No support for players but ready to host a World Cup

AIFF’S AGGRESSIVE PUSH TO HOST LARGESCALE GLOBAL EVENTS IS A FAR CRY FROM THE APATHETIC WAY IT RUNS THE GAME AT HOME.

football. At the senior level, the three-year-old Indian Women’s League provides competitive action of less than 10 games to the average club. At the youth level, the situation is worse. The current U-16 team has been selected from the sub-junior girls’ nationals, which run for barely a fortnight. “Opportunities for women have increased but it is not enough to have tournaments for short durations. To improve in the long-run, there has to be more tournaments,” said former India captain Bembem Devi.

In the absence of a professional structure, the federation will have to make do with the desperate measure of scouting out players from short-term youth tournaments or through trials over the next few months to bolster the U-17 team. “I think this will be a good chance for us to draw technical lessons from other countries in terms of the kind of exposure to the game that players and coaches of other countries get. We have to go beyond two-week long tournaments and look at more hyper-local models,” said Richard Hood, former head of player development at AIFF.

APATHETIC APPROACH The senior national team hasn’t been in good health either. The federation shockingly arranged just one international friendly for the team between the period of May, 2013 and January, 2019. It was only after the Sports Authority of India (SAI) provided funds following an MOU with the federation that the latter arranged an exposure trip for the women’s team to play an invitational tournament in Spain last year and a series of friendlies this year.

Ahead of Olympic qualifiers in April, seven players from Manipur, including Bala Devi, one of India’s greatest female footballers of all time, have pulled out after disagreements with the coaching staff, an issue that hasn’t been addressed yet.

As things stand, the federation will continue to pursue grand projects like age-group World Cups over the next few years. Such an approach, which will require heavy public investment, may provide a short-term push to the sport but is unlikely to act as substitute to organic growth from the grassroots.