The apocryphal tale of the Indian national team and the 1950 World Cup is as well-worn as the boots of the country’s millions of players. The sole representatives of Asia had qualified for global football’s showpiece event for the first time in their history, but, so the story goes, refused to travel to Brazil because FIFA had banned them from playing bare-footed.
It’s an entertaining yarn, perfectly encapsulating the lazy stereotype of an exotic nation but also acting as a point of reference whenever the question of Indian underachievement or sporting regression arises. The sting in the tail is, predictably of course, that the tale is not true.
India did indeed qualify for the 1950 World Cup, but they did so by default rather than any seemingly since-lost aptitude on the field. Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines had all withdrawn, handing India an automatic berth in Brazil. The All India Football Federation (AIFF) then elected not to travel to South America due to, an official statement said at the time, “disagreements over team selection, and insufficient practice time.”
While such debunking demonstrates that accusations of decline are exaggerated, it does not absolve the AIFF of its footballing failings — especially given Sailen Manna, the Indian captain in 1950, told Sports Illustrated’s India edition in 2010 that he believed the reason his country did not travel to the World Cup was in fact because the ill-informed AIFF prioritized the 1952 Olympics.
“We had no idea about the World Cup then,” Manna said. “For us, the Olympics was everything. Nothing was bigger.”
India has never come close to qualifying for the tournament since, despite enjoying fervent support in eastern and southern pockets of the country, such as West Bengal, Assam, Mizoram, Goa and Kerala. Ranked 107th in the world, behind the likes of Madagascar and the Faroe Isles, its failed run at next summer’s World Cup in Russia included a 2-1 loss to tiny Guam, a country whose entire population of 160,000 is only 30,000 more than the record attendance at the Kolkata derby between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal.
So why does India so consistently punch below its weight? Is it bad nutrition, as some foreign experts have suggested? Is it interference and incompetence, as often claimed by India’s English-language media? Or does the country’s obsession with cricket prevent any real focus on football?
“The biggest reason is the culture,” the AIFF’s chief operating officer, Kishore Taid, told Arab News.
“The culture of football needs to be instilled at a young age and if you don’t have that it’s very difficult because players need to be developed right from the age when they start kicking a ball. It has to be in the environment, through parents, uncles, cousins.
“We can talk about the population, but actually the truth is if we don’t have the culture the population doesn’t matter. You can see Iceland have qualified for next summer’s World Cup with a population of only around 300,000, so more than the size of the population is what size of that is actually playing football from a young age. That’s what we are working to change.”
The Under-17 World Cup currently being hosted across six Indian cities is the first FIFA event to be held in the country and interest has taken some outsiders by surprise. At the halfway stage of the tournament, FIFA reported 830,000 fans had attended the first 36 games, taking the average match attendance to more than double the historic average. This despite India’s early elimination.
“To be honest, I never expected this level of passion because you only ever hear about India being a cricket country,” said Javier Ceppi, FIFA’s tournament director, who has been based in Delhi for the past three years. “But it is changing and people are getting more into football. In the big cities, kids are now playing more football than cricket. This is a reality.”
India has already officially declared interest in hosting the FIFA U20 World Cup in 2019 and while a World Cup proper remains a pipe-dream, rumors are swirling that a bid to host an Asian Cup is at an advanced stage. India has the fourth-highest number of football facilities in the world, including 28 FIFA-approved training pitches and 98 stadiums with capacities larger than 20,000. Six of these were renovated for the U17 World Cup, while two other FIFA-ready arenas have already hosted Asian and World Cup qualifiers.
“We have shown we are ready for big tournaments now,” said Taid. “You can see with this U17 World Cup, that it has a huge impact on everyone involved. Definitely, we want to keep bidding for the big tournaments because we need to use them to spread the word and already we’ve seen many people come to the stadiums that usually would not. This is encouraging because the development structure is cyclical: If the national teams do well, then the culture starts to change, which leads to the creation of better players and better national teams.”
India’s elimination this month came after three successive defeats in which they managed only one goal and conceded nine. Yet Taid added that he and the AIFF are “proud (and) happy, although not satisfied.”
The work will not stop, he said. The federation is in the process of launching grassroots leagues across the country for children aged between five and 12 years old, while previous planning is already starting to bear fruit at other age-group levels.
The country’s U17s may be the most traveled group of footballers in Indian history, but last week the country’s senior team qualified for the 2019 Asian Cup for only the fourth time in history while the U16 team has already qualified for the Asian Championships, a feat previously managed just six times in 16 attempts.
“We are all very positive with the way Indian football is going,” Taid said. “We will keep pushing for better quality and more quantity and it will take more time, but we are on the right track. No doubt.”

Source:Arabnews