Football in India – Is the world's most popular sport conquering its final frontier?

Christian Letourneau reported from Kolkata, India, exploring every level of the country’s football ecosystem. He and Rory Smith canvassed dozens of executives, fans, players and coaches to examine the state of the game in the world’s most populous nation (1.4 billion).

The final whistle goes, calling time on a 5-0 win, and the crowd of a few hundred ambles out of the Mohammedan Sporting Ground and into the hazy glow of a Kolkata Sunday afternoon. If anything, though, as the stands empty, the noise starts to grow.

In the makeshift away section, a few dozen fans remain steadfastly in place, happily working their way through a set-list of chants and songs. One of their number keeps time on a makeshift drumkit comprising two empty water bottles and the nearest concrete step. 

Their victorious players meander over, gathering in front of a chainlink fence draped with handmade banners daubed in the dark green and deep burgundy of Mohun Bagan, India’s great footballing powerhouse. This is the club’s under-17 team. These fans, members of the Mariners de Xtreme, the club’s ultra group, are only a little older.

Together, they raise their hands in the air and embark on a Viking thunderclap. They start slow, then build up speed, until the two groups are applauding each other. The sound echoes around the stadium and out across the Maidan, a verdant patchwork of pitches right in the heart of Kolkata that serves, as well as anywhere, as the spiritual home of Indian football.

Outside India, the idea that such a thing might exist — that Indian football might be the sort of thing that has a home — runs contrary to stereotype. There is, after all, a long-held and deep-rooted assumption that the world’s most populous country just does not care for the world’s most popular sport.

Over the past quarter of a century, football has permeated many of those parts of the world that were once seen as hostile territory.

The United States has ever-expanding domestic leagues, broadcast schedules stuffed with football, and is on the verge of hosting its fourth FIFA World Cup across the men’s and women’s games. Both audiences and crowds are growing in Australia, too; the Women’s World Cup, co-hosted with New Zealand in 2023, captivated the country. Saudi Arabia in particular, and the Gulf region in general, increasingly serve as the sport’s economic engine. That the heyday of the Chinese Super League was brief can be attributed more to political considerations than public interest. 

India, though, has always been seen as the exception.

Sepp Blatter, as long ago as 2007 and during his days as FIFA president, described it as the game’s “sleeping giant”. It became accepted wisdom that cricket was simply too dominant — not so much a sport as a pillar of the country’s civic, regional and national identity — for football ever to take much of a hold.

Young Mariners de Xtreme watch Mohun Bagan Under-17s against Mohammedan Sporting Under-17s (Christian Letourneau/The Athletic)

However, as the presence of a squadron of Mohun Bagan ultras at a youth team game might suggest, that is far from the case.

“There is a huge amount of passion for football in India,” says Rajrup Biswas, founder of Off Guard Sports, a marketing and entertainment agency in Kolkata. “Particularly here and in Kerala, in the south, you can probably make the case that football is more popular than cricket. We are a football culture.” 

For more than a century, though, no thriving, robust and professionalised domestic league had risen to meet that demand. The country’s major teams — Mohun Bagan and their crosstown rival, East Bengal, prime among them — had fanbases that stretched into the millions, but they played only in longstanding state tournaments and in various, ever-shifting incarnations of a national league.

And then, a decade ago, the country’s wealthiest family decided it was time to change that.

Reliance, the sprawling industrial conglomerate run by Mukesh Ambani and his relatives, secured the rights to launch a new league, one that would sit above and outside India’s existing, if somewhat shaky, football pyramid. 

East Bengal fans watch their side face Mumbai City at Kolkata’s Salt Lake Stadium (Christian Letourneau/The Athletic)

The new competition would follow the blueprint laid down, years before, by cricket’s wildly successful, staggeringly lucrative Indian Premier League.

It was both simple and ambitious: bankrolled by the country’s emergent tycoons and plutocrats, the Indian Super League (ISL) would entice the best players in the world to join freshly-minted franchise teams. Massive marketing efforts would pack stadiums across the country, command TV audiences in the tens of millions, and inspire young Indians to follow in their footsteps.

The formula had worked in cricket. There was no reason at all, as far as anyone could tell, why it could not succeed in helping football conquer, at last, its final frontier. 

The first night of the Indian Super League, a little more than 10 years ago, passed in a haze of fireworks and a frenzy of spectacle. Dancers and musicians, drawn from each of the eight regions to have been awarded a franchise, performed at the Salt Lake Stadium, a cavernous concrete bowl on the outskirts of Kolkata, ahead of the opening game. Seventy thousand fans came to watch.

The league had delivered on the ambitious promise of its brochure. The tender for its initial roster of teams had attracted a directory of the steel, cement and petrochemical barons who dominate the country’s economy: Tata Steel, JSW and Sanjiv Goenka among them. The ownership ranks were garlanded by a phalanx of Bollywood stars and cricketing legends. Leading European clubs Atletico Madrid and Manchester City had both taken operating licenses, too.

And the players had followed. Alessandro Del Piero, Nicolas Anelka, David Trezeguet and Alessandro Nesta all agreed to take part in the inaugural two-month season. “Obviously, they are not the current stars (of world football),” said Sourav Ganguly, the former Indian cricket captain, who had taken a share in the Kolkata team and was now going slightly off-message in talking about the signings of globally-known names who were by that stage in their late thirties and beyond. “That will happen over time. It is the beginning of something.”

Del Piero arrives to join Delhi Dynamos in 2014 (Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

To many, though, it also felt like an end.

None of Kolkata’s historic teams had been invited to take part in the new league. Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan — the city’s third historic side, its support traditionally drawn from its Muslim population — had been left in the I-League, now relegated to being the country’s second tier, replaced at the summit of the game by Atletico de Kolkata, a franchise spun from whole cloth. 

This artificial imposition left fans of longer standing and established allegiances cold. “We would go to the games, of course,” said Shubham Chatterjee, a leader of Mariners de Xtreme. “If Luis Garcia is playing Del Piero in your home city, why not go? But it was more to pass the time. We were still here, supporting Mohun Bagan (in the I-League) at the weekend.”

The biggest game in Indian football remained his team’s meeting with East Bengal, the Kolkata derby, which continued to draw crowds upwards of 60,000 even if it had now been relegated to the second tier.

Ten seasons on, the ISL has grown in some regards and stalled in others. There are now 13 teams, still including all three Kolkata sides mentioned above. Jamshedpur FC play in the league’s first soccer-specific, club-owned stadium, while Bengaluru FC and recently promoted Punjab FC are leading the way in talent ID and player development.

At the same time, the star names have disappeared. The most high-profile import in the current edition of the ISL is probably Jason Cummings, Mohun Bagan’s Scottish-Australian striker who appeared for the latter at the 2022 World Cup. By winning the 2024-25 title earlier this month, Mohun Bagan became the first team to retain the ISL championship. 

Mohun Bagan supporters celebrate winning the 2024-25 Indian Super League (Samir Jana/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Despite incentives, many clubs have failed to meaningfully invest in youth development and playing infrastructure. Two founding franchises, Pune FC and Delhi Dynamos, no longer exist in their original forms. Others, operating at considerable losses covered only by their benefactors, have occasionally risked going the same way.

A devoted Liverpool fan and a keen player himself, Dhruv Sood had always wanted to help build his beloved sport in his homeland. He had explored the idea of buying a second-division team in his hometown of Delhi, but no deal materialised. A lawyer by trade, he did some pro-bono work on a disputes committee for the All India Football Federation (AIFF). He paid close attention and waited for a chance.

He got it late last summer, when he and his contacts at BC Jindal, another industrial conglomerate, were invited to make an offer for Hyderabad FC. They made the 1,000-mile journey south from their base in Delhi to finalise the deal. The paperwork finally went through on August 28. India’s transfer window was due to close two days later. 

Hyderabad had been ISL Cup winners two years prior. Now, they were listing heavily under a slew of transfer bans and league sanctions incurred by the previous owners. Several players had cancelled their contracts. There were bills to pay and debts to settle. Sood, 36, inherited them as the team’s new chief executive. His dream of contributing to the growth of Indian football had come true, though the circumstances proved less than ideal.

Those first 48 hours passed by in a blur: Hyderabad signed a bunch of players on free transfers, featuring a horde of young Indian talent and recruits from across the world. Sood’s pitch to each of them was honest. “We said, ‘Come to Hyderabad. You might have to take a pay cut, but you’ll play, and if you play your way into a better offer somewhere else, we won’t stand in your way’.” 

It worked: Hyderabad, fielding the youngest side in the competition, managed not to finish bottom of the ISL table. Sood and his ownership group have bolstered team finances; they have designs on establishing a top-tier academy. The circumstances by which they came to run the club, by which Sood achieved his dream, illustrate the competition’s uneven progress.

There are some, certainly, who feel the ISL increasingly resembles a “missed opportunity” for Indian football, as Biswas, the sports executive, put it. Away from the game’s heartlands in Kolkata, Kerala and the country’s north east, there is a feeling its presence is fragile, ephemeral, a sudden explosion of glitter and sparkle that may yet disappear in a puff of smoke. 

At 9.57pm, the ambient techno music that has been playing over the sound system at the Lion’s Den Bar and Cafe in central Kolkata cuts out abruptly and is replaced, just a little discordantly, by the opening arpeggio of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The song is instantly picked up by a group of 50 or so customers, gathered in front of the establishment’s big screen. All of them are wearing red shirts or red scarves. They stand to attention, their voices cracking with emotion. What they might lack in tunefulness they more than make up for in volume.

The members of the Official Liverpool Supporters Group of West Bengal find the next two hours, watching their team being held to a 2-2 draw by Manchester United, almost unbearably tense. He might not know it, but every time Bruno Fernandes appears on the screen, the United captain is being heckled with considerable gusto in a dark basement bar 5,000 miles from Anfield.

Fernandes during the match against Liverpool in January (Zohaib Alam – MUFC/Manchester United via Getty Images)

It is sufficiently stressful that, at half-time, with the match awaiting its first goal, one of the group’s founders, Krishnendu Biswas, feels the need to step outside for a breath of fresh air. “Cricket is a passion here,” he said. “But it is also an industry. For football, we have the passion. We do not yet have the industry.” 

The problem is that passion does not have to be directed locally. Just as in the United States and Australia, football in India does not only have to compete with other domestic sports for attention, eyeballs and revenue. As the dedication of Biswas and his group suggests, it has to compete with the established appeal of European football, too.

The Premier League, in particular, is a considerable force. JioStar, Reliance’s broadcast arm, recently paid $63million (£48.9m) for the rights to show England’s top flight in India for another three seasons.

Precise figures are hard to come by, but the streaming service which broadcasts the games has somewhere in the region of 50million paid subscribers, and 500million more free users on models supported by advertising. (Some matches are made available for free.) Even if only a fraction of these people are watching, it is not unreasonable to believe that there are probably more people watching Premier League games in India than in England. 

That rather contradicts the idea that India is not a football country, but then, that assumption has never really stood up to scrutiny. That it should have taken hold nonetheless is partly to do with a misunderstanding of scale: India is so vast and so diverse that even a niche pursuit can still command a following in the tens of millions.

Football fans in India mourning the death of Argentina legend Diego Maradona in 2020 (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images)

But it is testament, too, to football’s general unwillingness to share. Just as in the U.S. and Australia, fans and executives alike have always regarded public attention as a zero-sum game, confusing not being the most popular sport in a place with not being popular at all. Football tends to demand a monopoly.

The popularity of the European game, and the Premier League in particular, is not just a challenge for the ISL, of course. It is also an opportunity. There is, as the Liverpool-supporting Krishnendu Biswas illustrates, no tension between following a foreign team and a local one at the same time: he is a regular at East Bengal’s home games, too.

His sense, though, is that the league’s offer to fans like him is not yet as compelling as it should be. “It is not doing what it needs to do,” he says, as he prepares to head back into the bar, to endure 45 more minutes of long-distance suffering. “The ISL is a lot about glamour, and not about development.”

On a dusty parade ground just outside the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium — a crumbling concrete oval 12 miles and a world away from the bright lights of the Salt Lake Stadium, where the ISL announced itself 12 years prior — 150 or so children have gathered, just before seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, to be put through their paces by a tiny, tracksuit-clad figure with a shock of short white hair.

Shanti Mullick is one of India’s most decorated and most visible women’s footballers. She captained her national team to a silver medal in the 1980 and 1983 Asian Championships. Now, in her sixties, she devotes her time to running an eponymous training camp, one available to children of every age, gender, ability level and economic background.

Shanti Mullick with training camp staff and players (Christian Letourneau/The Athletic)

For a nominal 200 rupees ($2) a season, each student gets two three-hour training camps held on Saturdays and Sundays; there are medical checks beforehand, and a substantial snack afterwards. In between, Mullick runs a series of drills, exercises and small-sided games. Every so often, she blows her whistle, calls her protégés to attention, and demonstrates a specific aspect of technique.

The clinic exists, in theory, to help identify talent that might otherwise be overlooked; it is a chance to scour the city for players who might one day be able to play next-door at the stadium itself, the home of Southern Samity FC, a mainstay of the Kolkata State championship.

That the ISL has done little to incentivise the nurturing of young talent is a common complaint among both fans and those whose job it is to try to find among India’s almost limitless population a regular supply of footballers.

It is a condition of the league’s operating licences that teams must run an academy. To encourage their growth, Reliance matches their clubs’ costs, rupee for rupee; even so, more modest regional clubs regularly surpass ISL franchises on the AIFF’s list of top accredited development programmes. ISL executives privately concede that some take it more seriously than others. 

As easy as it would be to criticise that apparent lack of commitment, though, the camps that Mullick runs offer an insight into the specific complications of youth development in India. “One thing we need to do to improve the level is to bring up nutrition,” says Jinia Chowdhury, Southern Samity’s chairwoman. “Many players do not receive the proper diet at home to train hard.”

A session at the Shanti Aich Mullick Football Training Academy (Christian Letourneau/The Athletic)

Seeding grassroots football in India, in other words, is not simply a case of hiring coaches and building pitches. Three years ago, Reliance’s non-profit arm — the Reliance Foundation — established the first of what it calls the “Baby Leagues,” organised youth football, in Mizoram. A tiny state sandwiched between Bangladesh and Bhutan in India’s north east, Mizoram is fertile territory, historically producing 40 per cent of the country’s professional players.

Still, the project’s emphasis was as much on providing basic facilities — toilets, drinking water, ensuring that games kick off at the appointed time — as technical advice. It has proved so popular that the Baby Leagues are now being expanded into other regions. 

Scale, too, is an issue. As an illustration: Reliance has organised a national tournament for schools and colleges, modelled on a similar system in Japan. It involves, at the current count, 13,000 institutions. Another: the group estimates there are 9.3million grassroots players in India — almost twice the entire population of Denmark.

That makes it difficult to spot even the brightest talent. The scouting operation for Reliance’s flagship academy in Navi Mumbai, which provides state-of-the-art facilities for 90 of the country’s best prospects, involves holding trials of thousands of players, as well as employing an army of scouts across huge swathes of the country.

All of this is slow work, but it is beginning — a decade in — to bear fruit.

Sood, for one, cites the central academy as the country’s new premier source of domestic talent: “What Reliance has done at the youth level will only now start showing, because it takes eight or 10 years to develop players.”

Several dozen of the first cohorts of players to train at the facility are now registered with clubs in the ISL or second-tier I-League, and those working in youth development in India believe the recruits currently in the academy are even better. A partnership with the Premier League has given Indian teams a chance to compete against some of the best youth players on the planet.

The hope is, in time, that all of this young talent can feed into India’s chronically-underperforming national side.

India has never been to a men’s World Cup (it did qualify in 1950, but withdrew from the tournament in Brazil, reportedly citing reasons including travel costs and a lack of practice time). That will not change at the 2026 version hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico — India fell in the second round of Asian qualifying, finishing third in a group behind Qatar and Kuwait — but results are improving. In 2019 and 2023, India qualified for back-to-back Asian Cups — the region’s equivalent of the Euros and Copa America — for the first time.

The India team before their 0-0 draw with Kuwait last June (Dipayan Bose/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

When the ISL launched, Nita Ambani, chair of Reliance Foundation, suggested it would help the country raise its “own football heroes”. Expecting them to emerge overnight feels more than a touch unfair.

Back in Kolkata, the noise has started to abate on the Maidan. A small contingent of ultras, though, are not yet ready to finish celebrating. Slowly, they fold their banners and wander past the cricket pitches and polo fields toward Mohun Bagan Ground, their ancestral home. The team’s clubhouse and training facility are still here.

Shubham Chatterjee, one of the group’s leaders, sits down and stares out at the pitch. He starts to reel off the highlights of his team’s history: famous wins, iconic goals, faded glories. He has been alive for only a fraction of it. Most of those successes predate the Indian Super League. That does not diminish them. “We cheer for the badge that says 1889, not 2020,” he said.

Agnibha Das and Shubham Chatterjee, Mariners de Xtreme capos, at Mohun Bagan Ground, Kolkata (Christian Letourneau/The Athletic)

Like everyone else, he wants the ISL to build on its first decade. He wants those hints of progress to be a sign of things to come. He wants Reliance’s promises, its ambitions, to come true. Mohun Bagan’s arrival in the league may have been belated, but it has made things better already: the crowds are bigger, the standards are higher, the future is brighter.

But he does not give the impression that it would make a vast amount of difference to him, not really, if everything changed again.

The fate of the ISL is not the fate of Indian football. No matter what league Mohun Bagan play in, no matter who wears the shirt, the fans would still come: to the humble concrete stands on the Maidan, carrying their flares and their banners, just as they always have done, just like in any other football country.

(Top photos: Christian Letourneau; design: Eamonn Dalton)