Sports enthusiast Gaurav Modwel, CEO, FC Pune City, wears different hats. He’s also CEO of the Wadhawan Group which owns the Pune club and is further involved with India on Track, a sports venture that has a tie-up with Arsenal Football Club for grassroots development. He shares his views on the various aspects of his new venture in an exclusive interview with indiansuperleague.com.You are CEO of FC Pune City and CEO of the Wadhawan Group too, how do you manage to handle so many responsibilities?I’m quite used to it. At certain times, when it’s a new venture, more time is spent in building it up. We will build it up and it’s a part of my life and I keep doing it all the time.What made FC Pune City opt for a tie-up with ACF Fiorentina?We are very passionate, for sure. What results we are able to get is obviously due to how well we work. We are very passionate about football, about doing well, about building grassroots and that’s why they fit in really well. They work really hard, have a very good work ethos; we have worked 18-19 hours together identifying the targets during the [domestic player] draft.What are your thoughts on the players acquired by your club?In a draft, teams are evenly matched as compared to the auction process. So while we have got a good team, others would have got great teams as well. We got what we wanted, so we are really happy about that, Fiorentina and Pune City, both of us are really happy. We have a young team, in the age group between 19-29 years. Whatever positions we wanted, we have got nearly 99% of those positions.Who are going to be the key Indian players for FC Pune City?We really can’t tell as of now. We build our spine and then we put in the people, everyone plays their role. There is no star really that I can single out of these 14 players we have picked. I want these 14, as and when the call comes, to be able to play their chosen roles.We have four defenders – Deepak Devrani, Pritam Kotal, Dharmaraj Ravanan, Anupam Sarkar. Now if there is a weakness in say, the left back position, and we cannot play a left back who is an international in the game, then, one of these four guys has to come in and play at left back even if they are natural centre backs or right backs. So there are different roles and they could become heroes in different ways.
