India can fight the flab by gorging on other games

Now for some good news out of India: all being well, Diego Maradona landed in Calcutta on Friday night. The football-mad city plans to fête him all weekend. This is more than just a case of a large, manic metropolis meeting small manic person. Rather, it’s another sign that India, sport’s final frontier, has begun playing the world’s games.

The only thing most foreigners know about Indian sport is cricket’s new Indian Premier League with its blonde American cheerleaders. The IPL’s success appears to imply that cricket still has this country sewn up. That is wrong. Just as India’s economy is being globalised, so now is Indian sport. And the arrival of football, basketball and other games in the worst performing country per capita in the history of sport could save millions of Indian lives.

India was once halfway decent at football. In 1950, it was invited to play in the World Cup in Brazil, with all expenses paid. However, when the Indians heard they couldn’t play barefoot, they stayed at home. Nonetheless, a year later, they won gold in the first Asian Games in Delhi and, in 1956, came fourth in football at the Melbourne Olympics.

But India was just then closing itself off from the world. Near-autarky may have its virtues but it makes you bad at sport. Indians barely ever saw the world’s best football, let alone played against it. “Sleeping giant”, a standard term for Indian football, is too polite. In 2001, their national team visited east London to play their motionless, old men’s football against tiny Leyton Orient. While India were holding the mighty Orient scoreless, a group of 10 Indian fans chanted, “Are you watching, Pakistan?” But then Orient scored. When a chubby Indian named I.M. Vijayan equalised just before time, he disappeared beneath a pile of team-mates as if he’d just won the World Cup. Today, India’s national team ranks 144th in the world. Vanuatu are 143rd.

While India was shut off, only cricket thrived. The national team became a rare source of Indian unity. In 2004, the country’s 10 biggest television audiences for sport were all for cricket. That was a mark of Indian isolation, since elsewhere cricket has usually crumbled after other sports arrived.    

Yet strange to tell, cricket’s IPL is a harbinger of football’s arrival in India. First, the IPL’s name was inspired by the English Premier League. Second, it’s a little-known fact that the IPL’s creator, Lalit Modi, had originally planned to found an Indian football league. Takeo Hirata, a collaborator of Modi’s and former general secretary of Japan’s Football Association, told me: “Actually Lalit wanted to contribute to Indian football.” However, after some frustrating dealings with the nabobs of Indian football, Modi chose cricket.

Still, last year India got its national professional football I-League. Admittedly most of the teams play in India’s two longstanding football heartlands, Calcutta and Goa. Elsewhere, the league’s crowds are usually minute.

But then there’s foreign football. Many of India’s 1.1bn people can now bore you to tears about Maradona. Peter Kenyon, Chelsea’s chief executive, told last month’s International Football Arena conference in Zurich: “I’ve been there three times in the last 12 months and you see visible changes as a football-literate market.” Whereupon Alan Durante, chairman of Mahindra United in Mumbai, revealed to the conference: “I’ve received three letters from Chelsea in the last three weeks to come and have some sort of dialogue.” He added that Arsenal were interested too. “I’ve been holding this club of mine for 25 years. We’ve never seen this interest before from...European clubs.” 

The US’s National Basketball Association is just as keen. “A place like India is growth. It’s very far from being saturated by sports,” says Heidi Ueberroth, the NBA’s president of global marketing partnerships and international business operations. She watched an IPL cricket match in Delhi, and was struck by the “demand the IPL is creating for other kinds of sports and entertainment”. Many TV channels and advertisers who missed out on the IPL are now looking for other competitions.

This is good news for obscure sports. In Beijing, India won its first ever Olympic gold in an individual sport, shooting. Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of the steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and vice-chairman of the Queens Park Rangers Football Club, told the International Football Arena: “Six or years ago, the shooters didn’t actually have bullets to shoot.” Now Mittal is sponsoring several Indian Olympians.

India’s new wealth is also turning the country into a host of global sport, notes Amit Gupta, expert on south Asia at the US’s Air War College. In 2010 and 2011, India will stage the Commonwealth Games, cricket’s World Cup and a Formula One race.

These are matters of life and death more serious than terrorism. India may be at the frontline of terrorism. It is indisputably at the frontline of obesity. “Very few Indians ever play sport,” says Gupta and, as Indians get richer, they are eating more fatty western foods. India now has perhaps 32m diabetics, most of whom don’t know they are diabetics. Football and basketball can save lives.   

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