Every four years, when the FIFA World Cup comes around, the footballing backwater that is India wakes up to the Beautiful Game with common people turning armchair experts and critics, and sleep cycles getting affected throughout the country.
Most of these people would pay scant attention to the sport between two editions but won’t hesitate to pronounce opinions on Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland et al as well as explain the strengths of the Spanish defence and FIFA geopolitics.
Along with this, a familiar quadrennial lament would be heard from a wide cross-section of the population: Why India, with a population close to 1.5 billion, can’t come close to making it to the World Cup?
Most of these people won’t be able to name more than a couple of footballers from the Indian national team, but consider it a national embarrassment that India is nowhere to be found in the Greatest Show on Earth, when tiny nations like Cape Verde and Curacao make their presence felt and give some of the biggest teams a run for their money.
It’s nothing more than FOMO (fear of missing out), with the exception that the fear comes true, unfailingly, at every edition. There’s a feeling that India, as the self-proclaimed Vishwaguru, needs to be at the FIFA World Cup and somehow, the event can’t be called the World Cup if it doesn’t feature the most populous country on earth.
That’s when the tournament was expanded to 48 teams to make it more inclusive, but with the real intention of allowing the two biggest markets – India and China – to be part of it. But while China did qualify for the 2002 edition in Japan and South Korea, it failed to advance beyond the group stage, losing all its three matches and failing to score a single goal.
Some Indians may mention the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, where India had a chance of playing before pulling out. Contrary to the popular myth, it was not an insistence on playing barefoot as opposed to with boots that was the reason for the withdrawal, but more mundane financial reasons – the cost and logistics of sending the team to virtually the other end of the world – poor preparation, and considering the football competition at the Olympics as more prestigious.
As for the nostalgia for a time gone by when India was supposedly good enough to ‘qualify’ for the World Cup, here’s a reality check. They had got the opportunity after all the other three teams in the Asian qualifying group – Indonesia, the Philippines and Burma – had withdrawn, for reasons similar to those given by India.
Bleak future
Coming to the present, India has little chance of qualifying for the FIFA World Cup in the foreseeable future – even if the number of teams is increased further – as it’s not a priority of any of the stakeholders beyond offering lip service. India hasn’t even qualified for next year’s AFC Asian Cup.
The governing body of the sport in the country, the All India Football Federation, thinks it’s more worthwhile to pursue a change in its name to Football Federation of Bharat than to improve the level of the game in the country or its FIFA ranking, which is languishing at 138.
A country that can’t even conduct a domestic league – not due to war or other factors beyond its control – shouldn’t even think of qualifying for the World Cup. The reasons why the last season of the Indian Super League (ISL) was curtailed and seemed likely to be cancelled altogether at one stage are well documented and were largely commercial in nature. The sticking points were marketing rights and broadcast deals, and other issues related to money.
Even countries with meagre resources have a functional domestic league. It doesn’t need to be glitzy or flashy. Having a functional domestic structure that has a fixed calendar and abides by generally accepted regulations shouldn’t be too much to ask. Every league needn’t be a copy of cricket’s IPL.
On the footballing side of things, the issue that gets talked about the most is the paucity of quality Indian strikers, as if it’s the one aspect holding the national team back. The AIFF initially stipulated that one must be on the field throughout a league game, before backing out realizing that the regulation was not enforceable.
Another proposal offered as a sure-shot solution is looking for quality players of Indian heritage around the world. Indeed, a lot of players who have featured in the ongoing World Cup weren’t born or raised in the countries for which they are playing. But why would a talented player, having Indian blood, find it worthwhile to surrender his passport and take up Indian nationality? He will first have to be convinced that he doesn’t have a chance of representing a quality side that may have a chance to compete in the biggest tournaments in the world. This approach first needs a change in regulations at the highest levels of the government. Clarity of purpose is the first requirement here.
Lack of quality
The best Indian players contracted for amounts that may not be commensurate with their quality, who were supposedly worst hit by the uncertainty surrounding the ISL, can’t absolve themselves of this mess either. Apart from shedding tears and drafting appeals to resolve the impasse, they just sat on their hands even when the franchises they were contracted to reduced salaries and sometimes even threatened to shut down. The players could have tried to go and play overseas. Most of their Indian teams may not have had a problem with relieving them as they weren’t playing anyway, and it would have helped their finances.
But hardly any player sought that route, as they would have had to compare themselves with footballers elsewhere. Their level would have been exposed, and they would have had to settle for amounts much lower than what they are getting in India.
And now to the Indian football fan.
It’s only been a few months since Messi came for a four-city tour of India, and people spent considerable amounts just to get a glimpse of the legend. The vandalism that took place in Kolkata when some disgruntled fans vented their ire was unprecedented. That sort of ‘passion’ is not visible when the national team underperforms or the domestic league isn’t held.
The problem here is common to what ails almost every sport in the country. People care less about the sport than the stars.
In such a scenario, the hand-wringing over India’s absence from football’s showpiece is only temporary. The World Cup has one week left. This phase will soon pass too.