For a football World Cup enthusiast, the past weekend proved to be surreal as the All India Football Federation (AIFF) proposed that its name be changed to the Football Federation of Bharat (FFB). Though not yet official—it requires approval from the Sports Ministry and from FIFA—it defies logic that the world’s most populous country is, instead of prioritising its grassroots football programme, fixated on a name change to align with the general rightward ideological transformation. That Türkiye and Czechia have adopted traditional names doesn’t matter since they are in.
India should hang its head in shame. Curaçao has a population of 1.5 lakh and Cabo Verde has six lakh citizens; each are less than a single Indian district—and yet both are proudly playing in front of the world. One had to look at a map to locate these countries. Cabo Verde is a group of ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean, over 600 km to the west of the westernmost point on the African continent in Senegal. Curaçao is an island in the south Caribbean, just 65 km north of Venezuela. Both were important ports in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Two other qualifying nations merit mention. Jordan, with a population of 11 million, has never been in a World Cup before. To the shock of everyone (including their own fans), its team reached the Asia Cup final in 2024. And there is Uzbekistan (pop. 37 million), on the other hand, which had been on the brink of qualifying for many years and finally fulfilled its fans’ dream; it is the first Central Asian country to qualify for the tournament.
Some of you may ask what the big deal is, since even China did not make it to the 2026 World Cup, their only appearance having been back in 2002. For this fixture, they weren’t even close, though many thought they had a good chance since eight places in the tournament were allocated to Asia (plus one spot in an intercontinental playoff). China was eliminated by Indonesia and ended up far behind Japan and Australia, after which its coach, Branko Ivankovic, a former Croatian mid-fielder, was sacked.
Over the past 25 years, China has had a stronger national team than India’s, far outpacing us in resources and investment. But China and India prove that it is not population alone that determines whether one can qualify; what matters more is a football culture, a coaching network, and a development system that can produce elite players.
Though India never qualified for the World Cup, it developed an Indian Super League (ISL) in 2014 though this has come late in the day. There is great passion for football in Kerala, Bengal, Goa, and the northeastern States. In the 2021-22 ISL, about 85 players were from the northeastern India: 43 from Manipur, 33 from Mizoram, and the rest from Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Assam. If India ever has a World Cup team, we will not have to import players from the Netherlands, as have Curaçao (25) and Cabo Verde (6).
India did reach the semi-finals of the football tournament of the 1956 Olympics and won the gold at the 1951 and 1962 Asian Games, so we were not always irrelevant. But since then, football stagnated, and though the ISL launched a dozen years ago, India has fallen way behind other nations who have been developing an extensive programme for decades, if not a century, such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
The cricket obsession
One of the reasons India has fallen behind is our obsession with cricket. All the money is in cricket; all media attention is on cricket. If a youngster wants to be a competitive athlete, his/her parents will steer them towards cricket, not football. In the best football countries, children choose football first.
India has a weak grassroots infrastructure. There is a documentary about Japanese football on YouTube. Going back to the early 1990s, Japan was not a global football power. But the Japanese are a disciplined nation of devoted people who have concentrated fully on the task of developing domestic football. (India, on the other hand, puts everything off till tomorrow.) Japanese children are immersed in football, their mothers facilitating coaching and practice by licensed coaches, who number in the thousands. They have strong local clubs and extensive school competitions. They have professional academies.
Talented Indian youngsters, on the other hand, never receive elite coaching at the right age.
Then there is the AIFF, which is beset with internal politics, inconsistent governance, and short-term planning. Someone on the internet half-jokingly remarked that if in Japan, Rs.100 goes to grassroots football development, in India half of that Rs.100 will be siphoned off by bureaucrats to build for themselves a swimming pool. That might be unfair, but this is the generally dim view of our Sport bureaucracy. The exceptions are few, like Jaspal Rana, the former athlete who successfully mentored Olympian shooter Manu Bhaker. No wonder he was deeply mourned when he prematurely passed away earlier this month.
There is still hope for India, as money is now going towards clubs, academies, and TV exposure. But we will need 20 to 30 years of competent administration, grassroots development, and coaching.
Changing the name of AIFF to FFB might seem like a minor distraction to some, but it is more meaningless pandering to the right wing. It does nothing for football. Earlier this month, RSS activists forced some football enthusiasts in Kadavoor in Kerala to pull down the Brazilian flag they had hoisted; Brazil has long been a global powerhouse, and players like Pelé and Ronaldinho were household names, so it is natural Brazil has fans all over, including in India. The RSS workers, perhaps drunk on gaumutra, claimed the flag looked too much like the Pakistan flag.
It may be a while before India makes it to the FIFA tournament.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
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