When parents let their kids play for a living instead of having them become an engineer, a doctor or a warm body in an outsourcing firm, maybe one day, those football and basketball jerseys will have an Indian name on the back
In offices across India employees, are turning up bleary eyed every morning as they have been until the early hours watching the brilliant football being played half a world away in Brazil. There is no doubt that the FIFA World Cup 2014 has been a brilliant display of football, far removed from the dour displays over the past few decades. Yes, the tournament has had its fair share of controversies but at the end of the day, the goals scored per match statistic is the highest since the 32-team format began two decades ago.
The captain of the Indian team, Sunil Chettri, is a presenter on the television channel broadcasting the event. India’s most famous footballer of recent times, Baichung Bhutia is appearing in promotional events for the World Cup as well. However, the sad fact remains that India, despite being the world’s second-most populous country and one where across the country, particularly in Goa, Kerala, West Bengal and Meghalaya, there is considerable interest in football, India’s national team languishes at the lowest depths of the world.
From a high of 94 in March 1996, India is currently ranked 154 in the world. In the slightly more respected ElO ranking, India is even further behind the mark, ranked 179 in the world. Some might argue that this is due to the geo-political changes that have taken place in the world with many more countries existing today than two decades ago, but that does not in any way of form excuse such a lamentable showing.
With the sole exception of cricket, where we can hold our heads high and claim that we are fairly good, particularly if we manage to beat the English over the next few weeks, India’s overall performance in other sports has been ordinary. In the recently concluded Hockey World Cup in The Netherlands, India’s young team promised much but eventually came ninth. In other large global team sports, India does not even count.
There have been some stand-out individual performances by Indian sportspersons. In badminton (a sport incidentally created in Pune), the recent performances of Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu have been excellent. India’s haul of medals in the london Olympics was not bad, but a tally of six medals, not one of them Gold, left us 55th in the standings.
There is no doubt that cricket is the sports loved and enjoyed by a majority of Indians today, and it is also a sport that has evolved and one thanks to the Indian Premier league able to provide an income to far more players than ever before. Cricket in India has endured some tough times, as any fan of Indian cricket in the 1990s will testify, but thanks to astute marketing following India’s stunning win in the 1983 World Cup and the successful hosting of the 1987 World Cup changed the sport in India. The single-most important change as sports management professionals will testify is that those changes persuaded middle-class Indian parents that cricket was a viable career option for their children.
Sports is played at every major school; go to the fields and even in the most atrocious weather young boys and girls kick a football, smash objects in racquet sports, learn basketball and so many other sports. But the success stories of contemporary (non-cricket) Indian sportspersons like Mary Kom, Saina Nehwal, Abhinav Bindra or Gagan Narang are so few and so far between that you can actually count them on your fingertips. Where do the rest fall through the gapsIJ Millions play but only a handful succeed, although that is a fact of life, but the success rate in India is even lower.
Read their stories and there is one underlying common thread: There was complete and total family support for each of these individuals. Whether it was Bindra’s parents building him a private shooting range or Nehwal’s parents moving to Hyderabad for their daughter. If there are to be more stories of success there have to be more parents like these.
There are several things wrong with India’s sports administration and in some sports in particular there is rampant performance-enhancing drug abuse. At a level this is due to the fact that one method the Government uses to encourage sports is to offer sportspersons jobs in public-sector companies or in the police. There is nothing wrong in the Government’s incentivisation, although that does indirectly encourage drug use as athletes can perform well once through whatever means possible to get a sarkari naukri.
However, the Government, while a convenient scapegoat, is not the only one to be blamed here. But if India is to make champions, if India is to make it to the top table of the sports league, if India is to one day possibly qualify for the FIFA World Cup (or even make it to the top 50 countries), it needs the middle class to understand that sports is a viable career for the children. If a kid from India cracked into one of the major European football clubs as a regular starter, the boost the sport would get in India would be immense.
If parents let their kids play as a career, even American sports like basketball or baseball, things could change. The Disney movie Million Dollar Arm looks at the US Major league Baseball’s hunt for a pitcher in India. The National Basketball Association, also of the US, has been heavily promoting the sport in India and has even tied up with the Mahindra Group to scout talent from this huge country.
Go to any mall on the weekends and there are boys (and men) wearing football jerseys, who understand the history and the dynamics of clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester United. Viewership numbers for club games in India among this is admittedly small (in the Indian context), but demographically influential population has risen sharply over the past few years. Talk about the NBA championships and chances are there will be several interested parties.
The interest is there, and possibly the talent as well. If parents let their kids play for a living instead of having them become an engineer, a doctor or worse, a warm body in an outsourcing firm, maybe one day in 20 years’ time, those football and basketball jerseys will have an Indian name on the back. And, who knows, maybe the Tricolor will wave on the stands.