Sunil Chhetri loves to recount the story of how he started playing football.
His parents tell him that he was kicking a ball as soon as he could walk. His father, an army officer, played football. His mother represented Nepal’s women’s football team as a teenager. “We always had football, always, always,” Chhetri says, his eyes aglow with excitement. “My father was away a lot, so I spent a lot of time playing football with my mom, who is highly competitive. She was my soul enemy. I could not win against her, and she’s not one of those nice moms who will beat you and be quiet. She has one of the worst mouths when it comes to making fun of the loser, so once I started beating her, oh, the joy that I had.”
Chhetri, sitting on a sofa in his penthouse apartment in Bengaluru, breaks into a wide smile. “So yeah, to get that competitiveness, to get mad at losing and rejoice in winning, I didn’t have to look outside.” His three-year-old son barrels into the living room with a football at his feet and unleashes a powerful shot, aimed squarely at Chhetri’s museum-worthy collection of trophies and awards. The ball narrowly misses the cabinet. “Good shot!” Chhetri exclaims. “One more?”
At 41, and recently retired from international duties, Chhetri is still playing club football. He has played for every major team in the country, but has stuck with Bengaluru FC for the past 12 years, ever since the club came into being (with a year out at Mumbai FC). He is the most prolific forward India has ever produced, scoring 159 goals for club and country, which makes him the highest scorer for the national team and in Indian club football, as well as the fourth highest scorer in the world, behind Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Iran’s Ali Daei. He is the first and only footballer to win the Khel Ratna in 2021.
“It feels good, when I sometimes look at all these trophies,” he says. “It reminds me how privileged I am, how lucky that I got to do what I love and get so much love in return. But I think, if you took away all the amazing things that this game has given me, I would still be happy, just because I got to play the game. Nothing else would matter.”
Yet Chhetri’s entry into football was accidental. Growing up in Delhi in the late 1990s, the teenage prodigy found few avenues to play the sport except within the army school system. He never learnt the game formally, never went to an academy. He had no thoughts nor knowledge about the football system, or the absence of it, in India. He simply played. He knew if he played for India’s U-19 team, he could get entry into St Stephen’s, the city’s premier college, through a sports quota.
“That was my only ambition. I only really played two months in a year, and during that time, I was playing for a local team for the Durand Cup, and some representatives from Mohun Bagan said, you are good, come to Kolkata,” he says. “I did not know much about Mohun Bagan, or how crazy Kolkata is about football. I went thinking they will give me admission into their academy. I said to mom, I’m so excited, I’ll learn proper football for three years.”
Instead, Chhetri was offered a contract by the biggest club in India. “Straight into the fire,” he says. “A scared little boy sitting in the team bus after a loss, getting pelted by rocks and stones, thinking, what is happening?”
That was 2002—the most talented young footballer in India had no system to rise through, no academies, and few matches.
In June 2026, Parthib Gogoi, a 23-year-old from a village in northern Assam, became India’s newest striker. Gogoi considers Chhetri his idol, having grown up watching him play. When Gogoi made his top division debut for Guwahati club North East United FC in 2022, it was against Chhetri’s Bengaluru FC. “I came on as a substitute in the 70th minute, along with my brother,” Gogoi says, lounging in the stands at Guwahati’s football stadium after a practice session. “And I was staring at Sunil bhai. My brother said, stop staring and play your game.”
The story of the two strikers shares a common, dispiriting thread—Gogoi too had no opportunities to play or learn the game as a child in a structured system.
“There were no matches,” Gogoi says. “No academies. When I was 15, I got the chance to join a very good academy in Bengaluru called Ozone, and immediately from there I got picked for India’s U16 team, and that’s how my professional journey began.”
“But 15, 16, 17…that’s too late!” Chhetri says. “You have to start learning and playing football when you are 6,7,8. Otherwise you can never learn the fundamentals, you just won’t have enough football under your belt. Imagine the same thing in the context of schooling. You need to learn something when you are 6, but you only get to learn it when you are 15. How does that work?”
This is one crucial aspect of why India, despite its long, rich history of football, despite having swathes of the country where it is the sport of choice—the seven states of the North-East, West Bengal, Kerala, and Goa—is so desperately bad at the game.
“What are we doing at the grassroots? Can we improve if we don’t have a grassroots system that works? No,” Chhetri says. “Does our grassroots system work? No. And it’s not just football, but any sport except cricket.”
The All India Football Federation takes no responsibility for this. “We have to understand how sports is run in our country,” says AIFF president Kalyan Chaubey, a former India International who is now a BJP MP. “We are a country of 1.4 billion people. One organisation can’t look after 1.4 billion people. We have 36 member associations under us, state and Union territories and they are responsible for developing football in their areas. AIFF conveys the policy. Our job is to execute the directions of FIFA and AFC. The clubs are supposed to run youth programmes.”
Indian football clubs, whether they are giants like the two Kolkata clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, or newly-formed minnows like North East United FC, are all struggling to stay afloat, making losses worth crores every year. “How do you run a youth development system if you don’t have money?” Asks Bengaluru FC CEO Darren Caldeira, a former top-division footballer. “Yet all the clubs are trying. We have a renowned academy. North East United is setting up new centres in the states there. We are doing what we can with what we have.”
AIFF may try to deflect blame for grassroots development, but the truth is that there are as many ways to develop football as there are countries playing the world’s most popular game. Most European countries go the academy way—the world’s best clubs run the world’s best youth systems, like Barcelona’s famed La Masia, which produced Lionel Messi among many others, or the legendary Ajax Academy in the Netherlands, or Bayern Munich’s dazzling youth programmes. Some, like France, do it through the national federation, through a programme that intensely scouts every corner of the country and brings the most talented young players into a central, federation-run academy—Clairefontaine—from which generation after generation of world beaters have emerged, from Thierry Henry to Kylian Mbappe. Others, like Japan, do it through a highly efficient and competitive academic system, where sports form an integral part of both school and university curriculum. Japan’s Shigakkan University, for example, has produced 16 Olympic medals in women’s wrestling alone, 12 of them gold (in comparison, India has a total of 10 gold medals in Olympic history).
Tiny nations with colonial histories, like Curacao (population, 158,000), or Cape Verde (population, 500,000) have taken a different route, developing their national team first by recruiting players from their widespread diaspora populations to spark more interest, investment, and love for the game at home, channelling the money from the success of their national team back into grassroots development at home—Curacao’s World Cup debut this year has resulted in new stadiums, academies, and youth programmes at home.
India has done none of this, stumbling along in the same loop of poor infrastructure and systems from the grassroots to the top division, with a federation that’s long been accused, like most sports federations in India, of corruption and inefficiency. “The Indian football federation is a complete, complete failure,” says Bollywood producer and action movie star John Abraham, who is the only individual owner of a top division team (North East United).
This dismal state of Indian football—if th
Table of content 30
e grassroots is broken, so is the national team, which did not win a single game for a period of almost three years between 2023-26, and has languished outside the top 100 in global rankings forever—was best captured by the fiasco of the ISL, India’s top division, in 2025.
The ISL was supposed to inject new life into the ailing football system; a shiny new league formed by Reliance in an unprecedented deal with the AIFF inked in 2010. That deal guaranteed the AIFF a flat payment of ₹50 crore per year, more money than the federation has ever seen, in return for total control of Indian football. Reliance held all rights to the marketing, commercialisation and broadcast of Indian football, including the leagues and the national team. They were free to make their own rules on the running of the league, and thus the ISL, when it became India’s top division, was cut off from the rest of the football pyramid, with no promotions and relegations. The ISL ignored most of India’s legacy clubs, inviting major corporates to establish their own teams.
“It was a strange move,” says Sourjya Bhowmick, a Kolkata-based journalist who comes from a family of lifelong Mohun Bagan supporters. “Because it left the fans confused. Here we are, the biggest, most successful club in Indian football, with a history that goes back more than 100 years, and we are not playing in the top division?”
Mohun Bagan, formed in 1889, is one of the oldest clubs in the world, predating giants like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Liverpool, Arsenal, AC Milan, Juventus, or Bayern Munich. In 1911, the club became a part of the narrative of India’s freedom movement when it became the first Indian team to beat a British team to win a major tournament. Bhowmick’s great grandfather Prafulla Roy played for many years at the club, captaining it in 1908.
“The AIFF ignored the spiritual home of football in India,” Bhowmick says. “Now football, even in West Bengal, has gone down in popularity. More and more people are going towards cricket. The public parks where once everyone played football are getting fenced off and made into cricket academies. The way things are going, football in India will never change.”
Back to the ISL, which improved playing conditions and broadcast standards as the top division, and for a few years, got viewership to increase, before it went back into free fall. In 2017, a litigation started in the Supreme Court challenging various aspects of the AIFF’s functioning, including whether it could cede control of its leagues to a private body. In 2025, the last year of the contract between AIFF and Reliance, the Supreme Court directed that there can be no negotiations about a new contract till they had reached a verdict. The AIFF took this to mean that they now had no responsibility to ensure the continuity of professional leagues. With the old contract expiring, the 2025-26 season of the ISL, and all the other leagues below it, were suspended indefinitely. National team players, in despair, took to social media, appealing to FIFA to intervene to “save Indian football”. After five months of no football, in which the clubs scrambled to stay afloat without revenue or matches, an intervention from the sports ministry allowed the leagues to restart, funded by the clubs themselves, and the AIFF, with a last-minute broadcast deal valued at just 5% of the earlier one.
“So for 15 years, we paid ₹15 crores a year as franchise fee to be a part of the ISL,” Abraham says. “That’s most of our revenue, leaving us with next to nothing to invest in the grassroots. Then the ISL collapsed, and we did not know if the club would survive. Isn’t that shameful? Is this the way football is run?”
The 2026-27 football season, which should normally start in September, is still mired in uncertainty, with the clubs and the AIFF engaged in a bitter behind-the-scenes-battle over how the leagues should be structured and run.
Who takes responsibility for the complete mess that’s Indian football? “All of us,” says Chhetri, looking downcast. “The players, the clubs, the federation, the corporates, the ISL. We have no plan and no leadership. We don’t know where we are going or what the next step is. We take two steps forward and three steps back.”
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi.