AGARTALA, Feb 14 (TIWN): Representatives of Tripura football team is all set to participate in the Santosh Trophy football tournament at Aizwal. The match is held every year in the memory of late Maharaja Sir Manmatha Nath Roy Chowdhary of Santosh.

Santosh Trophy is an annual Indian football tournament which is contested by states and government institutions. The first winners were Bengal, who also leads the all-time winners list with 31 titles to date.

The tournament first began in 1941, and was the premier football competition in the country before the National Football League started in the year 1996. The trophy as named after the late Maharaja Sir Manmatha Nath Roy Chowdhary of Santosh, which is now in Bangladesh, who had been the President of the Indian Football Association, the football organisation of Bengal and the donators of the trophy. The runners-up trophy, Kamla Gupta Trophy, was also donated by the IFA.

The third place teams receive the Sampangi Cup which was presented by the Mysore Football Association (now KSFA) in 1952, in the memory of Sampangi, a renowned footballer from Mysore.

The competition has seen a few changes in the format through the years. In the present format, there is a qualifying round involving eight clusters of three or four teams each. The eight winners from each cluster are then drawn along with four seeded teams, who do not have to come through qualifying, and these twelve teams are then divided into four groups of three each. This is the quarterfinal league stage, in which each of the three teams in the group plays each other. The winners of each group then move to the semi-finals. The semi-finals and the final are single-legged fixtures, with extra time, golden goal and penalty shootout, if required.