Can Indian football learn anything at all from the FIFA World Cup?

Indian football needs some grassroots changes, like developing and popularizing its own style of play, to send a team to the World Cup. (Illustration by Suneesh K)

Another World Cup has come and (almost) gone with nights spent watching some exhilarating football and admiring how countries like Morocco, with barely any resources, can go head-to-head with the best in the world.

But above all, it has been another bout of wondering why India, a country with a 100-year history of the game, some of the oldest competitions in football in the form of the Calcutta Football League (which started in 1898), and the Durand Cup which began in 1888, a legacy of finishing Asian Champions twice and fourth in the Olympics in 1956, can settle for being merely a cheerleader from afar. That’s been the fate of the Indian football fan for so many decades now that most of us actually support Brazil or Argentina as our home teams now. Entire lifetimes have passed waiting for an opportunity to cheer an Indian football team at a major global event.

A similar fate befell Indian hockey in the decades following its gold medal win at the 1980 Olympic. But in the 2021 Olympics the country regained some of its lost status as a hockey giant by winning the bronze medal. After the ignominy of the London Olympics in 2012 when the team lost each one of its six matches to finish last, it was redemption of sorts. In the intervening 10 years, changes were made, both in terms of the hockey establishment in the country and the coaching infrastructure. A new league, the Hockey India League, became the starting block for the resurgence and top international coaches along with an emphasis on the junior squad soon started paying off.

But it took some serious introspection, the involvement of those who loved the game more than the power that came with occupying positions, and players committed to continuous improvement and intoxicated by the idea of rubbing shoulders with the best in the world. Success fed on itself and by qualifying for the big events, the players were soon getting regular opportunities to play with the top teams.

It’s the oldest formula in the world - play, play and more play. But it isn’t enough to play with each other in the league that’s now at the apex of Indian football. The more games a player plays for and against footballers better than himself, the more he hones his skills.

In the last 10 years, India has, on an average, played 12 international matches in every calendar year except for 2020 when it didn’t play a single game due to Covid restrictions. By contrast Morocco, which has created the biggest splash of the current World Cup, played 18 games in 2021 and 14 this year before the tournament started. Most of them were highly competitive games against higher ranked teams.

There is also the existential problem of defining the Indian style of play. Experts have lamented the defence-first mindset of Indian teams and how their kicking-the-ball upfield style is an anachronism in modern football. The problem is it is something rooted in the system, inculcated at the grassroot level and so difficult to change.

The top playing countries have their own distinct style of play which is seeped into their footballing ethos. It is what the youngest players of the game in that country watch, absorb and then seek to emulate. A Brazilian kid grows up not just listening to stories of Pele or Ronaldinho, but also learning about their way of playing. Not surprisingly, he grows up to be Neymar or Vinícius Jr. A Spanish kid learns the tiki taka, the game of a million small passes, before he’s crossed into his teens. And this isn't just something in the mind. There is an institutional framework to it as well.

In Brazil a popular adaptation of the game is futebal de salao, the sport through which all the Brazilian greats from Pele to Ronaldinho learnt to play football. Recognized by FIFA, it is small-sized indoor football played between two teams of five players each at any one time, with rolling substitutes and a smaller harder and less bouncy ball. The net result is that while young soccer players in England or Germany learn to make long runs into opposing territory in chase of a measured pass, Brazilian kids trained on futebol de salao need to excel in short, measured passes followed by speedy bursts.

That's the kind of grassroot change Indian football needs. And it has to start with the pre-teens.