India can absolutely win a World Cup in our lifetimes. Here's what it would take.
Disclaimer: long, analytical post.
First off, ask your parents or grandparents to name a single cricket player before 1983. I bet you'll hear crickets. Why? Because it was only after that World Cup win that India's cricket fever began. And only where fever exists is it possible for investment, national support, and dominance to exist.
Just think about it.
Do you really think a wartorn nation like Haiti is investing in youth sporting development? Or corrupt wastelands like Senegal? India is far far more functional than both. We're just not obsessed about football. When you walk through the slums, you see kids using makeshift bottle-bats and scrunched up paper-balls, not footballs.
So how do you change that?
Just adapt the 1983 playbook for the realities of modern-day football.
Engineer a national success privately and let the sport become a fever publicly.
The best part is that it's already been done. We just need to adapt it.
In 1999, Tom Vernon, Manchester United's head scout in Africa, started a makeshift academy training 16 young African boys out of his home. More charity than anything else. And in 2004, they began partnering with boarding schools in the US to get talented kids athletic scholarships.
Fast forward 10 years and the academy ended up getting ranked as one of the best football youth academies in the world and buying a club in Denmark's top league (with a bit of corporate charity). Now, in it's 20-somethingeth year Right to Dream academy has graduated several Premier League (EPL) players and operates professional clubs in Denmark, Egypt, and soon Major League Soccer (MLS).
Here's the model -- run cheap, large-scale tournaments all across West Africa (something like 100k kids participate in total per year) and mine the pool for the 15-20 that are worth developing rigorously. Fund their entire lives / training / education until they turn 18 and then transfer/relocate the most talented ones to your European club, which is cleverly situated in a region that doesn't require a large "homegrown" roster, to start racking up reps against elite competition. With a large enough population that gets to Europe, you're likely to find a golden goose player that can be "sold" to a major European club for a very very hefty transfer fee (i.e. millions and millions of euros), that is then reinvested into the pipeline.
By this point the player will be good enough that the national team (NT) will beg him to join. Why? Because it's a win-win for them -- they get to keep mismanaging public funds lucratively while claiming success for the player's results.
Within a few cycles, India should have a squad that can achieve WC qualification -- it won't take a lot especially since the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) circuit is one of the weakest federations in the world. For example, the Australian national team has only 1 player that plays in a top European league.
Once that happens and the public is sufficiently crazy about football, everything else will fall into place just like cricket (and rather quickly at that too). No matter how corrupt India's sports ministry and the Board for the Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) are, there is far too much public scrutiny on the national team's performance for them to really fuck it up. The engine is in place so despite politician's best efforts, they can't really stop it. Now, that may seem like a ton of infra to setup, but India has some nice simplifying factors
- Footballing culture is largely restricted to just a few pockets of the country: the Northeast states (Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc), Goa, Kerala, and West Bengal. No point mining anywhere else at the start.
- We know a lot more about what genetic traits are highly valuable for football now than we did in 1999. For example, among elite footballers there is a significantly higher incidence of the ACTN3 (fast-twitch muscle fibers / sprinting) and ACE (oxygen efficiency / endurance) genes. And PIEZO2 (proprioception / spatial awareness) baselines are being researched increasingly as well. Further, these genetic markers are more prevalent in certain populations (e.g. Rajputs mirror the muscle composition of West African / Caucasians and high-altitude populations are known ACE carriers) which reduces the search space as well.
Of course, this will still require some megadonor who is passionate about football.
And they will probably have to come from outside the Indian Super League (ISL), India's top domestic football league, because the investors there, e.g. the Ambanis, are pure businesspeople who have significantly hampered the league to protect their investments.
For example, in England there is a tiered football league system where poor performance relegates a club to a lower division and a strong performance elevates a club to a higher division to allow new market entrants / incentivize existing ones to continue investing in player development. In contrast, the ISL (and MLS) are pay-to-play where you can get your club in (and keep it in the league) provided you pay the requisite annual membership fee.
There is progress happening as we speak though. Actor John Abraham (yes our favorite Dostana star) has owned a football club in India (NorthEast United FC) as a solo non-corporate owner since 2014 even though it causes him huge financial losses each year. It's purely a passion play for him. And now, after touring many many top European youth academies, he's building a similar academy in India with the intent to make it 100% scholarship, just like Right To Dream.
He just needs a single checkbook (and likely only a $10M upfront investment at that) to believe, and the machine will begin.
I'm optimistic, but for now, Dima Maghreb / long live Morocco!