Game over?: Rudraneil Sengupta on the tragic decline of football in India
Where were you on July 13, 1997?
I was at the Salt Lake stadium in Kolkata, a cauldron of 140,000 people on that hot, muggy evening, my mood soaring amid the energy (and deafening roars) of the crowd.
Banners the size of train compartments, bearing the names of different Kolkata neighbourhoods and the colours of the club they supported, waved amid the throng. There was green-and-maroon for Mohun Bagan; red-and-gold for East Bengal (my team). There was the neon green of the pitch and the glare of the setting sun.
Out there, a young Bhaichung Bhutia, already a legend, was marauding through the Bagan lines like the hero of a kung-fu movie, outpacing, outwitting and outmuscling the defenders that fell on him in desperation. To the delirium of half the stadium and the despair of the other half, the 20-year-old scored a hattrick.
This too was Indian football. The game may not have been popular across the country, but in the pockets where it had a following, it was part of the essence of life. The national team may have been scrappy strugglers, the federation inept and corrupt, but the spirit of the game thrived.
Now, football lies gasping and flatlining.
The Indian Super League (ISL), the country’s top-tier tournament, stands cancelled. The All India Football Federation (AIFF) reported on Monday that there have been no bids for the commercial or broadcast rights.
Grand old Mohun Bagan, the oldest football club in Asia, has suspended all football activity for the first time since 1889. Odisha FC and Kerala Blasters have announced suspensions too. East Bengal, Mohun Bagan’s arch rivals, have made an appeal to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to bail out Indian football.
Players on India’s national team have made public pleas for help.
Is there another sport in the country that has fallen as far as this one has? The short answer is: No. How did this happen?
Well, we certainly saw it coming. AIFF has done little to help the sport; allegations of corruption suggest it has done a fair bit to hamper and undermine it.
More-blunt assessments have come from India’s foreign coaches, who have expressed shock at the way the game is treated here. Igor Stimac, the Croatian who coached the national team from 2019 to 2024, spoke up repeatedly against AIFF’s poor treatment of players and coaches, and the lack of a proper sporting structure for the game. Manolo Marquez, the Spanish coach who replaced Stimac, walked away in just two months.
ISL, founded in 2013, is partly to blame for the state of affairs. When AIFF accorded exclusive commercial and operational rights to Reliance, allowing it to be run as a “captive” league with no relation to the rest of Indian football (not even a link to the rest of the league structure through the usual system of performance-based promotions and relegations), there were plenty of voices raised in protest. AIFF proceeded with the plan nonetheless. (Among the voices raised was Stimac’s; he said ISL was not helping Indian footballers.)
Now, the League dream, built on this faulty foundation, has come crashing down.
Will the Salt Lake stadium ever see 140,000 people scream their hearts out for East Bengal or Mohun Bagan again? If it does, it won’t be any time soon, that’s for sure.
(To reach out with feedback, email rudraneil@ gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
