Football Dissected

With a population of over a billion, why is India not one of the big footballing nations? According to a recent study, over 550 million of the population are under the age of 21. With this massive pool of young people, perhaps the biggest on the planet, why then does India not even produce at least one world-class player? Why has India never played at a World Cup?

Firstly, young Indians have for decades have been influenced by Indian culture and family to concentrate more on education as a career than on sport. No one would argue that this is a bad thing, but it does immediately take out a significant amount of the under 21 age group.

Another problem is poverty. Most of the under 21s are in poverty and football is not seen as a way out of poverty like it is in South America. Some do play football, like in Goa and Kolkata, but because the caste system is still in effect, these young players are often ignored by the few scouts there are, regardless of their skill levels.

Some would say India is more of a cricket nation than a football nation. But, according to some leading experts, football is bigger than cricket domestically. So why then does India not produce world-class talent when football is argued to be the number one sport in the country and has been played in the country before FIFA ever existed? One reason is the structure of football in India. For many decades the infrastructure of the country was poor (e.g. communications, roads etc.). Because of this, the young talent that existed never got noticed because the villages and towns were poorly connected and therefore few scouts, if any, ever went to see the talent. In addition, because the country was poor, youth development never improved and because it didn't improve, top-quality players were never produced. All this is of course changing because of the super-power India is becoming and the infrastructure that comes with it.

Football in of Kerala, Manipur and West Bengal is said to be the top sport but still India lacks a world-class player. Attendances in India are erratic. In some parts of the country attendances can be very low while in other parts, particularly when the East Bengal Club and Mohun Bagan AC are playing in their derbies, attendances can be as high as 120,000. So the fan support exists (well in some parts anyway), but fan support doesn't equal better players. Proper training and youth development is very poor, although this is changing as the scheme, signed in September 2006, between India and Brazil to train Indian footballers and coaches is proving.

Another reason is media coverage. Cricket is seen to be the most popular sport because it has massive media coverage and because the Indian national cricket team is one of the best cricket teams in the world. In comparison, for decades football coverage in India was very low, although that is changing due to the realisation of the massive fan support, and for decades the football national team were poor having never played at a World Cup and never won a major trophy (except for the South Asian Football Federation Cup). At the time of writing, the Indian national football team are ranked 162 in the world according to the FIFA rankings, behind teams like Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore and even Niger - a Western African country which has a population of only roughly 14 million. With this young footballers have no idol to look up to with regards to the Indian national team.

In my opinion India could be as good as Brazil and Argentina. The climate is very similar to South America. Street football already exists in some areas in India. But the development at the grass-root level needs to improve significantly and hopefully that will happen with the scheme between India and Brazil as mentioned above. Nothing will happen overnight and in my opinion it will probably take another 10-20 years for India to even get into the top 30 of the world rankings.