On a moist Tuesday night final November, in a stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, 11 males in royal-blue jerseys did nearly nothing for 90 minutes—and made historical past. Curaçao, the Dutch Caribbean island recognized primarily for its golden seashores and electric-blue liqueur, held Jamaica to a goalless draw, and in so doing booked a spot on the 2026 FIFA World Cup for the primary time ever.
Curaçao is a rustic of about 156,000 folks. As The Related Press famous, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the place the World Cup remaining might be performed on July 19, has roughly half the capability of Curaçao’s total inhabitants.
That very same month, on the opposite facet of the planet, the Supreme Courtroom of India was as soon as once more listening to a case concerning the structure of the All India Soccer Federation, or AIFF, which supervises the Indian Tremendous League. A drawn-out controversy involving politics within the federation, cost disputes with the corporate that runs the league, and the intercession of the court docket had put the league’s 2025-26 season “on maintain.” Eleven of the nation’s prime golf equipment had written a joint letter to the federation president warning that Indian skilled soccer was “paralyzed.” The league finally started its truncated twelfth season 5 months late in February 2026, with the Asian Soccer Confederation pressured to grant India a one-season exemption from its necessary 24-match minimal.
Among the instability within the federation has rubbed off on the nationwide staff, which is at present beneath its third head coach since getting knocked out within the second qualifying spherical for the 2022 World Cup. This time round, India’s Blue Tigers had their hopes extinguished after ending third in a gaggle of 4 behind Qatar and Kuwait and forward of solely Afghanistan.
Curaçao, then, goes to the World Cup. India—inhabitants 1.47 billion, the most important nation on Earth—shouldn’t be. And this although the 2026 match was expanded from 32 groups to 48, and the Asian confederation’s qualification quota was practically doubled, permitting 9 groups from the area to make it to the ultimate phases.
What explains this discrepancy? The reply lies in the way in which Curaçao embraced its athletic diaspora whereas India constantly refused to do the identical.
It’s one among soccer’s nice anomalies that India has by no means made it previous the qualification phases of the World Cup. The game has deep roots in India: The Durand Cup, contested by Indian golf equipment and groups representing its armed forces, is Asia’s oldest soccer match. It was first performed in 1888, the identical 12 months because the inaugural English Soccer League. Nor has India traditionally lacked excellence within the sport. Within the Fifties and early ’60s, it was an Asian soccer big, successful gold on the Asian Video games in 1951 and 1962, and ending fourth on the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
India’s soccer downside, in different phrases, shouldn’t be absence of basis. It’s the results of decisions the nation has made on prime of these foundations.
The primary of these decisions was made in 1950, and it set the template. Having certified for the World Cup in Brazil by default—each different staff in its Asian zone had withdrawn—the AIFF then pulled out, citing journey prices that FIFA had in reality provided to largely cowl. The favored fantasy is that FIFA had mandated cleats, and Indians most well-liked to play unshod. However the captain on the time, Sailen Manna, has denied this for many years, and most soccer historians now settle for that the AIFF merely thought-about the Olympics a extra prestigious occasion.
India was penalized for this affront by being disqualified from the following World Cup, after which quixotically declined to enter the qualification rounds in any respect till 1985. No system recovers rapidly from three and a half a long time on the sidelines.
One other alternative, one made by followers reasonably than federations, is commonly invoked to elucidate India’s soccer struggles: Indians merely picked a distinct sport to care about. Cricket instructions practically 85 % of all sports activities viewership in India. The Indian Premier League, the world’s prime membership cricket match, drew greater than 600 million viewers final 12 months, and round $600 million in promoting. Which means, in distinction to India’s struggling soccer federation, the Board of Management for Cricket in India is without doubt one of the wealthiest sports activities our bodies on the planet.
However the Indian craze for cricket can’t be the complete rationalization, as a result of Indian soccer followers exist in numbers that ought to embarrass each different excuse. Worldwide viewers information for the English Premier League (EPL), reported by Win Sports activities On-line and others, counted 147 million EPL followers in India, greater than twice the inhabitants of England. YouGov’s FootballIndex locations Manchester United prime of the brand-affinity tables amongst customers in India—nicely forward of any home facet.
{That a} nation with 147 million EPL followers can not produce a staff able to beating Afghanistan twice is, to make use of a Hindi/Urdu phrase, ajeeb—unusual. That is the place an even bigger structural rationalization is required, one which Curaçao’s success properly illustrates.
The Caribbean island’s 156,000 residents didn’t subject a staff drawn solely from their quantity. As a substitute, it methodically used FIFA’s reasonably fungible eligibility guidelines to harvest its Dutch diaspora. 5 gamers who as soon as represented the Netherlands’ youth and U-21 sides switched allegiance final August. Considered one of them, defender Joshua Brenet, had even performed a senior World Cup qualifier for the Dutch in 2016. Tahith Chong, a Manchester United youth product, is one among solely a handful of squad members truly born on the island. The coach is the 78-year-old Dutch veteran Dick Advocaat, on his third World Cup.
FIFA’s eligibility guidelines, tweaked each few years, enable a participant to swimsuit up for any nationwide staff whose passport he holds—offered he also can present a robust connection to the territory: beginning there, a mother or father or grandparent born there, or, failing all that, a stretch of residency (two years, or 5 if he was naturalized as an grownup). Often, as soon as a participant has performed a aggressive senior match, he’s wedded to that “sporting nationality” for all times, with a slim one-time change accessible to youthful gamers who soar ship earlier than incomes greater than three caps. However exceptions are allowed, as within the case of Brenet.
Indonesia, which additionally tried to faucet its Dutch diaspora, fell brief. However this playbook has through the years served loads of different international locations searching for to progress within the World Cup. Morocco made all of it the way in which to the semifinals in 2022 with a squad drawn closely from foreign-born gamers who star within the prime European leagues. Cape Verde (pop. about 530,000), which is able to be a part of Curaçao as a debutant this time round, used LinkedIn to recruit gamers, together with the Eire-born center-back Roberto Lopes.
India doesn’t play this recreation. As in the case of most Asian international locations, Indian citizenship legislation doesn’t allow twin nationality, and holders of international passports can not characterize the senior nationwide facet. Soccer followers debate the query each cycle, the Indian soccer press writes lengthy (and longing) items concerning the Indian-origin gamers plying their commerce in Europe—Adrian Pereira of Norway’s Rosenborg, Sai Sachdev of England’s Sheffield United, and Yan Dhanda of Scotland’s Coronary heart of Midlothian, to call however three. However the authorities has proven little interest in altering its long-standing method to citizenship legislation to accommodate the nation’s soccer ambitions.
New Delhi has spent the final decade aggressively courting its diaspora politically and economically. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pravasi “Bharatiya Divas” (India Day) conventions are by now as choreographed as Bollywood premieres. However on the soccer pitch, the door is shut. Curaçao’s soccer pool covers the Caribbean-Dutch districts of Rotterdam. India’s doesn’t prolong past its borders.
Sunil Chhetri, the not too long ago retired Indian captain, has 95 worldwide targets to his title. As Wikipedia’s working tally has it, solely three males within the historical past of soccer have scored extra for his or her international locations: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and the Iranian striker Ali Daei. Chhetri scored his targets throughout 157 caps over 20 years, however by no means on the game’s best stage. The truth that essentially the most distinguished Indian participant of the fashionable period might spend 20 years on the entrance of the queue and by no means get to the door is, in itself, a verdict on the system that produced him.
The qualification of Curaçao and Cape Verde, then, is much less a soccer curiosity than a quiet rebuke for India. What the islanders have performed is learn FIFA’s rulebook as an instrument and used it. India nonetheless reads its personal citizenship rulebook as an id assertion and refuses to revise it in pursuit of any sporting objective.
Being small, Curaçao has labored out, shouldn’t be the identical as being weak—offered you might be trustworthy about who you might be and the place your countrymen truly stay. Being massive, the Indian soccer institution nonetheless appears to imagine, is similar as being sturdy, and 1.4 billion folks should, in some unspecified time in the future, merely produce a world-class squad. They’ve thus far produced a FIFA rating of 136, behind each different nation on this World Cup and many of the ones that didn’t make it.
When the FIFA Council voted in January 2017 to increase the World Cup to 48 groups, Indian industrialist-politician Praful Patel, the senior vp of the Asian Soccer Confederation—who occurred additionally to be the president of the AIFF earlier than being dismissed by the Supreme Courtroom—informed ESPN that the extra Asian locations would assist soccer develop in international locations like India and China. Three years later, Patel inspired his countrymen to dream of enjoying in 2026.
As a substitute, it’s Curaçaoans whose goals will come true. Subsequent month, the smallest nation within the match’s historical past will line up towards Germany in Group E. The most important nation on Earth might be following alongside, because it has at each World Cup, from the sidelines.
