Arunava about Football A look at football & the world through my eyes!
Related Articles
The discussion on the inclusion of footballers of Indian origin is a more than two decades long one and it has been always a controversial one. I have always supported the cause of OCIs/PIOs in Team India and within Indian football, and I recall starting the topic 21 years ago with various bodies including the All India Football Federation (AIFF), FIFA , the AFC and the Government of India. I even scouted PIOs all around the world and created a PIO Database on the old IndianFootballCom website with my team. Some of the players even trained with the Indian national team setup during Stephen Constantine’s first tenure at the helm of Team India, my old PIO card was send to FIFA in 2006 to check if it is fine as a document for PIOs to play for India and other things behind the scenes.
I still believe and support the idea to have quality PIOs/OCIs footballers in the national team – at all age groups and genders! I think the choice to have PIOs/OCIs in the Indian national team is definitively something we need as an option and this option shouldn’t be prevented by laws by the Government of India.
The reality is that most national teams around the world make use of foreign-born players who have some roots to the respective country – including top football nations like Brazil, France, Germany, Italy or the Netherlands!
In an old Al Jazeera interview, I had said in 2013, “The AIFF has to look at the bigger picture. The international team is not making the progress it should and even more worryingly on a regional level others are catching up. Mixing the team with players who have played in the Premiership or Championship can only be of benefit and give Indian football a higher profile in Europe.”
“You want to avoid a situation whereby overnight you have 11 PIO players in the team but they should be selective and pick the best two or three who can really help the national side progress and move forward.”
“The AIFF has missed out on high quality players in the past and they cannot continue to miss out going forward.”
And sadly things haven’t changed over the last few years, we can even stay in the last two decades.
But still some Indian football fans and officials refusing to accept PIOs/OCIs in the Indian national team say that these players don’t have the national pride and the connection to India to represent the country. But my experience is that many PIOs/OCIs mostly have a strong bond with India and that many of them are more patriotic about India than most people on the sub-continent can assume. And I think most PIOs/OCIs reading this article will agree to my opinion.
The laws by the Government of India are stopping Indian sports in general – be it football, tennis, athletics, etc. – to progress with equality of opportunity compared to other countries. No one is saying that it would be the only solution to strengthen the team and take it to the next level, but it would be a much needed catalyst. We need to make use of the quality players available around the world. But these players need to be quality players and they must be able to strengthen the Indian team. There is no sense to call-up PIOs/OCIs just for the sake of having these players in the team!
PIOs/OCIs are just one component of the pyramid to form a strong national setup. People often mix-up the PIO/OCI discussions with topics like grassroots development and more. But you can’t do that because these topics are two very different animals!
India is denying itself a big chance to utilise foreign-born Indian origin players for wrong patriotic (!?) reasons, while other nations including the top nations make full use of the option to call-up quality players to their national teams.
World football is played to certain rules, but India can’t afford to play the game with its very own ones and we can’t expect to go further unless there is a change… in laws, mindset and vision!
