How did a champion club end up with zero points?

If you opened the ISL (India's top football league) table after the new season kicked off on 10 October, you might have spotted a name at the very bottom with zero points: Diamond Harbour FC. They haven't played a single game.

A few months ago, they were champions of the league just below the ISL. So how does a team win promotion to India's top division and end up with nothing?

Start with the climb. Diamond Harbour is a town south of Kolkata, and its club is young. The club entered the Calcutta Football League in 2022. In 2024-25 they won the I-League 3 and the I-League 2 (India's third and second divisions) in a single season. In 2025-26 they won the Indian Football League, the new name for the old I-League, at the first attempt.

Very few clubs anywhere climb that fast.

Under the rules, that title came with a place in the ISL. But in Indian football, winning on the pitch is only half of promotion. A club also has to meet the league's off-pitch requirements, including licensing and the fees that come with joining.

According to the league, Diamond Harbour didn't meet the fee requirement. The club's own records call it a withdrawal for financial reasons. So instead of quietly being left out, they sit at the bottom on zero points and will drop back to the Indian Football League for 2027-28.

Think of it like getting into a top college on merit, then losing the seat because the fees weren't paid in time.

You might wonder why the fees matter so much. The ISL itself has had a hard couple of years. Its old commercial partner, FSDL (the company that ran the league), paid the All India Football Federation (AIFF) ₹50 crore a year until that deal ended in December 2025. When the AIFF looked for a new partner, nobody bid, even at a lower expected price of about ₹37.5 crore a year.

One reason bidders stayed away was promotion and relegation (clubs moving up and down divisions) itself. Few wanted to fund a league where clubs could drop out of the top division. The rule that gave Diamond Harbour a path to the top also made the league harder to sell.

And the top flight is expensive: entry fees, mandatory floodlights, a bigger squad, and away trips that can mean flying from Goa to Guwahati.

There are two fair ways to read this. Licensing rules exist so that clubs don't collapse halfway through a season and leave holes in the fixture list. But a team that won everything on the pitch has nothing to show for it this year, and that's a hard message for every small club trying to climb.

Diamond Harbour can win the Indian Football League again next season. The question to watch is whether the next club to earn its place will be able to afford to take it.