Cricket Already Wrote Football’s Playbook. Indian Football Won’t Read It.

You know exactly how it goes. A cricket World Cup comes around and the football fans start counting, ten teams, maybe five real contenders, call that a world cup if you like. Then a football World Cup comes around and the cricket fans get their turn, you cannot even qualify, two hundred nations tried and you were not one of them, come back when you have earned a seat.

Both sides think they are winning. Both sides are just loud. And while everyone is busy scoring points off each other, nobody is asking the only question that matters, which is how India gets good at both.

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Let Us Be Honest About Where We Actually Stand

In cricket we are not just good, we are the best in the world right now and it is not close. Three ICC trophies in a row. The T20 World Cup in 2024, the Champions Trophy in 2025, and then this March in Ahmedabad we beat New Zealand by 96 runs to win the T20 World Cup again, becoming the first team ever to defend it, the first host nation to win it, and the first to hold three of them. There is no argument to be had. We are the standard.

Now football. As of the June 2026 rankings India sits 138th in the world. We have been outside the top hundred for eight straight years. Our best ever was 94th, and that was in 1996, before I was born. We did not qualify for the 2026 World Cup, which nobody expected us to, but we also failed to qualify for the 2027 Asian Cup, and that one should sting, because that is not the world stage, that is our own continent.

So when someone says India should target the football World Cup, I want to be gentle but honest. In roughly a hundred years and twenty three editions, only eight countries have ever won that trophy. Eight. We are not in a position to talk about winning it when we cannot get out of Asia. That is not pessimism, that is just the scoreboard, and refusing to look at the scoreboard is exactly the habit that keeps us here.

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Cricket Was Not Always This

Here is the part both sides of this argument forget. Cricket in India was not born a giant. Before 1983 it was a sport we played, not a sport we owned. The money was not there, the obsession was not there, and nobody was building a national industry around it, because nobody had any proof it was worth building.

Then we won the World Cup in 1983, and the proof arrived. Not the money, not the leagues, not the stadiums, just the proof that we could actually be the best at this. And that was enough for a country to start pointing its attention and its investment in one direction.

Notice what happened next, because this is the bit people romanticise wrongly. We did not immediately dominate. We won nothing of consequence for the next twenty years. We lost the 2003 final. The trophies did not come, and we kept investing anyway, because we had seen what was possible and we were willing to sit through the boring middle part.

The money came later, and it came because of a decision. For years the board actually paid the state broadcaster to put cricket on television. Then somebody worked out that this was backwards, that the audience was the asset and the broadcaster should be paying us. Once the rights started being sold instead of bought, the money turned around and started flowing in, and everything that followed, the IPL, the salaries, the whole machine, was built on that reversal. Add the Ganguly era, then the Dhoni era, then the IPL, and you get the empire we have today.

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Football’s Problem Is Not Cricket. It Is Football.

This is where I lose patience with my own side of the argument, because football fans in India love to point at cricket as the thief. Cricket took the money, cricket took the eyeballs, cricket took the kids. And I have written before about how lopsided that money actually is, so I am not pretending the imbalance is a myth. It is real.

But the imbalance is not why Indian football is broken. Indian football is broken because of Indian football.

Look at what just happened to our own top league. The 2025-26 ISL season was put on hold last year because the contract between the federation and the league operator was expiring and nobody had sorted out what came next. The federation floated a tender for commercial partners in October, and not a single bid came in. Not one. The season eventually limped into life in February and ran until May, shortened so badly that each club played thirteen matches instead of the twenty four that Asian football normally requires, and we needed a special exemption just to be allowed into continental competition at all.

That is not cricket’s fault. Cricket did not do that to us. We did that to ourselves.

And then there is the stuff that is harder to talk about politely. There were reports back in 2022 that the federation paid a large sum to an astrology firm to motivate the national team. More recently, a club official who says he worked on the federation’s own integrity side alleged a payment of around twenty five lakh rupees to an astrologer, for horoscopes and advice on selection. These are allegations and reports, not proven facts in a court, and I want to be fair about that. But even as allegations, they tell you something about the institution we are dealing with, and about where the attention goes when there is no youth structure, no coaching depth, and no functioning calendar to spend it on.

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Sunil Chhetri Said the Quiet Part, and He Was Right

Chhetri made a point once that I think about a lot, and it is the most honest thing anyone in Indian football has said. Take a man who works all week and gets two hours on the weekend. Put a Clasico on one screen and an ISL game on the other. He will watch the Clasico. Not because he hates his country, not because he is a bad fan, but because he has two hours and he is going to spend them on the best football available.

That is not betrayal. That is a completely rational human being making a completely rational choice, and any argument that starts by calling that fan disloyal has already lost. The fan is not the problem. The product is the problem.

Which is why I get annoyed at the line that football cannot grow in India because there is no football culture here. There is. Ask anyone who stays up till two in the morning for a Madrid game, and I say that as someone who does.

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I Used to Watch the ISL. Then I Stopped.

And I want to be specific here, because I am not talking about Indian football from a distance. I watched it. I gave it years.

When the ISL started it was genuinely something. Roberto Carlos was here. Materazzi was here, playing and managing at Chennaiyin. Zico was coaching. Forlan came. I supported Chennaiyin, and that squad was a joy, Elano running the game, and Elano was my favourite, with Bruno Pelissari, Bernard Mendy, John Stiven Mendoza around him. Even the Indian players in those teams were sharp, because they were training every day next to men who had played at the highest level and they had no choice but to keep up. I went to games at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi. The cheapest tickets were nineteen rupees, then forty nine, ninety nine, one ninety nine. I remember because I was a kid and the price was the reason I could go.

Then the marquee players left, and the league quietly decided that fewer foreigners was the way forward. Six on the pitch became five, then four, the same as the IPL.

Now I understand the argument, and I want to be fair to it. When six foreigners played, they took the positions that decide games, the centre-backs, the number ten, the striker, and Indian players in those exact positions never got to develop because they never got to play. Cutting the number down was supposed to force Indian players into the spine of the team. That reasoning is sound. It just did not work.

It did not work because the level fell off a cliff. More Indians were playing, yes, but they were playing against a worse standard, and you do not get better by beating people who are also not very good. The quality of the football dropped, the games became hard to sit through, and I stopped watching sometime around COVID, which is not something I say proudly. I did not stop because I stopped caring. I stopped because it stopped being worth two hours.

Look at that list honestly. A league with no video refereeing in 2026, whose own capital city could not fill a stadium at nineteen rupees a seat, which lost two of its franchises, and which last year could not attract one single commercial bid. That is the product we are asking a working man to choose over the Clasico.

So no, the fan is not disloyal. Indians are passionate about football. They are just not passionate about bad football, and there is no reason on earth why they should be. Give people a team worth watching and they will show up. That is not a hope, that is exactly how it worked for cricket.

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One Man Is Already Doing the Federation’s Job

And then there is Ranjit Bajaj, who is the reason I have not completely given up.

He runs Minerva Academy out of Punjab. He played for India at youth level. He is also the man behind that astrologer allegation I mentioned earlier, which tells you the kind of person he is, loud, awkward, permanently at war with the federation, the sort of man nobody in power enjoys being in a room with.

Now look at what his kids have actually done. Last summer his boys won the Gothia Cup, the Dana Cup and the Norway Cup in a single season, the three biggest youth tournaments on the planet, the first Indian team ever to do it. At the Norway Cup they scored 130 goals in eight matches, the most anyone has scored in the history of that tournament. In one Dana Cup final they won 15-0. And then, at the MIC Cup in Spain, his academy team beat Liverpool 6-0. Liverpool. Six nil.

Now ask how it was paid for. Not by the federation. He crowdfunded around forty five lakh rupees, he is carrying roughly two crore in personal loans, and to fund one of those European trips he mortgaged his wife’s gold. The visas were rejected at first and nearly killed the trip. He says he has had no government support. When his team wins abroad, the help comes from ordinary Indians in those cities, and from strangers on the internet who chip in because they watched a video and believed in it. Which is beautiful, and which is also completely inadequate, because no amount of crowdfunding lets him pick the India squad.

Bajaj himself has said the obvious thing, that this should never have been his job, that it is the federation’s responsibility, and that ideally it is Indian national teams getting this exposure and not one private academy from Chandigarh. He is right. And the reason this matters is not that he is a saint, because he is not, he is abrasive and he makes enemies and plenty of people in Indian football cannot stand him. The reason it matters is that he has receipts. Whatever you think of him personally, his kids have gone out and beaten Europe with them.

So when he asks for a real role, for the federation to set aside whatever personal war it is having with him and just let him work, I do not see why the answer is no. Keep your grudge, give him the job. And if not him specifically, then find the ten people in this country who have actually built something that works and put them in charge, because right now the man doing the most for Indian football is doing it from his own pocket, and the institution that is supposed to be doing it is arguing about horoscopes.

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What I Would Actually Do

Start by getting the politicians out. All of them, every party, no exceptions.

The man who ran Indian football for thirteen years was a senior leader of one national party. The man who runs it now is a leader of another. Different parties, same disease, and the sport has not moved an inch in either era. FIFA has already suspended us once over outside interference. When the current president was asked about political influence in his own election, his answer was essentially to ask whether any sports federation in this country exists without it, which is not a defence, it is a confession.

I want to be clear that this is not a party point for me. You can think a government has done well on the things it has done well, on foreign policy or anything else, and still say plainly that its people have no business running a football federation. And the same goes for the other side. Not the BJP, not the Congress, not anybody. A sports body is not a place to park a politician who needs to stay relevant, and every year we do it, some kid who could have been coached properly instead is not.

And here is the uncomfortable part, the one I have to be honest about because it complicates my own argument. The current president is a former player. He kept goal for India. So just put ex-players in charge is not the fix I once thought it was, because we did that and it changed nothing. The filter cannot only be that you played the game. It has to be that you played it or ran it or built it, and that you owe nothing to any party. Competence plus independence. Both, or it does not count.

Then stop trying to buy the league its way to relevance. Saudi Arabia could throw money at Ronaldo and Benzema and drag the world’s attention to its own league overnight. India cannot. We do not have that kind of money to put into football and we are not going to have it soon, so that route is closed and we should stop pretending it is open.

So do the opposite. Instead of importing great players to raise the level here, export our best players to go and get better there. Send them out. Let them sit on benches in tougher leagues, let them get humbled in training every day by players who are simply better, let them come back changed. Our players will hate it, the league will scream that it is being gutted, and both of those complaints will be correct in the short term. Do it anyway, because there is no other door. You cannot become good at something by only ever playing against people who are as limited as you are.

And set a target we can actually reach. Not the World Cup. Qualify for the Asian Cup, consistently, every single cycle, and then go and win a knockout game there. That is the next step on the ladder and we are currently standing below it. Nobody skips from 138th in the world to a World Cup because they wanted it badly enough. Cricket did not skip steps either, we just forget the twenty flat years in the middle.