Travellers Guide to Indian Football: In search of the beautiful game’s many lives

It begins, not with a stadium or a crowd, but with a delayed journey.

On the way to Sombaria in Sikkim, a landslide stretches the Sportfolio crew’s journey by hours, as they travel to spend a day with former India international Sanju Pradhan, now working at the grassroots level in his village. By the time they arrive, the afternoon has already shifted between rain and play.

Three young boys linger around the camera, they are ballboys for a local match, but more curious about the people who have travelled all this way. When they are told they will be part of the story, their faces light up, not because of the camera, but because someone came. Because their football, their village, their lives, were worth travelling for.

“That moment crystallised everything,” says Johnson Kanjirathingal, founder of Sportfolio Productions. “We had travelled five hours to spend a day with a player-turned-coach trying to create change at the village level, and here we were, watching kids thrive because of it. That is why we make TGIF.”

That exchange, fleeting, captures the essence of Travellers Guide to Indian Football. It is a series built not on results or reputations, but on proximity, on going close enough to see what Indian football actually looks like when it is lived, not analysed.

“Indian football is a riveting story in itself,” Johnson says. “Everyone loves an underdog story in sport, well, Indian football is the underdog sport in the story of our country.”

What the creators recognise is not just a gap in coverage, but a gap in perspective. Much of Indian football storytelling has remained distant, driven by commentary, archives, and opinion. ‘Travellers Guide to Indian Football’ consciously moves away from that approach.

Watch Season 1 of Travellers Guide to Indian Football for free on YouTube

Telling the story differently

“In 2026, commentary-led or archive-heavy documentaries can be made by anyone from a living room,” he says. “We wanted to show the colour and chaos of Indian football culture… not tell viewers what to think, but ask the right questions so the people at the heart of each story could tell it themselves.”

Travellers Guide to Indian Football is structured as a journey, but it rarely behaves like a conventional travel series.

Each episode anchors itself in a region, yet the series resists becoming episodic in the traditional sense. Instead of isolating places, it builds continuity through recurring ideas, allowing Kolkata, Punjab, Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Sikkim to speak to each other across distance.

The storytelling is deliberately travel-led and people-first. It avoids the authoritative, commentary-heavy voice that defines much of sports documentary filmmaking, choosing instead to centre lived experience. The camera stays long enough for stories to reveal themselves.

Legacy: Pride, pressure, and memory

Nowhere is this more evident than in how the series approaches legacy.

In Kolkata, legacy feels inherited. Football is not discovered here, it is absorbed. The rivalries between Mohun Bagan, East Bengal, and Mohammedan Sporting extend beyond sport, shaped by history, migration, and identity.

The series captures this not through explanation, but through detail. A supporter Bapi Maji, who sold parts of his home to travel and watch his team play, becomes a window into what devotion looks like in this city.

                                                  Bapi Maji (Photo credit: TGIF/ Screenshot)

Even something as ordinary as a fish market carries the imprint of rivalry, prawn prices rising after a Mohun Bagan win, hilsa marking East Bengal celebrations.

Rather than presenting legacy as nostalgia, the series allows it to exist as something active, shaping behaviour, expectation, and identity in the present.

That meaning shifts as the series moves.

In Hyderabad, legacy is not absent, it is present, but unsettled. The memory of Syed Abdul Rahim and a golden era of Indian football remains central, but it sits alongside a fragmented present. His philosophy, “Football kya hai mian? Bas ball lo aur do”, still echoes, but in spaces that have changed drastically.

The series captures this contrast visually as much as narratively, from archival triumphs to children playing in parking lots, where cars move through the game without stopping it. It is in these juxtapositions that the weight of legacy is most clearly felt.

Grassroots: Survival against the system

If legacy explains where the game comes from, Travellers Guide to Indian Football turns to grassroots to understand how it survives.

“The most surprising thing was that despite systemic problems and weak administration in many regions, football always finds a way to survive, and sometimes to thrive,” Johnson says.

Punjab becomes central to this exploration. The series does not frame it through institutions alone, but through culture, where football exists in everyday life, visible even in the architecture of homes, like a football shaped water tank.

                    In Punjab football is a part of daily life (Photo credit: TGIF/ Screenshot)

Local tournaments draw thousands, with prize tables displaying motorcycles and gold, reflecting both the stakes and the scale of engagement.

“Second place is like death for us,” Ranjit Bajaj says, capturing a mentality where sport is pursued with intensity and purpose.

What the series does here is subtle. It does not romanticise struggle, nor does it reduce grassroots football to lack. Instead, it shows how systems and communities coexist, unevenly, but persistently.

Across these shifts, the series keeps returning to a quieter idea, that beyond legacy and structure, Indian football is sustained by belief.

“My answer may not be the most poetic,” Johnson says, “but I think Indian football operates like a virus, once you have caught it, you carry it for life.”

This belief takes different forms across the series. In Punjab, it is ambition. In Hyderabad, it is persistence. In Kashmir, it becomes continuity in uncertain conditions. In Sikkim, it feels almost instinctive, part of community life rather than separate from it.

“When you think of India, you shouldn’t think of it as a homogeneous entity,” the series reminds us.

That diversity is built into how the series is constructed.

                                       Mothers FC (Photo credit: TGIF/ Screenshot)

The camera as a participant

The visual language of the series reinforces this approach. The camera behaves less like an observer and more like a participant, moving with the journey, adapting to each environment rather than imposing a uniform gaze.

From rain-soaked matches in the hills to tightly packed urban games, from vast landscapes to improvised grounds, the series allows geography to shape its storytelling. Travel is not a transition between stories; it is part of the narrative itself.

“The most memorable frames were rarely the ones we had anticipated,” Johnson notes.

This openness to the unplanned gives the series its texture. Moments are not staged for emphasis; they are discovered. The camera lingers when necessary, steps back when it must, and trusts the environment to carry meaning.

A story still being written

What ultimately defines Travellers Guide to Indian Football is its restraint.

It does not attempt to reduce Indian football to a single narrative, of failure, or of promise. It avoids over-explaining, resists the impulse to offer definitive conclusions, and steps away from the familiar language of debate that often surrounds the sport.

Instead, it builds understanding through accumulation of places, people, and moments.

“Indian football is not for the faint-hearted,” Johnson says. “It is, in truth, more pain than joy. But it is not a cold case.”

That line feels like the series’ quiet conclusion.

Because what the series ultimately offers is not clarity, but perspective. It does not ask to be agreed with. It asks to be experienced.

And in doing so, it leaves behind something more lasting than answers, a sense that Indian football, in all its unevenness, continues to live through the people who refuse to let it fade.

Now streaming on YouTube, Travellers Guide to Indian Football is a journey worth taking, whether you follow the game closely, or are simply curious to see it up close- Watch season 1 here for free