Blatter's 'sleeping giant' to Wenger's 'gold mine': Indian football remains a puzzle

The Indian football community is at the seventh heaven with the arrival of legendary Arsene Wenger, one of football’s brightest minds and a coach par excellence, in the country.

He is not the first footballing mind to visit India, though. But unlike the past – most recently David Beckham descended into India on a vacation – Wenger is not on holiday and not quenching the thirst of Indian media with his insights about global football.

Wenger, now FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development, is here to guide India and chart its way to resurgence.

He marked his presence by drawing the attention of the Indian football community by making some jaw-dropping remarks. He called Indian football ‘a gold mine that is not completely explored, exploited and encouraged’.

The country is enlivened with his remark. And that it is coming from a great coach it carried unyielding weightage.

Wenger, who kept Arsenal among Premier League's top four clubs for 22 years, did not hide his emotion about India. He is simply flabbergasted about why a country, with a strength of 1.4 billion people, fails to arise as a footballing powerhouse.

A master tactician of the game, who unearthed several top talents – from George Weah to Thierry Henry - out of despair of poverty, refused to believe, even though there is an apathy around Indian football for several decades, that India is incapable of coming on the world map of football.

Wenger says, “It is impossible and criminal that India is not among the strong footballing nations.”

The chances of Wenger knowing the now forgotten nuanced and rich history of Indian football and its fabled stars, who once dazzled Asian and European crowds alike under a visionary manager named Syed Abdul Rahim, is little.

But the mere fact that India, the triumphant side of the 1962 Asian Games, came close to beating Wenger’s country, France, twice in the Olympics, was enough to awe him. In the 1948 London Olympics, India wasted two penalties to concede a 1-2 loss to France, and in Rome, 12 years later, India held Les Bleus to a 1-1 draw.

“I am a passionate football lover and I am fascinated by the history and development of football in India,” he apprised the Indian media after the inauguration of the AIFF-FIFA Talent Academy in Bhubaneswar, where the world body will provide technical support, the government of Odisha taking care of the infrastructure and logistics.

Wenger is also hopeful about India playing in the 2026 World Cup which will be a 48-team event. “I think India should be one of the countries making it to the tournament."

At a time when optimism ran amok around Indian football, it got a quick shake-up that broke a blissful illusion.

India dealt with a 0-3 thrashing at the hand of Qatar in the AFC World Cup Qualifier - Round 2 on Tuesday, and coach Igor Stimac underlined the harsh reality of Indian football.

“We still need to work a lot, inside our house, our family, about everything that is connected to football. Qatar spends more on one trip coming here than we (do) all year on all selections, clear as that. Organisation-wise travel, logistics, food, sleep, rest, everything needs to get better to get and it will help us in the future,” Stimac said at the post match press conference.

Talent awaits opportunity

11 years back, former FIFA president Sepp Blatter enlivened the Indian football fans with a similar exotic statement. He had then called India a 'sleeping giant', and it is ‘waking up’. What Stimac said on November 21 emphasised why India remains a poor footballing nation.

Indian football is still waking up. Here talent does not meet opportunity; there is scant system in place for talent identification and grooming. A lot has happened over the last decade but the state of Indian football has remained unchanged. It made scant progress since its heydays in the 1950s and 1960s, when India was a force to reckon with in Asia.

Since then, Indian football administrators, mostly politicians taking refuge under Delhi’s Football House to stake a claim in the corridor of power, have done eternal damage to the game by refusing, ignoring, and demolishing the knowledge and expertise of Indian coaches.

Rahim, an erudite coach whose knowledge about the game was extensive and laid out an inclusive plan for a nationwide development of the game based on his Hyderabad model, died of cancer.

Long back when India had zero access to modern football, he single-handedly introduced one-touch football and ensured a steady stream of talent by grooming players at schools and universities. As a tactical gem, he made his players play with their weaker legs in practice games and ran tournaments exclusively for diminutive players to improve their set-piece skills.

But when he died, Indian officials loathed and discarded his noble ideas. It is an anomaly that Indian football saw only a downward after his death. India has never again reached another Asian Games final or had a chance of playing in the Olympics.

The Indian presence in Asian football remains meager as the country has not yet steamrolled any significant grassroots development programme.

Hosting the FIFA U-17 World Cup in 2017 was an administrative milestone for AIFF, but that did not translate into any revolution as the youth set-up, the backbone of a country’s footballing future, is broken in this part of the world.

Barring a few individual initiatives, for instance, the Minerva and Reliance Academy, the residential academies in the Indian context remain insufficient.

Wenger's prophecy

While Wenger is here to impart his knowledge to the Indian officials about spotting, grooming, and educating talents, and FIFA will provide the academy with technical inputs, the execution - to 'make the ball friend of the young trainees' - lies with AIFF, which has for years been accused of lacking intent.

For the academy, which is part of FIFA’s Talent Development Scheme, 35 players have been shortlisted from the under-13 national championships.

Japan did not prove Wenger wrong when he made the world aware of its rapid progress in 1995, and in a span of three years, Japan made its World Cup debut in France.

Now, when Wenger sounded optimistic about India, and the country has reason to believe in his erudite insights and philosophy, the responsibility lies with AIFF and the stakeholders of Indian football to prove him right.