Dirven by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of making football the sport of choice in India, the Government of India, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports and All India Football Federation has launched the Mission XI Million (MXIM) programme. It aims to involve 11 million children in football from across each state and Union Territories in India before the FIFA U-17 World Cup.
MXIM is led by a simple idea to let every child in India play the beautiful game and to also involve schools and parents to educate them on the massive strides India is taking towards making football a sport of choice in India. The programme has already contacted 3,731,586 million children and with a little less than four months for the kick-off, MXIM looks set to cross its target of 11 million students before October 6, 2017 when the tournament starts.
Schools from across all the states have shown tremendous interest in the programme with an average of 155,482 students being enrolled from every state till now.
Under the programme, the students are introduced to football with the help of trained professional coaches from around the world with an intention to help them consider football as a sustainable career path in the future. Over the years, football in India has grown in leaps and bounds, with the Indian Super league launch in 2014, India for the first time witnessed some of the biggest names in global football such as Robert Pires, Del Piero, Florent Malouda, etc. playing in India along with Indian players.
In other massive developments, the senior Indian national team ranking is now ranked 100 in the FIFA Rankings as a result of strong performances in the past year and now with a set of 16 young boys on the brink of making history as they will become first players to represent India in a FIFA Tournament even before they are eligible to vote.