Enthusiastic Indian fans have been at the forefront of noisy welcomes accorded to teams touching down in Qatar for the World Cup starting this weekend. They were there for the Argentines wearing blue-and-white, while others in canary yellow waved at the Brazil team bus at the airport. When the English team landed at this desert venue, the Indians were there to extend their support to world football’s eternal under-achievers. They even shouted the popular English chant of perpetual hope — “It’s coming home”. Home? That didn’t sound right. The suspicious Western media instantly floated a conspiracy theory. These were fake fans paid to hype an event that has attracted bad press from the time it got hosting rights, they reported.
But in their haste to embarrass the organisers, they have ended up undermining an ardent football community that considers foreign teams as their own. The organisers were quick to remind them that their ecosystem “comprised of a diverse range of football fans, many of whom share emotional connections with multiple nations”. The hosts had got this right, and the “parachute reporters” were exposed for their ignorance of different football cultures.
Indians might be several decades away from qualifying for a World Cup but the country’s passion for the game is second to none. As this paper reported this week, the World Cup football frenzy isn’t just in the traditional hubs like Kerala, Goa, Kolkata and Northeast. During the World Cup, Kolhapur in Maharashtra too is divided by the love for Brazil and Argentina. Even at this World Cup, Indian fans were among the top-10 buyers of tickets. If not for the deaths of migrant workers and human rights violations, the Qatar World Cup would’ve been the perfect platform to showcase Kerala’s football culture. Not for anyone’s validation, but to educate the world that love for this game is truly universal.
