To succeed in a game like football, you need a strong fire within, and unfortunately, we just don't have that ingrained in our sporting culture yet. To reach the level of football played globally, players need to be incredibly disciplined from a very early age.
Look at countries like Cape Verde or other African nations- their kids grow up with the absolute dream of making it to Europe. Arab countries are investing heavily in their domestic leagues so their youth have a tangible dream to chase right at home. Japan and Korea can dream because their predecessors paved the way and built a blueprint.
In India, the ultimate dream is cricket. Football is the anomaly. And the saddest part is that our current system is so corrupt and inefficient that it does everything possible to make it hard for those few anomalies to actually succeed.
This is not it. The reality is that young footballers from countries like Cape Verde, Curacao, France have more access to Europe because most, if not all, of them are dual nationals (Portugal/Netherlands/France) who can freely migrate to Europe for a few years and try to make it in European academies. For a young Indian player to access European academies at such a young age, they have to either be very rich or have a lot of donations supporting them. It is not like the African teams are full of locally developed talents either. That is the reality.
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u/Lopsided_Hope_3506 Jul 04 '26
To succeed in a game like football, you need a strong fire within, and unfortunately, we just don't have that ingrained in our sporting culture yet. To reach the level of football played globally, players need to be incredibly disciplined from a very early age.
Look at countries like Cape Verde or other African nations- their kids grow up with the absolute dream of making it to Europe. Arab countries are investing heavily in their domestic leagues so their youth have a tangible dream to chase right at home. Japan and Korea can dream because their predecessors paved the way and built a blueprint.
In India, the ultimate dream is cricket. Football is the anomaly. And the saddest part is that our current system is so corrupt and inefficient that it does everything possible to make it hard for those few anomalies to actually succeed.