Sporting vanities

Behind India's failure in football

India's loss to Guam (population 170,000, FIFA rank 174) in a World Cup football qualifier earlier this week has raised the usual laments about Indians being unfit for physical sport on account of physique, diet and so on. Why can't a nation of 1.2 billion people turn out a decent football team or win more Olympic medals? It might help to take a closer look at the business of sport. Like cinema and the media, sport, especially mass team sports, is a vanity business in which immensely wealthy people provide the capital for motives that have little to do with the return on investment. Like cinema and media, the insatiable demand for talent makes it class- (and caste- and colour-) agnostic. Unlike those two businesses, sporting talent has the additional virtue of not requiring a significant degree of education, which is why less privileged sections of society flock to it. This is as true of football as of baseball, basketball or any discipline that does not require expensive equipment, for example, distance running.

Rags-to-riches stories in sports are commonplace. Football is a good example of a convergence of these dynamics on a global scale where "vanity capital" from the uber-wealthy of Russia, West Asia, the US (and yes, even India!) is invested in Europe, the historic centre of this industry. Till about a decade ago, the "labour" came from the working classes of ethnic Europeans and South Americans, the latter the beneficiaries of a market from former colonial rulers who brought the game to that continent after 1492. Now, this labour increasingly comes from the contiguous continent of Africa, principally former European colonies, where persistent poverty and/or civil strife have enhanced the El Dorado attractions of football as a career option.

It may be argued that India has all the ambient conditions for a sports industry to flourish but this notion seems to be illusory. First, cricket should be discounted as an outlier in world sports as much for its negligible participation as its monopsonistic and exclusivist nature until the advent of the Indian Premier League and its offshoots. In general, sports has not developed as a vanity industry and therefore as a viable career option for the masses of poor young Indians because of the country's trajectory of economic growth. More to the point, India is by no means an underperformer on this matrix; most comparable countries classified as lower-middle income (LMI) by the World Bank or even those that have risen to the upper middle income tier in the post-War world have similar records. India's FIFA ranking of 141 is cringe-making but it is not as though the Asian Tigers, for instance, are roaring in world football - or any other major sport, for that matter. Consider the numbers: Malaysia, classified upper middle income (UMI) by the World Bank, has a FIFA rank of 162; Thailand, UMI, 129; Singapore, high income, 154; Philippines, LMI, 137; Indonesia: LMI, 155. None of them has ever qualified for the World Cup Finals. China, which bootstrapped its way into the UMI ranks, is ranked a modest 79 and qualified for the World Cup Finals just once, finishing goalless in the group stages in 2002. So faring poorly in world football is frustrating - but insufficient cause for censure of India's sporting talent.