Diaspora is reshaping the World Cup, but it can’t lift India’s football fortunes

Every four years, when the football World Cup comes around, there is, as a former colleague puts it, a quadrennial lament in India about our perennial absence from the ‘greatest show on earth’. This, despite the tournament having expanded to 48 countries in 2026 and the presence of countries like Curacao, a tiny Caribbean nation with a population of 158,000.

The closest India came to participating in the World Cup was in 1950 when it received an invitation to the tournament in Brazil. There are several reasons, including Indian players playing barefoot at the time, put forward to explain India declining the invite. However, the most plausible one, as this newspaper reported in 1950, was a lack of funds. Subsequently, India was the first Asian football champion in the 1951 Asian Games and famously won the gold medal in the 1962 Asian Games in Jakarta by beating South Korea. The last major medal won by India was a bronze in the 1970 Asian Games.

The reasons for India’s steep decline have been debated endlessly. The list includes a lack of sporting culture, absence of football infrastructure, a dysfunctional club system and, finally, the dominance of cricket. This has meant that while India languishes at 139th place in the FIFA ranking, countries like Japan and South Korea that India had beaten until 1970 now routinely qualify and make it to the knockout stages.

Is there a way then for India to make it to the World Cup? The Economist has found that the most critical factors for footballing success are wealth, population, height and geography. India can lay claim to at least one of them with a population of 1.4 billion, but as China has shown, that is no recipe for success.

India could, of course, invest in football infrastructure to surmount or at least mitigate the obstacles to success. The top-down, state-led model has not worked for China and is unlikely to do so in India either. The other template is Japan’s highly successful long-term plan since 1992 of entirely revamping its football structure. This has ensured a steady supply of young footballers from club academies and Japanese footballers playing in the world’s top leagues. This is unlikely to work either, given the shambolic state of football administration in India and an absence of any long-term vision.

But wait, is there a sliver of hope? The Economist discovered that another variable — immigration — has had an enormous impact on footballing success in recent years. Indeed, in a world characterised by deglobalisation and closed borders, the tournament is a remarkable example of the benefits of migration and diaspora talent. In this World Cup, nearly a quarter of the participating players are representing countries they were not born in, the highest proportion ever. And only eight out of 48 participating countries do not have a player born abroad.

FIFA has, over the years, relaxed the eligibility criteria to represent a country. It now allows a player with an established connection to a country — either a resident for five years or at least one parent or grandparent who was born in that country — to play for that nation. These rules have benefited European nations that have traditionally had high migration, especially from former colonies. Countries with a large diaspora, especially in established footballing nations, have also reaped dividends.

The Curacao team has only one player born on the island, and the rest are Netherlands-born. But Curacao, which, though independent, is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, is not such a great example. India could draw lessons from Morocco, a middle-income country that has been doing exceptionally well in the World Cup over the past decade. A staggering 19 of its 26-member WC squad are foreign-born, with their football federation diligently scouting talent in European nations with a large Moroccan diaspora. For a while, in a group match against Brazil in this World Cup, all the Moroccan players on the pitch were foreign-born. Congo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Algeria, all of whom made it to the knockouts this time before exiting, have a similar player profile.

Here too, there is a catch. In this World Cup, there are only four Indian-origin players turning out for different countries. Let’s face it — diaspora Indians are good at tech and finance, not sports. Besides the paucity of diaspora talent, even enticing good players to turn out for India, with its stringent immigration laws and no provision for dual passports, would be tough.

So, it looks like we might be condemned to continue rooting for Argentina or Brazil or wherever our footballing gods reside. Unless India considers another route, namely hosting the tournament in the future. That perhaps might be the only realistic, though expensive, chance we have.

Sen is senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore. He has written a book on the history of sport in India

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