Every weekend, any Indian football fan with a cable or DTH connection is confronted with stark confirmation that consumer capitalism means near-unlimited choice. Apart from the ubiquitous English Premier League, we are offered live action from the Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Scottish leagues, plus the English second division (misleadingly called the “Championship”). Games that are not telecast in England—due to restrictions designed to encourage fans to attend matches live—are broadcast in India with commentary in your choice of Hindi or English.
Yet for all this surfeit of European football, India remains a one-sport country. The broadcasting choices of Star Sports indicate that unless Manchester United or Arsenal are playing, Indian viewers tend to prefer cricket re-runs (as long as India won the match, of course) to live football. The World Cup remains the only time where football transcends the affluent, urban demographic that follow the European leagues. It is only at World Cup time, for instance, that Indian newspapers—both in English and in the vernacular—have any serious or detailed coverage of the sport.
To European and Latin American fans, the World Cup has arguably never been less important. The standard of play is generally acknowledged to be lower than that of the UEFA Champions League, and a series of corruption scandals at FIFA, most notably around its decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, have diminished the World Cup’s prestige and glamour. Even in Brazil, a country that is thought of as being synonymous with football, the tournament is polarizing, widely seen as a waste of public money in a poor and unequal society. None of this seems to have affected Indian interest in the tournament: Sony Six, the broadcasters, were probably not far off when they estimated that 125 million Indians would tune in at some point.
India’s enduring—and growing—fascination with the World Cup is best understood, in historical terms, as having three phases. In the first phase, roughly from 1950 to 1978, Indians followed the World Cup in newsprint or on the radio. The 1958 World Cup was the first to be broadcast, but only to a Swedish audience. From 1962 onwards, the tournament was shown to a “global” audience that did not include India. This period was a Golden Age both for the World Cup and for Indian football. In an era where the best Latin American players tended to play their league football at home, the World Cup represented the pinnacle of football in terms of both prestige and the quality of play. The stars that emerged at these tournaments—Puskas, Didi, Garrincha, Beckenbauer, Cruyff and above all Pele—were household names in India, a country that during the 1960s had a claim to being Asia’s strongest team. Unfortunately, the regard Indian fans had for the World Cup was not shared by the All India Football Federation. When all our qualifying opponents withdrew in 1950, handing India a World Cup place by default, AIFF declined the place, in light of the expense involved in travelling to Brazil. The belief that India refused to play because FIFA insisted on us wearing football boots is, according to Novy Kapadia’s new history of the World Cup, “a self-perpetuating myth.”
AIFF’s decision to prioritize the Olympics over the World Cup retarded the development of Indian football in the long run—India did not attempt to qualify for another World Cup until 1986. For the Indian fan, however, the second phase of our relationship to the World Cup began with Spain 1982, the first tournament to be televised live in India. To read about Pele and Beckenbauer, or hear their skills described on the radio, was one thing: to watch Zico and Socrates in colour television quite another. For Indians, the 1982 World Cup was transformative in two fundamental ways. First, it highlighted the unbridgeable gap between Indian footballers and the European and Latin American elite players—the realization of this gap has suppressed fan interest and appreciation for Indian clubs ever since. Secondly, it implanted the idea of Brazil as representing football at its joyous, flowing, best.