saturday was avoided.
Since then, Dutta, a former club-level cricketer who would flaunt his proximity to Sourav Ganguly, has brought a number of former and current international footballers including Pele, Diego Maradona, Ronaldinho, Cafu and Emiliano Martinez to Kolkata. None of the events were on the scale of the tour involving Messi, Luis Suarez and Rodrigo de Paul. Organised under A Satadru Dutta Initiative (ASDI), which is also doing the Messi tour, they would have chaotic press conferences and meet-and-greet events running behind schedule but beyond that, were successful.
A PTI report said Dutta had, in a Facebook post, claimed that it had taken 993 days and 317 flights to firm up the Messi tour. Yet, it is his inability to delegate and invest in the right people or agencies that is one of the reasons for his events not running smoothly, according to people who know him.
“He loves football, wants his son to play the sport but lets his heart not head take important decisions,” one of them said on Saturday.
In his late 40s, Dutta had said his next project would be to bring Cristiano Ronaldo to India. The difficulty quotient on that has gone up after what happened here on Saturday.
