NorthEast United FC
Indian professional football club based in Guwahati
NorthEast United Football Club is an Indian professional football club based in Northeast India, that competes in the Indian Super League (ISL), the top flight of Indian football. The club was founded on 13 April 2014 during the inaugural season of Indian Super League. NorthEast United represents the 8 states of North East India, consisting of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Mizoram.
History
Formation
In early 2014, it was announced that the All India Football Federation, the national federation for football in India, and IMG-Reliance would be accepting bids for ownership of eight of nine selected cities for the upcoming Indian Super League, an eight-team franchise league modeled along the lines of the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. On 13 April 2014, it was announced that the Bollywood actor John Abraham and Shillong Lajong Football Club had won the bidding for the franchise.
On 16 July 2014, the club signed Joan Capdevila, a European Championship and World Cup winning defender with Spain, as its marquee player. He said: "India is a huge country and it should be a privilege for me to be a small part in popularizing this global game here and working with the young talented footballers of North East India".
On 19 August the club hired its first manager, New Zealander Ricki Herbert, who had represented his nation at the 1982 World Cup and managed New Zealand at the 2010 World Cup.
2014 season: Inaugural season
On 13 October 2014, the team won their first ISL match at the Indira Gandhi Stadium, with Spaniard Koke scoring the only goal of the game to defeat Kerala Blasters. The team did not make the end-of-season play-offs, finishing in last place among the eight teams.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “NorthEast United FC” is indian professional football club based in Guwahati. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through NorthEast, United and Indian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16840338. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 1982 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “NorthEast United FC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.