Jamshid Thachankandy remembers the exact moment his football career ended. It was 1992, University of Calicut, a knee that gave out and did not come back. He had been good enough to play alongside Jo Paul Ancheri, one of the finest Indian footballers of that generation.
After the injury, he waited a few years, accepted what had happened, and in 1996 packed everything into bags and flew to Doha.
He found work. He started a family. On Friday afternoons he played in local amateur leagues on dusty pitches with other Malayali men, all of them far from Kerala, all of them still needing football the way you need something you gave up too early.
His son Tahsin used to sit by the dugout and watch.
The boy was four years old. He would wait until the matches finished and then walk up to his father’s teammates and ask them to show him things, how to pass, how to dribble, what to do when someone is closing you down. The men humoured him. Nobody thought much of it.
This month, Tahsin Mohammed Jamshid, 19 years old and wearing a Qatar jersey, took the field in San Francisco for the opening match of the FIFA World Cup.
His father was in the stands.
“To see my son Tahsin play in the FIFA World Cup for Qatar,” Jamshid Thachankandy told reporters afterward, “feels like achieving my dream.”
A Nation of Spectators
India has never played at a FIFA World Cup. Not once. A country of 1.4 billion people, one of the loudest sporting nations on earth, sits somewhere in the 100s of the FIFA global rankings and watches the tournament from outside the gates every four years.
This summer, though, four men of direct Indian heritage are on the inside. Tahsin plays for Qatar. Sarpreet Singh, whose parents came from Jalandhar in Punjab, is in the New Zealand squad.
Samuel Moutoussamy, a defensive midfielder whose father is Indo-Guadeloupean and traces his family’s roots to South Indian indentured labourers shipped to the French Caribbean in 1861, is starting games for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nishan Velupillay, whose father is Sri Lankan Tamil and whose mother is Anglo-Indian, lines up as a forward for Australia.
India has no official claim on any of them. They hold New Zealand, French, Qatari, and Australian connections. They were developed by foreign academies, paid by foreign clubs, and selected by foreign coaches.
And yet millions of people across India are watching them with something that looks very much like ownership.
Fans track their goals on social media. WhatsApp groups in Punjab light up when Singh plays. Kerala newspapers run match previews framed around Tahsin as if he were one of their own, which in some sense he is, and in the most important sense is not.
Indian sports channels have quietly built coverage around these players’ ethnic roots in ways that their own national team cannot justify.
There is a word for this now in sports business circles: proxy fandom. And it turns out there is real money inside it.
The Number That Doesn’t Show Up on Transfermarkt
On paper, these four players do not represent enormous transfer values. Sarpreet Singh is valued at around 500,000 euros. Nishal Velupillay at 450,000.
Tahsin, still teenage and managed directly by Al-Duhail SC in Qatar, sits at 200,000. Samuel Moutoussamy, the most experienced of the group with 144 professional appearances in Ligue 1 for FC Nantes and now a contract at Atromitos in Greece running to mid-2027, is valued at 1.2 million euros.
A Championship club in England would spend more than that on a backup goalkeeper without blinking.
But transfer valuations only measure what one club will pay another club. They say nothing about what a broadcaster in Mumbai will pay to use a player’s name, or what a sponsor selling to 700 million Indian internet users will pay to put their logo near a jersey that carries cultural meaning back home.
When a European club signs a player of South Asian descent, their digital engagement from the subcontinent spikes. That is not an accident or a coincidence. It is a pattern well understood by the agencies and broadcasters who have built businesses around it.
Sarpreet Singh is managed by ROGON, a major European player agency with deep roots in German football. Agencies like ROGON do not simply handle contracts. They manage identities.
Singh’s Punjabi background, his time at Bayern Munich as the first player of Indian descent to sign for the Bavarian club, his 24 senior caps for New Zealand across several qualifying campaigns, together these things make him valuable in ways that never appear on Transfermarkt.
He is a footballer. He is also a story that millions of people in India have emotional stakes in, which makes him a vehicle for reaching those people commercially.
“The best player in the A-League right now at this moment in time,” former goalkeeper Mark Bosnich said during Singh’s breakout 2018-19 season at Wellington Phoenix. Bayern Munich’s scouts had been watching New Zealand at the FIFA Under-20 World Cup. They signed Singh that same year.
What a Sticker in Thrissur Is Actually Paying For
Regional broadcasters covering the Qatar Stars League have been running Malayalam-language advertising campaigns in Kerala during matches involving Tahsin.
Not because Kerala viewers care deeply about Qatari club football. Because they care about a boy from Kannur whose father they could have passed on the street.
Panini, the company that has been printing World Cup sticker albums since 1970, sells Tahsin’s collectible card in South Asia.
A child in Thrissur buying that sticker is completing a transaction that runs from Kerala to Doha to a printing facility in Italy, powered entirely by the feeling that someone who shares your background is somewhere they are not supposed to be able to reach.
Samuel Moutoussamy’s ancestry extends that market logic across more territory than most players could manage. His father belongs to a community of about 35,617 Indo-Guadeloupeans, South Indian descendants whose families were taken to the French Caribbean as plantation labour starting in 1861.
His mother, Cecile Tshibangu, is a Congolese legal director. Moutoussamy grew up in the Paris suburbs, trained at Olympique Lyonnais, made his name at Nantes, and could have played for France, Guadeloupe, or DR Congo.
He chose Congo in 2019 and has earned over 58 senior caps since. His career stitches together South Indian historical migration, elite French academy football, and African international competition. For a broadcaster trying to sell a match across three different continents with three different emotional entry points, that profile is genuinely unusual.
The Policy That Got Ahead of the Law
India has started to notice what it is missing.
On July 1, 2025, the Union Cabinet passed the Khelo Bharat Niti, a revised national sports policy replacing the 2001 framework. The third pillar of the policy set out to engage the Indian diaspora, to encourage foreign-born athletes of Indian heritage to come and represent India in international competition.
The policy hit a legal problem almost immediately.
Since 2008, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports has operated under a directive that limits Indian national team selection to holders of valid Indian passports. Overseas Citizens of India, the status held by millions of diaspora members who maintain formal links to the country, are not eligible.
An OCI card is not a passport. FIFA requires athletes to show a valid national passport on match day. The Citizenship Act of 1955 does not allow dual citizenship. So the government passed an ambitious diaspora recruitment policy without first arranging a legal way to act on it.
Legal analysts have pointed to Section 7B(2)(i) of the 1955 Act, which allows the government to issue specific administrative orders that could grant representation rights to OCI holders without touching the constitution. That provision has existed for years. It has not been used for this purpose.
Countries that face no such hesitation have done considerably better. Morocco recruited dual nationals to help build a squad that reached the World Cup semi-finals a few years ago. Vietnam and Singapore use foreign-heritage players as a matter of routine policy.
Qatar built the Aspire Academy, invested heavily in identifying and developing young talent living inside the country, gave Tahsin a “Qatari Mission Passport,” a specialised sporting document that allowed him to represent Qatar internationally while retaining his Indian passport, and then called him into a World Cup squad.
The Cost of Coming Home
A few athletes have gone the other way.
Ryan Williams spent most of his adult life in English football. Portsmouth, Fulham, Barnsley, Rotherham United, Oxford United. He was born in Perth and held an Australian passport. His mother came from an Anglo-Indian family in Mumbai.
His grandfather, Lincoln Grostate, known as Linky, was a significant figure in Indian football who scored the winning goal for Bombay against Bengal in the 1956 Santosh Trophy semi-finals. That Bengal team had eight players from the national squad that had just finished fourth at the Melbourne Olympics. It was not a small upset.
Williams eventually came to India to play for Bengaluru FC in the Indian Super League in 2023. He was encouraged by Sunil Chhetri, the national team captain, to think about switching allegiances.
The legal door was open because his one senior Australian appearance, a friendly against South Korea in 2019, was not a competitive match under FIFA rules. He gave up his Australian passport in late 2025. He got Indian citizenship.
He made his debut for the Blue Tigers on March 31, 2026, against Hong Kong in Kochi and scored after four minutes. The AIFF says it is the fastest debut goal in the team’s history.
Abneet Bharti arrived by a different route. The 27-year-old central defender was born in Kathmandu to Indian parents and has held an Indian passport his entire career, through stints on four continents covering academies in Singapore and Spain and professional clubs in Poland, Portugal, Argentina, and Bolivia.
He became the first Indian to debut for an Argentine club when he played for Deportivo Sol de Mayo. It was the Indian Embassy in Brazil that eventually told the AIFF he existed. The federation invited him to a national team camp in Kochi last year. Coach Luís Boa Morte described him as fast, athletic, and confident on the ball.
The AIFF task force has reached out to 33 OCI players in total through its scouting work. That number, 33, sits awkwardly against the fact that India’s diaspora is roughly 32 million people scattered across the globe. It tells you how early this process is.
Whose System, Whose Player
Sarpreet Singh grew up in Auckland with his parents, who came from Jalandhar. He played futsal as a child because that is what was available, and he was good enough to win the MVP award at the Australian National Futsal Championships at age ten, which is when Everton first noticed him.
Winston Reid, the New Zealand international, funded a scholarship that got Singh into Scots College and then the Wellington Phoenix academy. The technical habits he built in futsal, the quick touch, the comfort in tight spaces, carried through to his professional career and eventually to the Bundesliga.
None of these four players left India to seek a better footballing life. Their parents left, for jobs, for opportunities, for reasons that had nothing to do with sport. The children grew up inside whatever systems existed where they landed.
New Zealand gave Singh academies and scholarships. France gave Moutoussamy Lyon and Nantes. Qatar gave Tahsin the Aspire Academy and Al-Duhail. Australia gave Velupillay regional development networks and an AFC qualifying campaign.
Those systems did the work. India watched.
The AIFF has contacted 33 players and launched a task force and passed a pillar in a sports policy. Qatar spent billions building a factory for exactly this kind of talent and then watched it deliver a 19-year-old to a World Cup squad.
One of those is a programme. The other is a beginning.
Jamshid Thachankandy flew from Doha to San Francisco to watch his son play. The boy who used to sit by the dugout on Friday afternoons and ask strangers to show him how to dribble is now in a World Cup, wearing another country’s colours, carrying his father’s deferred dream in a Qatari passport.
For India, the feeling that creates is recognisable. It is the feeling of standing outside a party you were not invited to, listening to music that sounds like yours.