Down And Out At U-17 World Cup On Home Soil

After 180 minutes, the party and the dream were over. India’s U-17 women’s team was out of the World Cup on home soil. The manner of the elimination was grating: the 8-0 defeat against the United States in the curtain raiser was disappointing and deflating at all levels and indicative of what the rest of the tournament would be about: damage limitation. Against Morocco, the host restricted the opponent to scoring just three goals.

It was a déja vu. Five years ago, India’s boys exited the U-17 World Cup at home after defeats against the United States and Colombia. At least, Jaekson Singh got a consolation goal and elements of India’s play were constructive and encouraging. Following an intense training camp, the team had been sent on exposure trips around the world, but the early exit was a stinging indictment of India’s lack of grassroots development, with franchises in the Indian Super League, the country’s topflight, investing precious little in youth academies.

The girls’ team followed the same roadmap during an intense eight-month training camp and 250 sessions. They were sent to practice in Norway, Spain and Italy, but meaningful matches were rare. The majority of squad members had not played an international match before India’s match with the USA, the gold standard in women’s game.

The outcome in the form of a damaging 8-0 scoreline was predictable. Journalist and long-time observer of the Indian game Vishnu Prasad noted that the “AIFF [All India Football Federation] is like that father who walked out on his kid when it was born, then showed up a week before the 17th birthday and said ‘let’s go to Disneyland and make sure you have a memorable childhood!”

The governing body had scrambled to assemble a team, staging trials in Manipur, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Mangalore among others, but ultimately a bunch of teenage girls from the interior of Jharkhand could not disguise Indian soccer’s complete dysfunction with a ruling body in turmoil and no grassroots programmes. The vast majority of Indian states do not organize youth leagues for girls while the topflight at the senior level runs just a few weeks a year. In August, Gokulam Kerala, India’s best club, had to forfeit participation in the Asian Women’s Club Championship because FIFA had suspended the AIFF.

Following the exit of longstanding strongman Praful Patel, a FIFA Council member, from the Indian apex body, FIFA banned the AIFF for third-party interference and stripped India of the tournament’s hosting rights before the country’s supreme court repelled the committee of administrators and handed power back to the AIFF. The world federation moved to welcome the Indians back to the soccer fraternity and so the AIFF retained the tournament.

A week later, Kalyan Chaubey, a member of the BJP, India’s Hindu-nationalist ruling party, succeeded Patel, unperturbed by accusations of political interference: “Can you name a federation where the government, or a party, or a politician is not a part of the federation?”

Poor governance and the reality of India’s market economy have not helped Indian women’s soccer, but the AIFF’s top-down approach of hosting major international tournaments in a bid to prompt interest and development is slowly beginning to be questioned in the body’s own circles.

“We are working on the Indian football Strategic Roadmap which would clearly specify our strategic goals and priorities for the next four years,” AIFF general secretary Shaji Prabhakaran told me. “However, the new team at AIFF will certainly have a different approach to developing football which would be along global lines and moreover, focusing on developing a robust domestic competitive structure for women’s football and increasing participation of girls at the grassroots level.”

Building a proper ecosystem for girls as well as boys is imperative for the domestic game to progress because today Indian soccer has little to savor apart from Jaekson Singh’s goal and the delusion that it’s going somewhere.