Messi’s GOAT tour in Kolkata exposed everything broken about Indian sport

Earlier this summer, while ambling around Naples’ timeworn Spanish Quarters, I saw what football madness really looks like. The walls still breathe Diego Maradona, half a decade since his death and a lifetime after he first introduced the city’s club Napoli to world football. A giant Maradona shrine sits next to grocery stores selling Limonata a cosce aperte (Italian for "open legs lemonade", named so because of the action needed to avoid getting soaked by the ‘eruption’ of the traditional, fizzy Neapolitan street drink) and carts vending Cuoppo di Mare, a classic Neapolitan street fare served in a paper cone (the "cuoppo"), kids and elderly women argue over formations in alleyways barely wide enough for a scooter to bypass another and every conversation eventually bends back to the club and the beautiful game. Just months earlier, at the Salt Lake Stadium (or Yuva Bharati Krirangan, for political correctness) in my hometown of Kolkata for an East Bengal FC match, the emotion felt uncannily familiar. Different colours, different chants, different kinds of banter—but the same fever.

Football fanaticism, I realised once again, is universal. Only its dialect changes.

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Which is why what unfolded around Kolkata’s much-hyped Lionel Messi visit over the weekend feels so painfully embarrassing, more so for a Calcuttan raised on the sacred madness of one of the world football’s fiercest local derbies between two teams (East Bengal and Mohun Bagan) whose allegiance, for millions and generations, is not chosen but inherited. Not because plans fell apart—sport is messy, logistics are hard—but because it exposed, yet again, how deeply broken India’s sporting ecosystem remains—just as the condition the angry fans left the Kolkata stadium in after Messi’s fleeting blink-and-you-miss-it appearance, masked by an unwanted, never-ending coterie of politicians, bureaucrats, actors and VIPs. This was not a failure of passion. It was a failure of administration.

India loves sport (and Kolkata its football as its people showed so many times in the past in welcoming everyone from Pele to Maradona). But administrators love power.

The Messi affair was dressed up as a coming-of-age moment: the GOAT arriving in a cricket-first nation where football and every other sport languishes on the fringes. Instead, it became a case study in inflated promises, opaque spending and political one-upmanship. Reports suggest millions of dollars were earmarked for appearances, logistics, branding and “legacy”. The outcome? Confusion, chaos and a city left looking foolish on the global stage. 

This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

I say this as someone who has watched Indian sport from the inside for years. My first ‘big’ story as a trainee reporter was on the Sports Authority of India’s now-forgotten ₹10-a-day scheme for its day boarders—a programme meant to support young athletes scraping by on hope. Ten rupees a day. For UAE readers, that’s about 45 fils. Even then, the scheme was losing steam, choked by indifference and poor execution. That was nearly two decades ago. Little has changed, except the numbers have grown larger and the inefficiency more spectacular. More vivid.

Today, we talk in crores—a popular Indian word for ten million rupees (Dh 405,000) and global icons, but the foundations remain hollow—stripped down to its bare bones.

Football in India, a country of 1.4 billion, struggles to breathe—like every other sport and like those in the capital Delhi’s winter air—not because of a lack of talent or love, but because it is suffocated by administrators who treat federations as fiefdoms and tournaments as political theatre. 

The All India Football Federation lurches from crisis to crisis even as Indians prepare to support their adopted teams at next year’s FIFA world Cup in the USA yet again. Long-term planning is replaced by short-term optics. Youth development is announced loudly and funded brusquely, if at all. Contrast this with Naples. Or Dortmund. Or even modest footballing centres that know exactly what they are building towards. Their systems are boring, methodical and unglamorous – and that is precisely why they work.

India, instead, wants shortcuts. We want Messi before we build pitches. We want headlines before academies. We want legitimacy without reform.

Cricket, for all its excesses, survives because it is commercially autonomous. Football has no such shield. It remains hostage to politicians who see stadiums as photo opportunities and federations as extensions of their influence. The result is a sport perpetually gasping for relevance.

This is also why, personally, I haven’t watched cricket seriously in over a decade since last working on an episode of the International Cricket Council’s official weekly magazine show. Not out of protest, but out of fatigue that has hardened into disillusionment. Indian sport, across disciplines, repeatedly asks its fans for blind faith while offering little accountability in return. Passion is treated as an endless resource; competence remains optional. Cricket included. 

The Messi episode should have been a celebration of football’s place in India. Instead, it became another reminder of why India remains a failed sporting nation—not for lack of heart, but for lack of honest, professional governance. Until administrators learn that sport is built from the ground up, not flown in for a weekend, no amount of superstar shine will save us. 

And until then, we will keep mistaking occasional success for sporting greatness—world beaters in cricket’s isolation, but amateurs in how we govern, nurture and respect sport itself.