How Lack of infrastructure is killing Indian Football!

You and your friends are hyped to play football… but no field exists nearby!

I remember when I was 14, living inside an Indian Air Force campus. I would always play football with friends who studied in the KV (Kendriya Vidyalaya). 

We played on a muddy pitch that actually existed back then. The ground was very uneven, but we still loved every minute we spent playing there.

I am turning 23 now. Since my father retired, we had to move out, but we still live just opposite the campus. Recently, a friend and I went back inside just to hang out and walk around. As we passed by a certain area, we saw that the very pitch where we once played had been excavated. 

Upon inquiring, we found out that the camp commander and top authorities had decided to build a living complex for the airmen.

There is nothing wrong with building a housing complex, but why kill a football pitch? Now, this whole campus consists of one basketball court, one volleyball court, and one indoor badminton court. 

If we consider the area of that campus to be X square meters, we will have exactly zero district-level footballers coming from that X region. Since they cut off access to the pitches, where are the kids supposed to play? On the roads?

In the civil areas, the issues are even bigger. I live in Marathahalli in Bangalore. In such a massive region, you do not have a single public football pitch. That means zero footballers will come from Marathahalli unless parents start sending their kids to private academies, which are already rare in Bangalore.

Look at Mumbai!

The Neville D'Souza Football Ground was the reason behind many national and state-level footballers. Nearly 400 youth teams and around 300 senior clubs used the facility, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls training and competing there on a regular basis. But the Maharashtra government decided they wanted to build a convention center. Where did they decide to find a piece of land? By removing the Neville D’Souza ground.

Who cares about the future of those football kids, right? What is playing football going to get us?

It shows that we don't just have a low number of football pitches in this country; our numbers are actually decreasing. We simply do not care about football. We care more about convention centers, statues, and party offices.

Meanwhile, throughout Portugal’s major cities, concrete courts are visible in almost every neighborhood. In Barcelona, hard courts with basketball hoops and football goals are everywhere, allowing children to practice football, basketball, or tennis. 

In Croatia, all school multi-sport facilities are left open for the community to use. In France, a documentary called Concrete Football showed how caged football courts in housing communities were the direct reason for the national team's success. In Uruguay, children gather to play on dirt fields on every street corner.

There are countless examples of this phenomenon, and in many cases, such basic facilities can be built at minimal expense. Public space to play does not require close to the same level of investment as modern, elite facilities. Despite this, they are the real elite development facilities, allowing children to practice for hours, seven days a week. The Icelandic government built small, free-to-use football pitches at almost every school, open 24/7, along with free indoor facilities for the winter.

So, when I say "lack of infrastructure is killing Indian football," I mean a lack of public football spaces where any kid can play 24/7.

Since we have less space in India, and our urban geography can be dense like the favelas in Brazil, we need to build small football courts. If we do that, we will have hundreds of talents coming through just from street play.

It's not just about building pitches in every area. We must ensure every educational institution has a small pitch in their facility meant strictly for football. Pitches should first be built across high-affinity footballing zones where interest is highest, slowly and steadily growing the culture by building more in other regions.

But nothing will change unless our federation becomes serious. It won't change until people start demanding more pitches across their cities and standing up against the unfair excavation of local grounds.

Since we are seeing increased interest in football from the PMO, the central government, state governments, and the AIFF can work together to build tens of thousands of multi-purpose hard courts. 

This will help the leaking talent of this country play unstructured football, develop their skills, and ensure they are ready to give trials for the academies we do have.

Question for readers...  

Do you think multi-purpose hard courts are a good idea?

Do you see these unstructured public spaces eventually acting as the primary scouting grounds to funnel raw street talent into much larger, elite academy campuses?