Why did Indian hockey stop winning? The answer was hidden under the player’s feet

Aslam was the only Muslim player in the Indian hockey squad. He was due to travel to a mosque in Kuala Lumpur on a shuttle bus shared with the Pakistani team, hours before the World Cup final against them. Balbir Sr, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and the team’s manager, didn’t have to go. By the Express’s account, he wanted to.

Pakistani forward Abdul Rashid Jr is said, in that same account, to have turned to his teammates that morning and remarked that with a Sikh leader walking into a mosque alongside his Muslim player, luck was clearly not going to be on Pakistan’s side.

It’s a story that has circulated in Indian hockey circles for years, repeated in newspaper retrospectives rather than filed as it happened, and it’s worth reading in that spirit, as part of how the team remembers that day rather than a transcript of it.

What isn’t in dispute is the result. India won the final 2-1. It remains, 51 years later, the country’s only men’s Hockey World Cup title.

That’s the story everyone remembers. What’s less discussed is how close India came to not sending a team to Kuala Lumpur at all, and what happened to the sport in the years right after that gold medal.

Both threads are, at heart, business stories. One is about a government stepping in when an institution collapsed. The other is about a piece of technology that quietly wiped out a nation’s sporting advantage, and took decades to claw back.

When the federation fell apart

Months before the 1975 World Cup, the Indian Hockey Federation was in disarray. Its chief, Ashwani Kumar, resigned after a meeting in Delhi that he himself described, years later, as the most agonising moment of his long association with the sport.

Rival factions fought over who controlled the sport. India’s participation in the World Cup itself was in doubt.

It wasn’t the sports ministry or a corporate sponsor that stepped in. It was a state government.

Giani Zail Singh, then Chief Minister of Punjab, offered to fund and run the national camp himself. The Indian Olympic Association handed him the reins. Forty-two players were picked and housed at Panjab University’s Hostel No. 4 in Chandigarh, a building originally built for women students.

What Punjab built there was, by most accounts, ahead of its time. Balbir Singh Sr ran the camp as team manager, Gurcharan Singh Bodhi coached, and doctors from PGIMER, led by Dr Rajinder Kalra, oversaw the players’ physical conditioning, alongside physical fitness trainer Dr S S Gill, per The Indian Panorama’s account of the camp.

Zail Singh is remembered, in a Times of India piece on the Panjab University camp, for telling the team not to worry about plots of land, houses, or scooters, and to keep their focus only on winning the Cup.

The tournament that almost slipped away

None of this guaranteed anything on the field.

India lost 1-2 to Argentina in the league stage and the mood turned grim. Balbir Sr didn’t reprimand anyone. He sat the team down for breakfast, spoke to each player individually, and told them to forget Argentina and focus on West Germany. India won 3-1.

Then came the semifinal against host Malaysia, where Aslam Sher Khan’s story really begins. He had barely played all tournament.

Speaking to PTI ahead of the 2026 World Cup, Aslam recalled the personal agony was so intense that he would tear up every night before going to sleep for not getting a chance to play. His father, an Olympian in 1936, died when Aslam was 13.

With India trailing 1-2 and ten minutes left, there was, according to a detailed Indian Express account of the match, a heated exchange on the Indian bench about whether to bring Aslam on in place of defender Michael Kindo.

Team official Cardar Singh Dosanjh is said in that account to have won the argument and sent Aslam in, telling him to trust his skill. This part of the story, like much of that day, comes from the recollections of the players and officials involved rather than a courtside recording, and is best read as the Express reconstructed it from those interviews.

Aslam scored off a penalty corner within two minutes of coming on. As he put it to PTI, that two-week agony led him to score in the last fifteen minutes of the semifinal. The match went to extra time. Harcharan Singh scored the winner. India was through to the final.

In the final, Surjit Singh equalised in the second half after Pakistan had led 1-0, and Ashok Kumar, son of the legendary Dhyan Chand, scored the winner in the 51st minute.

Speaking to PTI, Ashok recalled that after the 1971 semifinal loss, Balbir Sr cried so much it was difficult to calm him down, and that he himself would have felt ashamed returning home with anything less than gold after the bronze and silver of the two World Cups before.

By most measures, it was the peak of Indian hockey.

Then the ground changed under their feet

One year later, at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the International Hockey Federation switched the sport to synthetic turf, or AstroTurf. This was not a small rule change. It rewired the game.

Grass rewarded touch, wrist work and dribbling, the traditional strengths of Indian and Pakistani hockey. Synthetic turf was faster and more uniform, and it rewarded raw pace and physical strength instead.

Wooden sticks, traditionally made of mulberry wood, gave way to carbon-fiber and fiberglass composites built for harder hitting. The ball changed too, from stitched leather to a harder plastic compound that travelled faster.

European teams adapted quickly, largely because they could afford to.

A single international-standard AstroTurf pitch cost millions of rupees to import and lay in the late 1970s and 80s, a figure repeated across multiple hockey histories of the period, though precise contemporaneous pricing records are hard to come by now.

Western Europe and Australia built networks of these pitches at school and club level. India, without that capital, could not. Municipal bodies, public schools and regional clubs simply didn’t have the money.

Indian players kept learning the game on grass and mud while the rest of the hockey world moved to a different surface entirely, developing habits that didn’t transfer cleanly once they reached international turf.

Around the same time, cricket’s commercial rise pulled sponsors, broadcasters and advertisers away from hockey almost completely, especially after India’s 1983 Cricket World Cup win and the satellite television boom of the 1990s. Hockey survived largely on public sector jobs, with organisations like Indian Railways, Air India and Bharat Petroleum offering players modest employment rather than professional contracts.

The low point came in 2008, when India, an eight-time Olympic champion in the sport, failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics for the first time in its history.

Odisha decides to bet on hockey

The recovery, when it came, followed a strikingly similar pattern to 1975: a state government stepping in where the federation and private sponsors could not.

In 2018, when hockey’s traditional sponsors withdrew, the Odisha government under Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik began sponsoring both the men’s and women’s national teams, senior and junior, through the state-owned Odisha Mining Corporation, initially for five years.

India won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, its first hockey podium finish in 41 years, and the women’s team reached the semifinals for the first time. Whether the sponsorship directly caused that result is hard to prove, but the timing gave the arrangement real credibility within the state.

On April 24, 2023, the Odisha cabinet approved a ten-year extension of that sponsorship, running from February 1, 2023 to January 31, 2033. According to a report in The Hindu, quoting state Chief Secretary Pradeep Kumar Jena, the Odisha Mining Corporation committed a total of 434.12 crore rupees, excluding taxes, to Hockey India over that period.

Jena described it as a significant step for the growth of hockey in India, and pointed to the men’s bronze and the women’s semifinal run at Tokyo as validation of the state’s involvement. In June 2024, under new Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi, that commitment was extended further to 2036, aligned with the state’s centenary under a plan called Vision Odisha 2036.

Even taken at face value, the scale is notable. Over 400 crore rupees, committed across a decade by one state, is not a token gesture, and it isn’t tied to a single Olympic cycle. It reads as a long-term bet that hockey is worth funding as a symbol of the state, not just a sport.

Odisha has also put money into infrastructure, building the Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium in Rourkela and a string of synthetic training centers across the traditional hockey belt of Sundargarh district, according to figures the state government has publicised, though these particular numbers were not independently verified for this piece and should be read as the state’s own claims.

This is, in effect, the answer to the AstroTurf problem of the 1970s. Back then, India could not afford synthetic pitches. Now, one state alone says it has built dozens.

Players start getting paid like professionals

Public money has gone into infrastructure. Franchise money is now going into player careers.

The Hockey India League returned for the 2024-25 season, and for the first time, a Women’s Hockey India League ran alongside it, giving women players a market valuation they hadn’t had before.

At the October 2024 player auction, captain and drag-flicker Harmanpreet Singh became the most expensive player in HIL history, bought by Soorma Hockey Club for a reported 78 lakh rupees, with forward Abhishek and midfielder Hardik Singh also drawing bids in the 70 lakh range and Udita Dhanwar topping the women’s auction.

These figures were widely reported at the time of the auction but were not independently re-verified for this piece and reflect franchise bids at a single event rather than annual salaries.

Compare that to 1975, when Zail Singh’s promise to players, as they remember it, was that they wouldn’t have to worry about a house or a scooter. Fifty years on, a young drag-flicker can earn nearly 80 lakh rupees at a single auction. That is a different economic universe for the sport, even allowing for five decades of inflation.

Corporate sponsors have followed. The JSW Group has entered a commercial partnership with the International Hockey Federation ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the kind of deal that simply didn’t exist for Indian hockey a decade ago.

A World Cup return, with an old scar still open

India goes into the 2026 FIH Hockey World Cup, being co-hosted by Belgium and the Netherlands from August 15 to 30, still chasing a podium finish it hasn’t had since that 1975 gold. Back-to-back Olympic bronzes at Tokyo and Paris count for something, but the World Cup drought, now 51 years, is its own separate story.

Ashok Kumar and Aslam Sher Khan, both speaking to PTI ahead of the tournament, urged the current squad under Harmanpreet Singh to play with country ahead of individual ambition.

Ashok’s advice was to make decisions quickly, on ball control, attacking and passing alike. Aslam’s was blunter: that the team should enter the field thinking of the country the way they once did, and play with the same all-costs passion.

What hasn’t changed, it seems, is the emotional core of the sport. Players still carry family expectations, still need someone to hold their nerve for them the way Balbir Sr once did for a frightened young Aslam Sher Khan. What has changed is everything built around them, the pitches, the sticks, the sponsorship checks, the auction prices.

Zail Singh once told a group of anxious young players not to worry about houses and scooters. Today, a state government has committed over 400 crore rupees to the sport over the next decade, and a young drag-flicker can earn close to 80 lakh rupees in an afternoon of bidding.

Whatever became of the prayer room Balbir Sr built in that Chandigarh hostel, and much of what happened inside it survives only through the memories of the men who were there, the instinct behind it, that a team drawn from different states and different faiths needs one shared thing to hold on to, is still what Indian hockey seems to be chasing, fifty years and one lost surface later.