• In the past few months, the Futbol Mundial TV programme has shot in India and talent scouts from top English side Aston Villa have shopped in India for a reality TV football show• Last year, Premiership team Leicester City tied up with East Bengal for an umbrella deal covering coaching and marketing• Youngsters aged 8-18 have a new way of spending their summer holidays: At pay-and-use football academies in the UK• You can’t buy Team India cricket jerseys but you can buy official Liverpool, Arsenal, Man United jerseys at select shops in the metros

Football has never been so big in India, especially among those under 21. Blanket TV coverage of almost all top leagues — a boy in Ludhiana gets to see far more football for free than his cousin in Luton — has created a set of fans as well versed in the skills of Thierry Henry as they are in the batting stats of Rahul Dravid.

But how much of all this comes back to this country where football is in abysmal condition? Does this have anything to do with sport or is it purely to benefit the interests of Villa, Leicester and the cable guys?

‘‘The basic purpose of Aston Villa making trips to places such as India is to popularise Villa outside England. The club is based in Birmingham so what better place than India to set up base’’, says Arup Das of the Delhi-based Indian Youth Soccer Association. ‘‘India is a huge market, and they (the clubs) know it.’’

His words echoed those of Asian Football Confederation secretary Peter Velappan, who last month called India a ‘‘sleeping giant in football’’.

Aston Villa’s plan to discover that giant included sending top talent scout Keith Brown and a three-hour session with 35 youngsters.

‘‘We do community stuff in Villa in that there are a lot of Asians in the community close by’’, Brown said. ‘‘We’re trying to find an Asian footballer from the community.’’

It’s the logical extension of the fact that, back in England, people of South Asian origin are increasingly leaving stereotype professions for sport, football in particular.

Football, noted the club’s marketing officer Simon Rines, has become a lot more global. ‘‘People have seen that with Manchester United, Real Madrid and others coming to Asia.’’

That may well be the real story: The discovery of India’s huge market — and growing spending power — has hit the football world, and those associated with it.

There are two visions of the game: ‘‘serious soccer’’ and ‘‘fun football’’. For example, the IYS Association (not to be confused with the similarly named IYS Academy — and in that tangle is another pointer to the sport’s growing popularity!) runs annual leagues for around 600 children and sets up coaching infrastructure across the country.

The IYS Academy, meanwhile, has just organised a trip for 42 children to the Bobby Charlton Soccer School, touted as the skills camp where David Beckham was discovered. Organised several times a year, these trips don’t come cheap; a 10-day excursion to the BCSS can set you back by around Rs 75-80,000.

A 12-year-old’s summer holiday was never so expensive. But is it football? Does it help develop long-term skills that could be useful to, say, Dempo or Mohun Bagan?

One stumbling block is obvious: teens don’t see it as a career option.

‘‘I have two choices — a sporting career abroad or higher studies in India,’’ says 17-year-old Steffan Bofeeri, who notched the highest scores among his group in the recent BCCS camp. ‘‘The national football league doesn’t have any scope.’’

What do the academies do if a top-level coach marks a player out as special? ‘‘If he wants to study in England, BCSS guides and helps him. But the initial investment has to be made by the parents’’, says Anjali Shah of the IYS Academy.

So it seems like an expensive hobby, especially when it’s a long way from attending the academy that Beckham attended to making it a quarter of the distance he has.

‘‘It’s a gimmick’’, says veteran Kolkata coach Amal Dutta on Villa’s scouting in India. ‘‘It’s for their own benefit they are doing it. That’s not going to help Indian football.’’

True, says IYS Association’s Das. These initiatives, he says, are aimed at the fat wallets. ‘‘The skills levels in Indian football remain zero. We don’t need superstars right now, we need the basic infrastructure.’’