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In a single, sweeping decree on May 17, the All India Football Federation’s (AIFF) Club Licensing Committee (CLC-FIB) rejected the Premier 1 license applications of seven Indian Super League (ISL) clubs: Mohun Bagan Super Giant, Kerala Blasters FC, Odisha FC, Chennaiyin FC, Mohammedan Sporting Club, Inter Kashi, and Sporting Club Delhi.

The remaining seven top-flight applicants, Mumbai City FC, Bengaluru FC, FC Goa, East Bengal FC, NorthEast United FC, Jamshedpur FC, and Punjab FC, managed to secure their licenses for the 2026-27 season, but only with official sanctions attached.

The federation’s public explanation points directly to the Indian Club Licensing Regulations (ICLR) 2026, a dense framework designed to strictly enforce standards across five key pillars: Sporting, Infrastructure, Personnel & Administrative, Legal, and Financial. In theory, it is an objective quality-control mechanism built to elevate the professional standards of football in India.

But the ICLR 2026 framework, when cross-referenced with the federation’s official financial records and the private consensus among top-flight executives, points to a vastly more cynical reality. To the franchises, club licensing has ceased to function as a tool for institutional development. Instead, it has not turned into a mechanism for revenue extraction, deployed against clubs, who are already struggling to survive.

Here is the status of all the 14 ISL Clubs’ licenses

To understand the current gridlock, one must first look to the official rulebook. The Indian Club Licensing Regulations segment club requirements into a rigid hierarchy of compliance:

Grade A Criteria: These are mandatory requirements. Failure to satisfy even a single ‘A’ criterion results in an immediate, outright rejection of the license application.

Grade B Criteria: These are also mandatory, but failing them does not trigger an automatic rejection. Instead, the license is granted “with sanctions”, typically resulting in financial fines.

The seven franchises that secured their Premier 1 licenses “with sanctions” successfully cleared the Grade A criteria. Their punishments stem entirely from secondary Grade B technicalities.

One such technicality perfectly encapsulates the suffocating atmosphere. FC Goa was fined because its goalkeeping coach holds a UEFA B license. By standard European coursework, it is the direct functional equivalent of an AFC A license. The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), however, does not formally recognize the equivalence for this specific tier under its current coaching conventions. Because of that rigid structural friction, the club was slapped with a financial penalty by the AIFF.

For these sanctioned clubs, the frustration isn’t merely about writing a check; it is about the complete absence of institutional empathy during a period of unprecedented commercial volatility.

“I sympathize with the clubs who have not met the club licensing criteria this year,” said Ravi Puskur, CEO of FC Goa, in an exclusive conversation with Sports Now.

“There is a requirement which you’re asking them to fulfill when there’s a lot of uncertainty around the league itself. Honestly, everyone is chasing survival rather than looking to thrive,” he added.

This official pointed out that the AIFF demands operational and administrative perfection from its clubs while its own ecosystem remains deeply unstable.

“Right now, the ecosystem in Indian football is designed to survive, not thrive,” Puskur continued.

“I think it’s a little unfair to some of the clubs that you continue to hold the same heavy sanctions when we can also talk about how other competitions in the country – the junior age group leagues and everything – have seen constant chopping and changing. They should have looked at this a little bit more favourably and relaxed the criteria,” he further added.

While the sanctioned clubs reluctantly absorb these fines to protect their eligibility for strictly governed AFC continental slots, the mood among the rejected clubs has crossed the threshold into open revolt.

For the seven clubs whose licenses were not renewed because of failure to meet the Grade A criteria, the rejection triggers an immediate requirement to appeal before the Club Licensing Appeals Body (CLAB). According to a chief executive of one of these clubs, the appeals process has become the focal point of a highly lucrative regulatory trap.

“Basically, what is supposed to be a quality control thing has become a money-making racket,” the club boss states flatly.

“They reject you, and then when you appeal or ask for an exemption, they charge a fine of ₹2 lakh per criterion. They make upwards of ₹20 to ₹50 lakh per club. This is their objective: how to make money from the clubs. For them, we are cash cows,” he adds.

The ₹2 lakh figure is far from arbitrary. According to the executive, the AIFF strategically anchors individual criteria fines at exactly ₹2 lakh because, under internal regulations, penalties exceeding that threshold open up vastly more robust legal avenues for clubs to challenge the validity of the fine itself. By capping the penalty at the boundary line, the federation ensures a steady stream of non-appealable cash.

According to the official AIFF audit report of the 2024/25 season accessed by Sports Now, the federation’s reliance on internal penalties has exploded.

Disciplinary sanctions experienced a massive 130% surge, with revenue more than doubling from ₹3,81,65,532 to ₹8,77,73,050. Sponsorships, on the other hand, saw a 21% decline, dropping from ₹3,64,56,313 down to ₹2,87,49,744 over the same period.

The data confirms the executive’s underlying premise: while core commercial sponsorship revenue plummeted, the AIFF managed to more than double its intake from internal fines, extracting nearly ₹8.78 crore directly out of the football ecosystem in a single fiscal year.

The Credibility Gap

What makes this unyielding administrative discipline so unpalatable to the ISL teams is the structural chaos within the governing body enforcing it. The AIFF has spent months operating in an administrative vacuum, notably missing key personnel in top leadership roles, including a permanent Secretary General.

To the clubs, being lectured on compliance by a federation that cannot keep its own house in order is an untenable double standard.

“When you look at the Federation themselves, they don’t have a Secretary General. How can the fail me for staff which is not absolutely necessary to first team operations but they deem as mandatory” the disenfranchised official argues.

“At least that position is fulfilled at our club. Apna pehle dekho na (Look at yourself first). Your whole thing is a mess. You’ve not given a calendar, and you’re trying to make money off clubs,” he adds.

This credibility gap isn’t just club gossip; it is spelled out in black and white inside the federation’s official financial records.

In the audit report, the AIFF’s own statutory auditors, SARC & Associates, flagged two massive financial red flags that compromise the federation’s authority to lecture anyone on compliance

The auditors explicitly warned that they could not verify a large portion of the AIFF’s books because the federation simply failed to get basic balance confirmations from its debtors and creditors. In plain terms, the AIFF cannot definitively prove who owes them money or who they owe money to.

The report notes that a deep-dive forensic audit was launched by Deloitte, ordered by a Supreme Court-appointed committee, to uncover potential “financial or accounting irregularities” spanning five years from 2017 to 2022. Today, that explosive report sits in a “sealed cover” before the Supreme Court. It is so heavily guarded that the AIFF itself has been blocked from even accessing a copy of the findings.

For the clubs, the irony is impossible to ignore. The AIFF is weaponizing minor formatting technicalities to bar or sanction half the top flight of Indian football, yet its own financial house is clouded by missing paper trails and an active, sealed forensic investigation sitting before the highest court in the land.

The irony is acute: the AIFF has disqualified or penalized half the top flight of Indian football over formatting discrepancies and technicalities, while its own institutional balance sheets are clouded by unconfirmed.

Club licensing was originally conceived by FIFA and the confederations as a collaborative, transparent roadmap designed to elevate professional infrastructure, protect player safety, and insulate clubs from financial ruin. In India, it has become the front line of a bitter political war.

The AIFF Audit Report ledger notes that while the federation earned a steady ₹50 crore from the sale of telecasting and master rights, the subsequent collapse of its primary commercial partnership has left a massive deficit in the their operating budget. To bridge that gap, the federation has stepped up regulatory enforcement.

The AIFF still holds the ultimate leverage. Under the ICLR Exception Policy, the federation retains the domestic authority to grant national exemptions, allowing rejected clubs to compete in the ISL regardless of the CLC-FIB’s initial rulings. It is a mechanism the AIFF has routinely deployed into ensure the league’s continuity.

But as the appeals process gets underway, the franchises are sending a clear message: the era of quietly absorbing administrative fines at the cost of doing business is over. If the federation attempts to use the 2026 rejections to force financial compliance or break club solidarity, the battle will quickly spill out of the federation’s headquarters and into the judiciary.

“If they even charge us a ₹1 fine [unjustifiably]… we will take it to the High Court, the Supreme Court, forget CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport), and we will take it to the AFC as well. Administratively, we believe these are extortionist tactics,” the angry club executive warned.

“In tough times we should be working together to rebuild but instead they (AIFF) want to strike us when we are down,” the official concludes.

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