Football league
Bend it like Bengalis

After several false dawns, Indian businesses are finally waking up to the beautiful game. The West Bengal division of the Indian Football Association has tied up with Celebrity Management Group and Mahuaa TV to create Premier League Soccer (PLS), based on cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL), whose Twenty20 tournament has turned that sport into a big business since 2008.

The PLS aims to launch next January as a sexier alternative to India’s lacklustre, four-year-old I-League, administered by the All India Football Federation. Licences to set up the PLS’s initial six teams – or franchises – are currently on offer to companies with a minimum net worth of 100 miliion rupees (€1.6m) and teams will be created in a tender process afterwards.

Each team will have a 25-player squad consisting of an ‘icon’ player – Dutchman Edgar Davids and Argentina’s Juan Pablo Sorin are said to have been in talks – plus three overseas and 21 local players.

India’s interest in international soccer is on the rise. Last year the rights to televise European games were sold to a partnership of IMG Worldwide and India’s Reliance Industries for €95m, and Pune- based poultry giant Venky’s paid €47m for the English Premiership club Blackburn Rovers last November. Rovers toured India last month and have plans to build a stadium and academy in Pune as an official ‘feeder’ facility.

With its cricket in the doldrums, it may seem the perfect time for Indians to embrace football. On the other hand, according to The Guardian newspaper, despite hauling in record income, the English Premier League's 20 clubs collectively lost close to half a billion pounds last year.

Bakery franchise
Lord of the bread rings

Casting for a slacker?

Connecticut-born Glenn Spicker looks a natural. But the bejeaned fortysomething is in fact a serial entrepreneur, not to mention a legend in Prague, where the political-science junkie ended up following the Velvet Revolution and the tumbling of the Berlin Wall.

His first venture was as a partner in an American music and food bar and his boho empire has grown to include the Museum of Communism, the U Malého Glena jazz club and Iron Curtain, a cellar music pub bedecked in communist memorabilia.

Meanwhile his Bohemia Bagel outlets are responsible for Prague’s infatuation with the ring-shaped bread. Fifteen years after opening the first one in the quaint Little Quarter, he is refocusing on the humble bagel. “I’d seen the incredible growth of the industry in the States. I see possibilities here,” he says, having just drawn up his own franchise prospectus.

Losing the lease on the original location in 2009 was the spur, he says, but his newest branch, a warehouse in Holešovice that serves as restaurant and much- enlarged bakery, has whetted his appetite for growth. “We now supply Starbucks, Gloria Jean’s, the sandwich shops at the airport and coffee shops all over the country,” he says. The brand is enthused about in guidebooks – and Spicker thinks this is the time to capitalise.

His nascent franchise scheme for the EU, he muses, might even replicate some of America’s success stories (bagel sales have increased by 500% since 1995 and franchiser Manhattan Bagel requires an initial investment of $400,000-$900,000). He considers himself “a relaxed kind of guy,” but as his website proclaims: “Like the hole in a bagel, the future is wide open.”

Sewage technology
Sanitation's new stars

Of all the things contaminating the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the most visible is the lack of suffcient sewage treatment in the Palestinian territories. Two million residents of the PA produce 150 million cubic metres of raw sewage annually. Only 22.5 million cubic metres of this is collected and purified in waste-water treatment plants. The remainder is collected in cesspools and dug in the backyards of houses in villages and cities. Water from those cesspools has been seeping into the soil and poisoning the groundwater.

This is why the work of Israeli start-up Mapal Green Energy is being embraced across the region. Its cutting-edge waste-water treatment technology – funded by an Italian-Palestinian-Israeli initiative worth €400m – offers a unique floating fine-bubbles aeration system, rather than the more conventional mechanical surface aerators.

The system, which enhances the delivery of oxygen into the waste water, does not require any complex systems or involve high maintenance costs. It also prevents untreated waste water from reaching and contaminating nearby bodies of water.

Inventor Hanoch Magen and investor and CEO David Azouri claim that the system can save up to 70% in energy consumption and up to 80% in maintenance costs in addition to significantly improving water quality. These conclusions have been confirmed in more than 22 waste-water treatment plants in Israel and other countries.

The Palestinian town of Uja will be the first, hopefully, to benefit from a pilot project now in full swing. Already UK private-equity fund Charles Street Securities Europe has invested $9m in Mapal in second-round funding.