The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Truth: Cricket Didn’t Break Indian Football, India Did

There is a argument that Indian football administrators, federation officials, and armchair analysts have danced around for years: that blaming cricket for football’s failures in this country is the sporting equivalent of blaming the sun for a house fire. Convenient, emotionally satisfying, and almost entirely wrong.

Last weekend, the Indian Super League finally returned after one of the most embarrassing administrative episodes in the history of professional sport anywhere in the world. Consider what actually happened. A league, the supposed crown jewel of Indian football, the vehicle that was going to carry the beautiful game into the nation’s living rooms, was left in operational limbo because two organizations, the All India Football Federation and Football Sports Development Limited, couldn’t sort out a commercial arrangement before their Master Rights Agreement expired in December. Players didn’t know if they had jobs. Coaches were left in states of genuine desperation. Clubs halted operations. All of this while Indian football sat 141st in the FIFA rankings, a position so humiliating it defies easy description for a nation of 1.4 billion people.

And now, reflexively, the conversation turns to cricket. As though the BCCI’s extraordinary success is somehow responsible for this chaos.

Any journalist who has covered sport professionally for the better part of three decades, who has watched football grow, stumble, collapse, and attempt revival across multiple cycles in this country, would arrive at the same conclusion: this crisis has nothing to do with Virat Kohli’s Instagram following or the IPL’s television rights deals. It has everything to do with the institutional rot that has plagued Indian football administration since long before Twenty20 cricket was even invented.

What cricket’s success actually represents is worth examining carefully. The BCCI didn’t become the richest and most powerful cricket board on earth by accident or by suppressing rival sports. It built structures, ruthlessly commercial, occasionally controversial, but fundamentally functional structures, that monetized India’s genuine, organic, mass passion for cricket. The IPL understood its product. It understood its audience. It understood that professional sport lives and dies on certainty: certain schedules, certain revenues, certain futures for its athletes. Cricket gave its stakeholders certainty. Football has given its stakeholders, repeatedly and with almost impressive consistency, chaos.

The loss to Singapore last October, a nation of six million people, that ended India’s qualification hopes for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup should have been the moment of genuine reckoning. Singapore. Not Japan, not South Korea, not Australia. Singapore. The kind of result that, in any properly functioning sporting ecosystem, triggers serious structural examination rather than shrugged shoulders and the familiar chorus about how cricket takes all the attention and all the money and all the oxygen.

What cricket actually takes is none of Indian football’s potential audience. The sport of football has two billion fans globally. The Premier League is the most watched sports league on the planet. La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, the Champions League, these competitions have cultivated enormous, passionate followings among Indian youth. The infrastructure for football fandom exists and is growing. Walk into any school in any city in this country and one will find children who worship Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland with the same intensity their parents reserved for Sachin Tendulkar. Football isn’t losing in India because cricket has won. Football is losing because football has failed to capture what is already there waiting to be captured.

The ISL was supposed to be the mechanism for that capture. Launched with considerable fanfare in 2014, it brought marquee international names, television deals, and genuine corporate investment into Indian football for the first time at scale. There were moments of genuine promise. Attendances were respectable. Some young Indian talent began to emerge. But the structural foundations were always shakier than the glossy production values suggested, and the expiry of the FSDL agreement without a successor in place has exposed just how precarious the entire enterprise remained beneath the surface. A league whose survival depends on a single commercial arrangement, and which has no contingency when that arrangement concludes, is not a league that has built itself to last. It is a league that has been performing stability rather than achieving it.

The players and coaches who found themselves in desperation these past months didn’t deserve that fate. They chose football over more immediately lucrative paths. They committed to a professional league in a country where that choice carries genuine risk. The administrators who left them in that position owe them not just the return of the league, but a fundamental rethinking of how Indian football governs itself.

What genuine reform would look like is not a mystery. It would start with separating the sport’s commercial future from the dependency on single-entity agreements that can expire and leave chaos in their wake. It would mean the AIFF functioning as a genuinely independent governing body with transparent finances, accountable leadership, and a serious grassroots infrastructure programme, not the kind announced with press releases and forgotten within a year, but the kind that produces technically competent players at scale over a decade. It would mean club owners invested in sporting success rather than franchise valuation. And it would mean an honest conversation about what Indian football is actually trying to achieve and on what timeline.

Cricket is not the enemy. Cricket is, if anything, the proof of concept. One administration built something extraordinary with the sporting passion of this nation. Another has squandered it repeatedly.

The ISL is back. The players are returning to training, the fixtures are being arranged, and the broadcast cameras will roll again. But if the lessons of this disruption are not absorbed, if the same structural fragilities remain in place and the same administrative culture persists, then this crisis will not be the last one. It will merely be the most recent in a very long series.

Indian football doesn’t need cricket to move aside. It needs to find the will to move forward. Those are entirely different problems, and only one of them is actually solvable.