The Mystery of Indian Football

India is vast, fast developing and passionate about the game. So why, Titus Chalk asks, has no Indian player made his mark in Europe?
Originally published in issue 35 of Champions, the official magazine of the UEFA Champions League.The UEFA Champions League is missing something. There are 1.2 billion Indians. Four million of them (or their descendants) live in Europe. Yet no Indian footballer has featured in the competition, let alone in its showpiece final.It's not that India lacks passion. In May last year, goalkeeper Oliver Kahn made his farewell appearance for Bayern Munich in front of an ecstatic 125,000-strong crowd - not at the club's own ground (which holds nearly 70,000) but at the home of Mohun Bagan in Kolkata, India. In the same city, last December, 50,000 locals cheered Diego Maradona's regal progress from the airport. And the cumulative TV audience for the 2006 World Cup in India - 675 million - was on a par with the country's most popular soaps.Former Tottenham Hotspur striker Garth Crooks told Champions: "That crowd! The potential! It's absolutely extraordinary." Crooks visited India in 2007 to represent FIFA at the opening of India's first fully professional national league, the I-League. "Sepp Blatter is right to have one eye firmly on India," he says.India's mission is to climb the world rankings from 144th to a berth more befitting a country with the world's second-largest population where clubs battle over two of football's oldest trophies. No easy task. But Japan, South Korea and the USA have all proved that concerted long-term development can pay off. Leading the charge for India's national side is head coach Bob Houghton, who surprised Europe by steering Malmö to the 1979 European Cup final. "Every boy in that side was from Malmö," he points out. "There's only 300,000 people there, so it shows Sweden got the development right."?This time, Houghton must work miracles in a vast country with a Byzantine bureaucracy, a clogged domestic calendar, and 28 states focusing on their local competitions. He knows the national side's fate will be shaped by the new I-League, so he lobbied successfully for its players to be spared midweek games in state-level competitions. "The I-League has to be the engine," he says. "It's improved a lot in two-and-a-half years. We're bringing club coaches together regularly, and when we next meet, we'll get someone in from overseas so our coaches get fresh ideas. That's where we can help the most."German-born journalist Arunava Chaudhuri, founder of the respected website IndianFootball.Com, says: "Bob has been given a mission to change Indian football and the players love him. He's had a lot of experience and success across continents in the last 30 years, and he really shows what you can achieve with a high-profile manager."His achievements? In August, Houghton led India to victory in the AFC Challenge Cup and qualified for the Asian Cup finals for the first time since 1984. The Asian Cup is a traditional proving ground for emerging football nations in this part of the world. "It was the culmination of a lot of hard work," says Houghton. "I hope it's a catalyst for our players to work hard, get fitter and be better."Crooks says: "Houghton doesn't strike me as someone who's there for the short term. He was attracted by the potential talent and India's passion for football."Chaudhuri, who watched Kahn's farewell in Kolkata, knows this passion may attract recession-hit European clubs intrigued by a lucrative business opportunity. "In the past year, European clubs have realised India is a huge market. The success of Indian Premier League cricket helped. When they saw it could raise £1.1bn (€1.2bn) out of the blue, they knew there was something in India for football, too."Some fear that England's Premiership sides, ever on the commercial front foot, see a territory ripe for exploitation. As Chaudhuri says: "Whoever finds the Indian David Beckham will be sitting on a gold mine." Arsenal, Manchester United and Everton have sent scouts, run training days and tournaments, and mulled over football development centres to find - and nurture - the best among the 20-million Indians who play the game competitively. But how deeply are European clubs committed to improving Indian football?Houghton is sceptical. "In October 2007, Manchester United had 5,000 kids in the Nehru Stadium in Goa to select eleven boys to go to Manchester for a week's training. It was horrendous. They were all believing they'd end up playing for United after three days of judgement. That sort of marketing is in nobody's interest."Crooks says it is a question of give and take: "If you're going to compete with cricket [in India], having Premier League clubs generating enthusiasm has to be a good thing. But clubs may tap into the talent and deprive the Indian public of seeing that talent develop on home soil. It would be wrong for a club not to put something back into India if they feel they can take a large financial payday from here.""It's every club's right to showcase themselves in India," says Piara Powar, director of anti-racism group Kick It Out. "But to be effective they need middle- to long-term commitment." For Chaudhuri that means: "Not three years, not five years, but ten years to get a return on investment. If clubs come and play in India, they must leave a legacy."That's not to say he's against Indian players moving abroad. "We have talent at junior level that needs to go to Europe to be taken to the next level," argues Chaudhuri. Tellingly, he reveals: "Last summer, young players in the national side were offered contracts in Portugal but didn't take them. They were offered less money to play in Portugal's second division than they get in India."Bayern are a better advert for European involvement. After Kahn's farewell, the club's head of international affairs Martin Hägele said: "On our way home, we decided on long-term involvement in India. We had an offer from the West Bengal government to build up a football school. We will consult on how to build a small stadium, pitches and a football school with the philosophy of our Bayern Munich school." Last November, club chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge flew to India to sign the deal. "We're not there to sell shirts," says Hägele. "We want to show young Indian people that our know-how and coaching experience can create something new in Indian football, and you can only do that if you start with the basics, with the very young guys."In China and South Korea, the success of local players in Europe has ignited interest in football. But there are very few Indians or Europeans of Indian descent in Europe's top leagues. Chaudhuri says: "Clubs, especially in England, have to work in their own back yard to get players of Indian origin to the standard required to market themselves in India."Why England especially? Because the country has 1.6m Indian-British people, roughly 40% of Europe's ethnic-Indian population. Yet there are only four or five professional players of Indian heritage in English leagues. "England is a real problem," admits former France star Vikash Dhorasoo, an Indo-Mauritian. "I've been to Asian schools to see the kids, and they love football. They play and they're good. I didn't see why they couldn't become professionals." The people Champions spoke to identified three reasons: racial stereotyping, cultural pressure, and a lack of grassroots professional structures. Netan Sansara, a 19-year-old left-back at first-division club Walsall, said: "I used to get called 'Paki' - even by my own team." Powar says this is "quite a common experience" for young Asian footballers.Racism is especially insidious when it comes to talent spotting. Kuljit Randhawa, founder of grassroots organisation the Asian Football Network, says: "It's good that scouts are going to India to look for talent, but they should look closer to home. West Ham has 250,000 Asians living next to it. The talent is there, we see it every weekend, but those players aren't being approached."Pakistan central defender Zesh Rehman, the first British Asian to play in the Premiership, agrees. "I don't think [being an Asian kid] is a barrier if you are good enough. It doesn't help that there are no Asian role models - kids need someone to aspire to being. We need more scouts to look at the players. The talent is out there, it just needs to be seen.""The game's not doing enough to educate scouts and coaches," says Powar. "If you had a white, a black, and an Asian player in front of you, all equally talented, the Asian player would be the first to go. Talent doesn't always win through." This reinforces the dim view of the game held by England's Indian community. Sansara says: "Some of my family on my mum's side ask if I'm working, and I say: 'Yes, I'm a footballer.' They just look at me and say: 'Isn't that just for the weekends?'""Asian families are very aspirational, like most immigrant populations," says Powar. "They see education as the means of moving on, so there's been reluctance to offer kids to the academy system. They can't see a career path at the end of it.""I understand why insularity exists in the community," says Crooks. "They have to break that open. When you've got some of the best kids in Europe coming through at 18, you realise Asian kids need to be playing not just at school, but at county level and in the academies." The key, Randhawa says, is at the grassroots: "We weren't seeing a progression from the age of 16. Asians were setting up teams, but often the standard of coach education was poor. And they might not know how to turn their teams semi- or fully professional. This is the biggest barrier to getting Asians into football."So when will we see Indian players starring in a Champions League final? "I'll be mortified if someone doesn't come through in the next ten years," says Crooks. "I want to see top players from India making the same impact as in cricket.""It would be a dream come true," says Chaudhuri, who cites PSV as a salutary example. "When the South Koreans Ji-Sung Park and Lee Young-Pyo came in, everyone said, 'What's Guus Hiddink doing?' They proved themselves. I really hope we see players of Indian origin, born in India or elsewhere, at the highest level. If that happens, Indian football will go forward in leaps and bounds."?A Bhoy in bandagesIndia has a long tradition of playing barefoot. The Mohun side that helped end British rule in India wore no boots. And in 1950, footwear scuppered India's one brush with the World Cup. Invited by Brazil after other teams had dropped out, they opted out on cost grounds, though FIFA's boots-only rule may have deterred them. They have failed to qualify since.But in 1937, Mohammed Abdul Salim proved bare feet could compete when he played for Celtic not in boots but bandages. After his second match, a 7-1 thrashing of Galston, he was dubbed the Indian Juggler. The Daily Mail noted: "He balances the ball on his big toe, lets it run down the scale to his little toe, twirls it, and hops on one foot round the defender."Salim caught the eye at Mohammedan Sporting in Bengal, where he won the Calcutta league in 1936. Selected for two national friendlies against a Chinese Olympic XI, he played the first match and vanished before the second - prompting a police search.He told them a friend had convinced him to try his luck in Britain, so he'd taken the next ship. His friend knocked on the door of Celtic manager Willie Maley and announced: "A great player from India has come by ship." International transfers were less complicated in those days.Beef eaters v Bengalis? The clash that shaped Indian footballFootball flourished when the British brought it to the Raj in the 19th century, - especially in West Bengal, Goa and Kerala. By the 1870s, British army teams and local clubs were burgeoning, and in 1888, India's foreign secretary Sir Mortimer Durand established the Durand Cup - the game's third-oldest competition after the FA Cup and Scottish Cup. But 120 years later, India is not even one of the 100 best footballing nations. What happened?Nationalist politics in India became entwined with football in 1909 when a Bengali side, Mohun Bagan, were finally allowed to compete in the IFA Shield. In 1911, they faced the East Yorkshire Regiment in the final. Special trains, trams and steamboats were needed to transport local fans, and one magazine set up a temporary telephone exchange to relay the result across Bengal. When Mohun won 2-1, thrilled columnist Nayak wrote: "It fills every Indian with joy and pride to know that rice-eating, malarial-ridden, barefooted Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean booted John Bull in the peculiarly English sport."Legend has it that after the match, someone pointed to a Union Jack and asked when it would come down. "When Mohun win the shield again," came the reply. The club next won the trophy in 1947, the year of Indian independence.The steady shift of power away from the British was matched by India's gains on the pitch, yet football never became the nation's favourite game. Why? In The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt says India was reluctant to play football against poor neighbouring teams - and that cricket, far more suited to a country dominated by its caste system, gave the new nation a chance to test itself against the Commonwealth.