Lionel Messi’s presence on Indian soil last week understandably created hysteria. It’s not often that you get a player of such eminence and charisma on display in the country. But apart from fleeting glimpses of Messi’s genius, what the Argentina-Venezuela friendly revealed was the wide chasm between the football played in India and most of the world.

I won’t spend much time criticising the country’s football establishment from keeping the sport locked in the medieval age while the rest of the world has moved into the 21st century. That has been a long and laboured debate which has little currency. How the the national federation perks up to new challenges is the issue.
The biggest of these is infrastructure: in India, for football this is not good enough. Those of my vintage are hearing of this from the time of Inder Singh, Jarnail Singh, P.K. Banerjee, Chuni Goswami, Mohamed Habib et al — whom I followed with passion through school and college — right through to Baichung Bhutia who retired last week.
In many ways football — not unlike hockey, I might add — shows how India messed up big time by lack of forethought, concern and administrative diligence. While India’s hockey past is replete with stories of wondrous players and decades of Olympic glory, football was not too far behind in the national consciousness. India’s achievements in the sport post-Independence — especially in the 1950s and early 1960s — bears testimony to the passion for the game amongst fans and the quality of players that existed in those days.
Gold medals in the 1951 and 1962 Asian Games, and a highly merited fourth place in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics did not come by fluke: they were hard-earned and reflected a level that could aspire to compete regularly at the global level.
In fact in 1950, Wikipedia records, the national team were put directly into the World Cup tournament in Brazil after all other Asian teams had withdrawn, but India refused because of the high cost of travel among other things. While most European and Latin American countries were obviously still superior, the difference was not so stark. Ironically, when India is poised to become an economic super-power, the fall in football standards has been so steep that playing in the World Cup is out of the question. The country currently stands at 158 (out of 203) in the Fifa rankings which tells is eloquent testimony to how little has been done to arrest the decline in the past 5-6 decades. It’s not that the office-bearers of the AIFF did not have noble intentions. But that is never enough to achieve success. But rather than lament at what might have been, I think it is more pertinent to see what Indian football can be in the future. The recently forged alliance between Reliance-IMG and the AIFF could be a game-changer, but we’ll have to wait and see how this story unfolds.
Can football rival cricket in popularity in India? On the face of it, this seems a pipe-dream. Yet there are encouraging signs. The EPL and other international tournaments are followed with great passion, albeit in major metros. But Bill Adams, the British coach who runs an academy, also says that interest in the junior ranks is growing rapidly across cross-sections of Indian society.
Baichung, India’s most capped player as also the highest goal-scorer, is one of those who believes that better facilities and marketing will help overcome several hurdles, but that the message of football will have to penetrate deep into the Indian consciousness — especially amongst the young — if India are to become a football power.
It is foolish to believe that India can play in the World Cup this decade, but there are some — among them a very hopeful Baichung — who believe it is possible by 2022; and on merit, not as host country. For that to happen, the AIFF will have to play a more proactive role than it has done yet.