13 July 2018 23:19 IST

The expansion of football’s showpiece event in 2026 should — in theory — improve the country’s chances of finally qualifying for it. But is that really the case?

In January 2017, after FIFA, world football’s governing body, decided unanimously to expand the World Cup to a 48-team affair from 2026, its president Gianni Infantino sought to interpret the tournament in the most literal sense possible. “Football is more than Europe and South America,” he remarked. “It’s not the 20th century any more. It’s the 21st. The football fever you have in a country that qualifies for the World Cup is the most powerful tool you can have.”

To FIFA’s critics, the move was a continuation of the kind of patronage politics past presidents Joao Havelange and Sepp Blatter were alleged to have practised. Each FIFA member has a vote and it was natural to expect those countries which benefit from an expanded tournament to vote in favour of the president who brought about the change. But from a global perspective, the addition of 16 teams was logically sound. From public policy to jurisprudence, it is accepted that inclusion is always better than exclusion. Sport is no different; a bit of hand-holding in a dog-eat-dog world is indeed necessary.

Can India now grab the outstretched arm? For many years running, lakhs of Indians have remained emotionally invested in a sport which hasn’t quite been a source of national pride. Like Indian tennis, Indian football too has a celebrated past — remember the ‘Barefoot Wonders’ at the 1948 Olympics? — but little contemporary success. The expanded tournament in 2026, though, appears to have excited more than a few. It may look a fantasy, but they have dared to dream.

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The reasons are clear. The number of spots for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) at the 2026 edition in North America is set to go up to a maximum of nine from the present five. India is currently ranked 14th in Asia, having jumped from a lowly World No. 173 to 97 in just two-and-a-half years under Stephen Constantine — thanks to some decent results, accompanied by the gaming of the system. Moving further up into the top 10 in Asia and earning a decent chance at qualification isn’t considered a stretch.

However, deep down, it is a tale of cautious optimism. It may seem like a few simple steps up, but what Indian football really needs are giant strides. “I don't think it is a realistic target,” says Sabir Pasha, former India international, currently assistant coach at Chennaiyin FC and the club’s technical director for youth development. “But at the same time we can’t write it off. It is a very long process. Look at Japan. They are visualising winning the World Cup in 2092. That’s how long the path takes. We have not provided our children with anything close to what is required for qualification. There are of course some good things happening. But 2026 is very ambitious.”

Football in India has forever been playing catch-up. It still doesn’t have a properly structured league. Till it won the right to host the U-17 World Cup, youth development was non-existent; U-18, U-15 and U-13 national leagues have sprung up only in the recent past. Contrast this with Uruguay, a country with a population of 3.4 million (one-fifth of Delhi’s), where kids aged four to 13 are part of a national scheme called Baby Football, with Luis Suarez and Edinson Cavani among its graduates.

At home, only Mizoram has something resembling this, and the sheer number of Mizo players in the national squad proves the importance of such a system. India, moreover, needs to prop up not one but multiple generations of players. Even in the most advanced footballing nations, no single generation forms the team’s spine.

“We want more kids to participate,” says Henry Menezes, deputy chairman, All-India Football Federation (AIFF) technical committee and CEO, Western India Football Association. “There was a huge gap between schools and club football. This has now been bridged with our youth competitions. In Maharashtra alone, around 32 teams are accredited in the programme for clubs’ academies. This is heartening.”

But Menezes adds that India needs to make a systemic decision. “In Iceland or even Spain, the top coaches work at the youth levels. We don’t have enough Pro and A Licence coaches. We do it with B and C [coaches]. We have to decide whether we need the expertise of A Licence coaches at the youth level or make do with B and C. Until now, India has concentrated only on the senior level. With the likes of Sunil Chhetri, we have got some decent results. Now it’s time to solidify it by concentrating on the youth level.”

According to Carles Cuadrat, Bengaluru FC’s newly appointed head coach, strong competitions make players stronger. The Catalan was at Barcelona when a young Lionel Messi came through. “In the first world of football, a kid has to play really big games,” he says. “When you are 10, 12, you have to manage the kind of pressure sides like Real Madrid, Liverpool, Juventus put you under. Unfortunately in India, the level is still not that big. Children are not playing in official competitions at the highest level to win titles. That’s something the federation should look at.”

This serious lack of competition is as true at the senior level as it is lower down. India may have jumped more than 70 places in the FIFA rankings, but skipper Chhetri believes that sparring with the regional heavyweights is crucial to know where it stands and what it needs to do to mount a World Cup challenge.

“Our aim is first to be in the top 10 or 12 in Asia and that’s very hard,” says Chhetri. “Once we’re there and once we start playing the likes of Japan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Australia and South Korea regularly, only then will we have a reference point. Right now, why would they want to play against us? When Japan is meeting tough teams like Senegal and Colombia at the World Cup, why would they want to face us? For them to take us seriously, we need to be in the top 12.”

In a way, India finds itself where Japan was in the early 1990s. Japan had just established the J.League, a top-down model like the Indian Super League (ISL). It had to contend with a far more popular sport in baseball like the ISL does with cricket. But unlike India so far, it managed to intertwine the goals of the league with those of the national team so they could feed off each other. The result was that Japan came agonisingly close to qualifying for the 1994 World Cup when it was still a 24-team tournament. Its presence in the 32-team 1998 edition was no surprise.

“Steady, sensible, and continued growth,” is how Sean Carroll, an English football journalist based in Japan, also a contributor to the famed quarterly magazine The Blizzard, describes Japanese football. “Slow and steady is always sensible — particularly when there is a sport more popular than football already around. There have been dips but the foundations were laid correctly and now Japan produces a stream of high quality players who progress from the J.League to Europe.

“Having players develop at local clubs and then move to the Bundesliga, Serie A, the Premier League, etc. is a huge source of pride and motivation to local fans/young players, which encourages the cycle to continue. That has obviously benefited the national team, which feeds back into football’s popularity even more,” says Carroll.

It’s no surprise that 13 of the 23-member Japan squad which played in Russia were based in the top tiers of Germany, Spain, France and England.

What all of this suggests is that India needs massive reforms and careful advancement of whatever it has initiated thus far. It shouldn’t fall into what Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan, called the “middle-income trap” in a recent article in The Economist. In this, developing countries adopt top-down approaches but fail to implement the structural changes to support them.

“We cannot always have the AIFF doing everything,” says Mandar Tamhane, CTO, Bengaluru FC. “The clubs are equally responsible. When you look at 2026, it can only happen if we start at the under-13, 15 levels. Every possible stakeholder has to do his bit.

“In Brazil and England, kids play 200 to 300 games by the time they reach the senior level. How many did the U-17 team play before the World Cup? Also, we need to select the right kids. A lot of age fudging happens at these levels but we are so inured to it. Honestly speaking, in eight years reaching the top nine or 10 in Asia should be doable. But of course we have to do better,” says Tamhane.

“I can’t put a date to it,” says Menezes about India at the 2026 World Cup. “The U-17 World Cup was a wake-up call. We got to know what the gap between the champions and us was. But if we start today, by 2026 we should be near it, and by 2030 we should definitely be in it.”