Everyone knows why football fails in India: Nobody fixes it

At 10:31 am yesterday, a friend shared a reel in our Instagram group, one that has become more active with the World Cup taking centre stage.

The reel questioned Mbappe’s fall in the match against Morocco: “Did Mbappe actually dive here?” Someone had already answered underneath: “Yes, but it’s not Messi, so nobody will care.” I responded, saying everything does not have to revolve around Messi.

What followed was message after message about how Messi’s win is supposedly rigged, all of it circling back to him, regardless of what the original post was even about, and it ended, half-jokingly, with someone remarking that our friend group had seen happier times before this World Cup started.

I live in a small city, in one of the smallest states in India, a state that Messi, Ronaldo, or Mbappe will likely never hear of. But for over half the population here, I don’t think I’m exaggerating, life genuinely revolves around football.

My mother is such a passionate Arsenal fan that she refuses to watch matches live; she’s too afraid they’ll lose, so she checks the score the next morning instead. I have a group of friends who time our dinners around Premier League kickoffs.

A video by Mizoram Click recently went viral, shared over 7,000 times, showing the entire city of Aizawl screaming when Messi scored against Egypt.

It isn’t only Mizoram. Across most of Northeast India, a child learns to walk and is handed a ball soon after. This is true of nearly everyone I know personally. Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, and “footballer” is the default answer, not the exception.

Premier League fan groups here run charity drives and organise blood donation camps. Parents name their children after the clubs they follow; a close friend of mine named his daughter Chelsea, in allegiance to the league.

Football is the heartbeat of this place. And yet the people who live and breathe it are, with a handful of exceptions, unable to make it past the state’s own boundaries.

A Conversation in a Sumo

I had this conversation with a sumo driver while travelling from Aizawl to Lengpui, on a night Japan was still in the tournament and set to play a few hours later. The driver knew every match and kickoff time the way most people know their own travel schedule. An army man sat in the front seat beside him.

I asked them both why they thought India could never make it to a World Cup. The army man answered almost instantly: “Because of the rampant corruption in the sports federation.” The driver added, without missing a beat: “The priority given to cricket as a sport in this nation.”

Neither of them works in sports administration. Neither hesitated. And that’s what stayed with me: this wasn’t some hidden or specialist knowledge. It was common knowledge, shared across age groups and professions across the country. So the real question isn’t why India fails to qualify. It’s why, given how clearly everyone seems to understand the causes, nothing changes.

The Age Fraud Economy

Some of the clearest answers to that question came from a Reddit discussion breaking down a talk by Richard Hood, the former Head of Player Development for Indian football. What he laid out was darker than I expected.

Age fraud in Indian youth football isn’t really cheating for the sake of winning a U15 trophy. It’s a career decision. A sports quota certificate, secured through a faked age, guarantees a government job for life.

When the punishment for getting caught is a six-month ban but the reward is forty years of guaranteed salary, the system isn’t failing to prevent fraud — it’s actively incentivising it. Reading that reframed the entire problem for me. This isn’t a story about individual dishonesty. It’s a story about an incentive structure that makes fraud the rational choice.

The Penthouse With No Pillars

The second thing that stood out was where attention and money go. India has hosted a U17 World Cup. It hosted Messi’s exhibition tour. These are the kinds of events that generate headlines and look good in institutional reports. What they don’t do is build a pipeline.

The district leagues, the actual foundation on which any real footballing culture is built, remain starved of funding and attention. Hood’s phrase for this stuck with me: we’re building a penthouse on a building that has no pillars.

Two Months Versus Ten

The most concrete number in that breakdown was also the most damning. An average Indian youth player gets around two months of competitive matches a year. A European kid gets ten.

We are, effectively, sending part-time players to compete against professionals, and then acting surprised when we lose. Once I read that, the sumo driver’s answer and the army man’s answer stopped feeling like separate explanations.

Corruption and cricket’s dominance are both symptoms of the same underlying failure: nobody with power is investing in the actual foundation of the game.

Chhetri’s Restraint, Chaubey’s Denial

Sunil Chhetri’s recent interview with Firstpost’s Rupha Ramani struck a very different tone from the sumo driver’s bluntness. Chhetri described the last year and a half as difficult, harder for him specifically because he knew every stakeholder’s story.

Players called him daily over uncertain salaries. He was in touch with AIFF officials, club owners, and fan groups simultaneously, and his sense, by his own account, was that everyone was struggling and everyone carried some share of the blame.

AIFF President Kalyan Chaubey’s response to corruption allegations was far less measured. He rejected them outright, arguing that real corruption would have already surfaced, and dismissed his critics as people who had either lost internal elections against his team or were themselves former insiders.

He specifically targeted Bhaichung Bhutia, who had publicly called for Chaubey’s resignation, accusing him of “playing on emotions” through his commercial football academies, and pointed to Bhutia’s own paid advisory role under the AIFF as proof the federation wasn’t excluding its critics.

Reading these two accounts side by side, I don’t think they can both be fully true. A federation where players were calling a former captain daily because of financial uncertainty, where Chhetri himself calls the period “difficult,” is not a federation functioning through clean due process.

The Politics Behind the Vote

None of this happens in a vacuum, and Chaubey’s own path to the presidency is a case study in how political calculation, not footballing merit, decides who runs the AIFF.

According to a report by The Quint, Chaubey’s standing within the BJP in West Bengal, built less on winning elections than on giving the party’s rivals a tough fight, is part of what worked in his favour. He’d lost a West Bengal assembly seat to the TMC’s Sadhan Pande and lost again to Mohua Moitra in the 2019 Lok Sabha race, but stayed in the party’s good graces regardless.

What stood out to me most is who actually nominated him: the Gujarat Football Association proposed his name, and Arunachal Pradesh’s association seconded it. Neither state is known for producing footballing talent. Both, notably, carry outsized political weight nationally.

Where This Leaves Me

What unsettles me most, sitting in a city where football is genuinely the heartbeat of daily life, is that none of this is secret. It’s in taxi conversations, Reddit threads, and interviews given by the country’s most recognisable footballer.

A sumo driver and an army officer could name the causes accurately within seconds of being asked.

I think about that Instagram group sometimes—the one that lit up over Mbappe’s dive, the one that’s gone a little quieter since the Messi arguments started feeling less like fun and more like fatigue. We care this much about a sport none of us will ever get paid to play.

I keep thinking about how much of this could have gone somewhere because, somewhere in Mizoram right now, someone is handing a child a ball before he has even learnt the meaning of the word ‘football.’ I hope he grows up to read this and not recognise the country it’s describing.

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