Capri Sports Bets On Girls' Football, Targets 1.5 Million Girls In 10 Years
For Capri Sports Director and Promoter Jinisha Sharma, the move represents a shift from investing primarily in sporting assets to building the pipeline that feeds them.
Capri Sports is making a major push into grassroots women's football with the launch of Nova Sports, a girls-only football pathway that aims to reach 1.5 million girls across India over the next decade. The project, incubated and backed by Capri Sports, also the promoters of the UP Warriorz WPL team, will begin in Bengaluru before expanding to other cities. Its first initiative, the Super Nova Football Championship, will be held in Bengaluru on September 5 and 6, featuring Under-13, Under-15 and Under-17 girls' teams.
For Capri Sports Director and Promoter Jinisha Sharma, the move represents a shift from investing primarily in sporting assets to building the pipeline that feeds them.
"When we were starting Capri Sports, early in that journey, we were still very focused on acquisition of teams," Sharma said. "But very quickly, we realized that just building commercial investments alone, from asset acquisition alone, is not going to build the India sporting story."
The company first entered football at the grassroots through Warriors FC, an MFA club it has run for more than two years. That experience, Sharma said, gave Capri Sports a closer look at the problems faced by young players and convinced the company that a broader intervention was needed.
Nova will attempt to build an integrated pathway starting with girls' first exposure to football and extending to high-performance opportunities.
Its development track will include grassroots academies, high-performance centres, international exposure trips and residential academies. A separate competitive track will focus on school tournaments and local competition.
The immediate plan is to work with schools that want to offer football to girls but do not have the coaching resources or bandwidth to run programmes themselves.
Nova will provide coaches and operate football programmes within schools. Girls wanting to continue outside school will be able to enter the academy system.
The Bengaluru academy will be the first. Sharma said the company is already hearing from existing academies that want to partner with Nova, potentially allowing the network to expand faster than if Capri Sports had to establish facilities in every city itself.
"I actually see that our journey, our aim for 1.5 million girls can come much faster because of a lot of existing academies that want to partner with us," she said.
The 1.5-million target is deliberately ambitious. Sharma said the number was chosen as a 10-year goal for the number of girls Nova wants to impact across India. The Super Nova Championship will initially be held once a year in each city, while academy programmes will provide more regular competition and game time.
The commercial model will initially rely on participation fees from children enrolling in academies or school programmes, although the exact academy fee has not yet been announced. School partnerships could operate either on a per-child basis or through an arrangement directly with the school.
The choice of Bengaluru as the starting point is also strategic. Sharma said the city has parents who are already receptive to their daughters playing sport, allowing Nova to test its model in a market where it does not first have to persuade families to participate.
The bigger challenge will be taking that model beyond major cities. A significant amount of Indian football talent comes from smaller towns and cities, where access to coaching and financial resources can be limited. Sharma acknowledged that Nova will need a mechanism to ensure talented girls are not excluded because they cannot afford the programme.
"We are definitely trying to build parallel solutions around how we could address that," she said. "Because of course, when we are thinking about our residential programmes, or even our academies currently, we are figuring out what could be the subsidized model, where we don't leave talent behind."
For now, Nova is starting with football, but Sharma said the longer-term ambition is broader. The programme is intended to remain girls-first even if it eventually expands beyond football into other sports.
"We want it to be a girls-only and girls-first programme," Sharma said. "We want to build it in a way where it can eventually become sport agnostic, but the philosophy continues to grow."
The All India Football Federation is not involved in the current launch. Sharma said Nova is operating independently, although the company expects to work with the federation in the future if its academies move towards accreditation.
For now, the project remains at an early stage. But the stated ambition is national: build a structured pathway for girls, expand access through schools and existing academies, and create enough competition and development opportunities to keep more girls in football. The first test begins in Bengaluru on September 5.