Is cricket’s overwhelming sway responsible for impeding football in India?

Abhik Chatterjee: Cricket is the primary sport in India. There is a huge appetite for it. However, I would say that football is a second favourite. I feel cricket has heroes, which is why people consume it more. There are so many people who aspire to get into the sport because India is able to perform at the highest level.

Football has many fans who consume the Premier League, La Liga, World Cup, Champions League, etc. But I feel that for it to explode, India needs to do well on the international stage. If we have players going and play outside India, that is when aspirations will go up and chatter around the sport will increase. The ISL obviously has played its part in giving the sport more eyeballs and in making clubs more professional. But there are improvements to be made. We need to take a few quantum jumps before we are able to compete with at least the top leagues in Asia.

Yannick Colaco: I do agree that football is the clear number 2 sport in India. Research shows there are close to 305 million football fans in the country now. When we think about sports as an opportunity, I don’t think we can say cricket is so dominant that there is no space for other sports. I mean, just the fact that there are 305 million football fans is proof of that — that is more than the population of some countries in the world. The opportunity for football to grow in this country is immense. We are just scratching the surface.

The Indian cricket team is among the best in the world right now. But the Indian football team continues to plummet in FIFA rankings. How big a factor is the performance of the respective teams?

Yannick Colaco: The performance of the Indian team is extremely important. I think that essentially just creates better sentiment. Anything that can create positivity around a sport is a good thing. But I don’t think it is the only thing. Even in cricket, if you look back some years, India was not consistently winning global tournaments, but cricket was still an extremely popular sport. Building the fandom that has already been developed around football and recounting the stories of footballers are essentially how we can actually move beyond performance of the Indian team.

Abhik Chatterjee: There are multiple factors. There needs to be a concentrated effort across the board. All the stakeholders, whether it is the clubs, federation, or broadcaster, need to come together. There is a way to convey why football is what it is, and why people love the sport. For all of this to happen, there are foundations to be put in place right at the bottom and then developed gradually all the way up to the top. It needs to be a systemic change, and it needs to also be something that is sustainable in the long term.

When the ISL, which was modelled along the lines of the Indian Premier League in cricket, began in 2014, there was a lot of optimism. People believed that this was a new dawn for Indian football. Do you feel that opportunity has been squandered?

Yannick Colaco: People are attracted towards the concept of a silver bullet. They think one move is suddenly going to change everything in a consumer product. It does not work that way. When the ISL was set up, it was a very positive move. The ISL has close to 150 million fans across the country. I think there is still optimism around the game of football.

Abhik Chatterjee: Nothing is wasted. The ISL has paved the way for people to start watching a professionally marketed domestic football league that from the beginning featured players from around the world. As an administrator, I have seen change. We have had some top foreign coaches come into the league over the last decade. Indian coaches have obviously benefited from working with them. They have learned how to upgrade themselves. Some of them have gone on to become head coaches in their own right. This is just a small example of how the ISL has contributed to the Indian football ecosystem. There are many positives. We have to pause for a moment and be grateful for those. But there are also aspects that we can improve on as we go forward.

When the ISL media rights were sold earlier this month, there were comparisons with the valuation of the IPL media rights. Joy Bhattacharjya said if India is to take itself seriously as a sporting nation, the bizarrely skewed ratio has to come down. What are your thoughts?

Yannick Colaco: In today’s social media world, putting out numbers without context has become a norm. The situation is a lot more complex. The media rights value is definitely not a reflection of the state of a sport in our country. You should be looking at following, viewership, attendance, and much more to judge a sport. The focus of everyone in the football ecosystem should not be about how much cricket makes. Monetisation will happen. But if you focus only on that, then you won’t concentrate on the most important aspect of football, which is essentially how our fan base is growing.

In terms of governance, cricket seems to largely have its house in order. In football, the administration has been riddled with controversies. How detrimental has that been?

Abhik Chatterjee: There are multiple issues that Indian football has gone through in the past year. It would be foolish to deny that. It is out in the open. But there is an opportunity to move in a new direction. The clubs have come together, which is refreshing to see. I speak more with my colleagues than I ever have in the last 14 years. Everybody has taken joint ownership of the product. Everybody is hands-on in taking decisions across the board, whether it comes to governance, broadcast, marketing, or sponsorship. That approach has stemmed from the challenges faced over the past few months.

Cricket has also had issues when it comes to administration, but through India doing well at the international stage and with strong leadership, it has settled into what it is today. The ISL is still in a growing phase, but everybody is committed to moving forward and working together to solve issues.

How optimistic are you of India widening its sporting footprint, and cricket and football thriving together? Or will football always be a distant number 2 sport?

Yannick Colaco: The sporting footprint is already widening in terms of participation. There is no one-year, two-year solution. We need to think of this and plan for the next five or 10 years. You keep building milestones in that space. But I don’t think anyone should look at football suddenly becoming 10 times its size in a year or two years. You have to build this patiently, in the right way.

Abhik Chatterjee: Football has to be looked at in a singular manner, in its own ecosystem, and within its own set of challenges. If you do want to compare, you should compare India to neighbouring countries in the Asian Football Confederation that we have to catch up with or match. That is a more valid comparison. You look at the likes of Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong. Those are more interesting discussions that need to happen.

Listen to the conversation

With the passing of Inderjit Singh Bindra, a link with a revolution in cricket that shifted the power base from England to India has been severed. For so long has India’s influence lasted and so profound has its impact been that it’s easy to forget their ascendancy is less than four decades old.

In the mid-1980s, N.K.P. Salve, Bindra and Jagmohan Dalmiya proposed that the World Cup, hosted thrice by England now be shifted to India and Pakistan.

The administrators dangled the carrot that the BCCI continues to dangle — money. They promised much more of it, and took advantage of the rule then that allowed associate members one vote each (Test nations had two). This meant that the 18 associate members had a big say since the full members were just seven.

Dalmiya and Bindra as a team were the spit and polish of Indian cricket, the enforcer and the planner. It was a combination that could be seen on the field of play too. Think Javed Miandad and Imran Khan, or Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar. Or Ian Botham and Mike Brearley.

The 1987 World Cup was only the start. The International Cricket Council, established in 1909, was a boys’ club run from the offices of the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club), and sharing a secretary with it.

The MCC President automatically became chairman of the ICC. With founding member Australia, England enjoyed the power of veto. Bindra and Dalmiya set about upsetting this cozy arrangement.

Revolution complete

In 1993, the revolution was complete. The veto was abolished, India co-hosted the World Cup again three years later, and the first sniffs of the enormous power of television rights were felt.

India had many advantages — a television audience in the millions, a marketplace for consumer goods that needed advertising between overs, companies willing to spend on advertising, and a team or great players who drew the eyeballs. The economy had opened, bringing all these elements together to India’s advantage.

Where India now miss the presence of a diplomat and persuader (in the gentler sense of the term, not as in Hollywood) like Bindra is obvious with the Bangladesh fracas. Whatever that country’s political reasons for pulling out of the T20 World Cup in India next month, Bindra would not have allowed things to come to this pass. One telephone call would have made the difference.

Brinkmanship is useful when you have less to lose, and in this case Bangladesh had more, both financially and cricket-wise. Pakistan’s current stance in support isn’t likely to end well for them either.

The 1996 situation where India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka hosted the World Cup is unimaginable now. In 1986, when India’s Operation Brasstacks, mobilised troops along the border, and Pakistan mobilised too, it was Bindra who persuaded Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq to visit India to ease tension. Sometimes those ruling cricket (Bindra was a bureaucrat, not a politician) can do good too!

The Los Angeles Times reported: “as the air bristled with tough talk, the Pakistani cricket team arrived for its scheduled, months-long, series of matches with the Indian team.

And almost as quickly as a fast bowler gets the ball to the stumps, the war-talk evaporated. Diplomats quickly signed an agreement under which both sides would pull back troops from their shared frontier. The tension eased measurably.”

Self-image

A cricket team reflects its nation’s self-image. And this self-image can be a treacherous thing, wanting to assert itself in all situations, grave as well as inconsequential, and everything in between.

The self-image changes according to circumstance too. We seem to be currently a muscle-flexing, imperious people, especially when faced with those patently weaker. Bangladesh are being taught a lesson which they knew all along.

Then there’s the International Cricket Council which says shifting the Bangladesh matches out of India “could set a precedent that would jeopardise the sanctity of future ICC events and undermine its neutrality as a global governing body.” This is rich, considering that the Chairman of the ICC is the son of India’s Home Minister, and venues have been shifted before — the so-called ‘hybrid’ model — to suit India.

Indian cricket misses an administrator like Bindra, the man who saw the big picture.

Published – January 28, 2026 12:30 am IST

File picture of Bangladesh’s Mustafizur Rahman celebrating a wicket during a T20I against India
| Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini

Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Information, Ata Tarar. File. Photo: XTararAttaullah

Since I began my career as a reporter, India have won four World Cup in two formats, become No. 1 team across formats, attracted more money, and power, and become the sole leader in a unipolar cricket world. But one thing hasn’t changed: the callous disregard for the paying spectator.

State cricket associations, like the national body, seem to believe that whatever they do or don’t do, the crowds will fill the stadium, media will ensure coverage, and television will bring in the riches. Players have little power to change things, so they don’t even try. In any case they are focussed on their game.

Still, it would be nice to hear one of them say, I will not play here, “till there are proper ladies’ toilets in all the stands” or “till there are ramps to allow access to the wheel-chair bound.”

Sunil Gavaskar once pulled out of a Test in Kolkata to end a run of 106 consecutive matches. But the reason was personal, not aimed at shaking things up. He had been heckled by a section of the crowd on an earlier occasion.

And while we are fantasising, how about senior officials occasionally sitting in the stands to experience the average spectator’s discomfort?

Confusion

The paying spectator is at the bottom of the priority list. As recently as two years ago, when India hosted the 50-over World Cup, the classic Indian confusions were present in public view. There was delay in the announcement of the schedule, for example, which left fans from within and outside the country little time to plan their own itineraries. The ticketing was a mess. Most venues continued to function by the theory: build something, however inconvenient, and they will come.

The usual complaints — messy toilets, exorbitantly priced food, insensitive security checks, poor transport and parking — popped up regularly.

Yet, none of this made the slightest difference to the bottom line. The International Cricket Council’s economic impact assessment concluded that the World Cup generated $1.39 billion to India’s economy. Whether actually or nominally, it is difficult to say, but whatever the final figure it is impressive even if not all the revenue accrued to the game itself.

Players have minimum requirements, media and broadcasters have minimum requirements, officials have minimum requirements, hospitality boxes have minimum requirements. The paying spectator might have minimum requirements guided by common sense, but he has to buckle down and accept whatever is given.

No forum for redressal

There’s no one he can complain to, no council for the redressal of spectator complaints. Maybe he knows someone whose uncle once played local league cricket with a former international star; he could explain to such a person the difficulties and the often miserable conditions. But that’s no guarantee a solution will be found, or even discussed.

The Annual General Meeting of the Board of Control for Cricket in India takes place on the last Sunday of this month. It is unlikely to change the life of the average cricket-watcher. The BCCI will have a new president. It might be a token former international who takes the job knowing where the real power lies — in the hands of the ruling party.

The president’s job is to ensure no one rocks the boat and to perpetuate a system that has been in existence for decades. When it comes to cricket administration, all political parties are the same, often even propping up one another on the theory that if they don’t hang together, they will hang separately.

Former cricketers do not resist the system; perhaps they can’t. It is too well entrenched. There’s something magical at the threshold between player and official. As soon as a player crosses it, he becomes indistinguishable from the entrenched official.

The transition has always reminded me of the final lines of Orwell’s Animal Farm where pigs take over the farm, but nothing ultimately changes. As he writes, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig…but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Even in informal discussions, there will hardly be a nod to the paying spectators and the hardships they are put through at many of our stadiums. Accountability is only for players and coaches; it is unheard of in officialdom.

Published – September 10, 2025 12:30 am IST

At the turn of the century, England cricketer Darren Gough said that international cricket had become a single man’s game. Since then tours may have got shorter, but tournaments have increased, and careers have expanded. The work-life balance remains skewed. To rephrase something an Indian CEO said recently, how long can you stare at a cricket bat on a weekend?

Sport and family life have an uneasy relationship. ‘Cricket widow’ is part of the game’s lexicon. As the sport makes greater demands on players, enlightened administrators permit a semblance of family life while on tour.

Gambhir’s view

Indian coach Gautam Gambhir has conveyed to the Board of Control for Cricket in India that the presence of wives on tour was a reason for the poor showing in Australia.

This is an effective way of taking the attention away from his own failures and focussing it on easy targets. From all accounts, a happy dressing room of recent years became an unhappy one. The major change was the new coach. Do the math.

Blaming the wife and kids for team failures reeks of toxic patriarchy. Had India won in Australia, would the wives have been given any credit?

I remember being greeted by players and media on a tour of England where Virat Kohli was struggling, with the words (spoken in a conspiratorial whisper): “You know he’s got his girlfriend with him,….” As if that explained a weakness outside the off stump. Yet when he made runs in Australia and elsewhere and the same lady, his wife now, was with him, no one said, “It’s because his wife is here.” Players are adults and professionals and it helps to treat them thus.

Misplaced blame

There are enough cricketing reasons for India’s loss — discussed in earlier columns here — including better cricket by the hosts. To blame the families is convenient. Also old-fashioned. Three decades ago, manager Ray Illingworth blamed England’s loss in South Africa on the presence of families. His contemporary, the great wicketkeeper Alan Knott has said, “I have played my best cricket when I have been with my wife.”

Both sportsmen and cricket boards have since become more enlightened. South Africa’s coach Bob Woolmer organised shopping and sightseeing trips for wives on tour because, as he told Wisden, “Players didn’t have to worry about whether the wife was being looked after or not and could get on with playing cricket. You’d then meet up in the evening for supper like couples leading normal lives.”

The key word here is ‘normal’. The attempt was to make things as recognisably routine as possible so players stayed relaxed.

Given the loneliness and frustration that are part of touring, some husbands stray, and family life is sacrificed at the altar of sport. Reporters who tour with the Indian team know about players’ peccadilloes. Mohammad Azharuddin’s marriage collapsed while Sourav Ganguly’s nearly did when he was photographed at a temple ceremony.

Of course such things might have happened anyway. And you could argue that it is not the cricket board’s job to foster relationships. But a happy player without marital problems is clearly the more effective player. Boards the world over recognise this. Which is why players are given paternity leave to be at the birth of their children like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli were during recent tours.

This is a cultural change in Indian cricket. In the mid-70s, when Sunil Gavaskar was playing in the West Indies his son Rohan was born. Paternity leave was an alien concept then, and Gavaskar didn’t ask for it.

Long absences affect every member of the family. Players have written about the pain of their young kids not recognising them on return from a tour or, in Phil Tuffnell’s case, receiving him at the airport with a “goodbye daddy”!

“You know what you signed up for” — implied in the (written) contract between player and board or the (unwritten) one between player and family — is never a consolation.

“When I’m out on the pitch with the Australian team, I don’t see them as men in the middle of a cricket match but as men in the middle of their lives,” wrote skipper Pat Cummins. It is an attitude cricket boards, especially the BCCI can learn from.

India’s coach Gautam Gambhir and captain Rohit Sharma. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) met with key members of India’s men’s cricket team’s management to take a stock after a disastrous season of Test cricket and planning the way forward.

The meeting was attended by Test and ODI captain Rohit Sharma, head coach Gautam Gambhir, chief selector Ajit Agarkar, joint secretary Devajit Saikia (who on Sunday will take over as the BCCI secretary) and former secretary Jay Shah.

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All the personnel were huddled together at a south Mumbai hotel, before Shah’s felicitation by the BCCI for having been elected as the International Cricket Council (ICC) chair.

It is understood that the meeting discussed the role of coaching staff and contemplated on charting out the transition of the longer format squads. Neither Rohit nor Virat Kohli – both out of form – are in danger of their place being questioned for the Champions Trophy.

A lot of feedback was sought about Gambhir and his coaching staff, who had drawn flak from legends including Sunil Gavaskar, after India’s poor strategic planning in the last two Test series.

After beating Bangladesh at home, India suffered a humiliating whitewash in a three-Test series at home and then conceded five-Test series in Australia 3-1 and lost the Border-Gavaskar Trophy after a decade.

The sorry losses meant India for the first time will not feature in the final of the ICC Test Championship in June.

With captain Rohit – who dropped himself for the final Test – and veteran batter Kohli suffering a woeful run with the willow, their future in Test cricket was not discussed in the meeting.

The BCCI hierarchy had met with the team hierarchy prior to the departure to Australia in November. It will be interesting to see if the selection committee is forced to pull the plug during the long break in international cricket between the Champions Trophy and the tour to England.

File photo of ICC president Jay Shah.
| Photo Credit: PTI

The ICC in collaboration with cricket boards of India, Australia and England is exploring the possibility of a two-tier Test system to facilitate more series between big three nations.

The Age reported that Jay Shah, the new ICC chairman, is set to meet Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird and his England counterpart Richard Thompson later this month to discuss the finer points.

“Any plan for a move to two divisions in Test cricket would kick in after the end of the current Future Tours Program in 2027,” the Age reported quoting its sources.

The BCCI is currently gearing up for its Special General Meeting on January 12 in Mumbai where interim secretary Devajit Saikia is expected to get a full-time role. Saikia was appointed in the interim role after Shah vacated his post last month to take over as ICC chairman.

A BCCI official indicated that the discussion floated around the ICC corridors in 2016, the first-time when a two-tier Test system was seriously considered.

“We don’t have any news of any such move as yet. Currently, preparations are being made for SGM and the recent tour to Australia too needs to be discussed.

“There was such a move sometime back, but we haven’t heard anything since,” a BCCI source told PTI.

The BCCI and cricket bodies of Zimbabwe and Bangladesh opposed the move, citing the possibility of decreasing revenue.

They had also argued that smaller nations would miss out on the opportunity of playing against top teams if such a system comes into existence.

However, nine years down the road the modalities have changed and even some of the reputed experts such as former Indian skipper Ravi Shastri are supporting the division.

“I’ve been a firm believer in that if you want Test cricket to survive and be alive and thriving, I think that’s the way to go.

“The top teams play against each other more often, so there is a contest; you want contests,” Shastri told SEN during the recent fifth Test between India and Australia.

Even some of the top players such as England Test skipper Ben Stokes had criticised the current model of World Test Championship.