Why India Can't Field 11 Footballers: Ranjit Bajaj on the System Killing the Game

Every four years, the same question returns: how can a country of 1.4 billion people fail to produce 11 footballers good enough for the World Cup? Ranjit Bajaj — academy owner, former club boss, and one of Indian football's loudest critics — has a blunt answer. The problem isn't the population, and it isn't the genes. It's a system he says is actively working to kill the talent India already has.

This post is translated and condensed from Ranjit Bajaj's Hindi-language conversation with Raj Shamani. The claims and allegations are his.

The 1.4 Billion Myth

Bajaj's first move is to dismantle the number everyone repeats. India doesn't draw its footballers from 1.4 billion people, he argues — it draws them from a handful of tiny pockets. Over the last 50 years, he says, 85% of senior national-team players have come from just 25 of India's 740 districts. He points to a "birth place effect": one sub-district in Punjab, Maldpur, that he claims has 400 football grounds, alongside small clusters in Kolkata, Mumbai, Manipur, Mizoram, Kerala, and Goa. Add them up and the relevant population is around 57 crore, not 140 crore.

So it can't be genes — and Bajaj has proof. Sappreet Singh, whose family emigrated to New Zealand, played two youth World Cups for that country. Indian-origin players captain other national teams. "Our genes are proven," he says. What's broken is the system.

No Stadiums, No Coaches, No Timing

The infrastructure gap is almost comic in its scale. India, Bajaj claims, has zero football-only stadiums — multipurpose venues ringed by athletics tracks don't count, and you never see those at a World Cup. On coaching, he offers a devastating comparison: Japan has 12,000 to 14,000 goalkeeping coaches alone, while India has fewer than 10,000 coaches of every type combined.

Even the money India does spend, he argues, lands at the wrong moment. The government's flagship TOPS scheme funds athletes already ranked in the world's top eight — the ones who need it least — instead of the strugglers trying to break through. He recalls Neeraj Chopra's college scrambling to fund his flight to an early competition because the sports authority didn't pay in time, and a young cricketer being handed ₹1 crore when he already had a ₹12 crore deal. That money, Bajaj says, could have built ten more players.

A Colonial Hangover, and the Power of One

Bajaj reaches back centuries to explain the mindset. The British, he argues, "ingrained" in Indians a belief that they were inferior — India's share of world GDP collapsed from roughly 25% when they arrived to about 3% when they left. That inferiority complex passed down through generations. His hope is the newest one: kids with no memory of that past, free to believe they can be the best in the world.

And belief, in his telling, is unlocked by a single example. Once Neeraj Chopra crossed 80 metres in the javelin, suddenly ten Indians could do it. Football, Bajaj insists, just needs its first star — an "Indian Mohamed Salah" — to prove it's possible. After that, the floodgates open.

Cricket and Football Started in the Same Place

The most striking part of Bajaj's argument is that cricket wasn't destined to win. Both games were left behind by the British, both were given federations, and as recently as 2010, he claims, the AIFF had around ₹40 crore — comparable to the BCCI. Cricket pulled away, in his telling, for one reason: so much money poured in that the system "couldn't afford to get it wrong." Corruption became too expensive to tolerate. Football never got that discipline.

He offers a hopeful counter-example too: Odisha's hockey revival. Through sustained political will, he says, a former "BIMARU" state built 200 to 300 turfs across every district and hosted two Hockey World Cups, with a sports budget that reached ₹1,300 crore against India's ₹1,500 crore. The result, he claims, is that half the national hockey team now comes from tribal Jharkhand and Odisha. Given intent, the system works.

How the ISL Broke the Beautiful Game

Here Bajaj's account turns to his central grievance. The AIFF, he says, handed the commercial rights and the control of both the federation and the national team to a private company, FSDL, backed by Reliance — an arrangement he claims gives the company veto power over the federation, even though the federation doesn't own the league.

The deeper damage, in his view, is the removal of merit. A club joins the ISL by paying roughly ₹18 crore a year, and there's no promotion or relegation — which strips out the very thing that makes football beautiful, the possibility that a poor team can beat a billionaire's club on any given day. His most damning statistic: in 11 years, he claims, ISL clubs' academies — with the best facilities and coaches in the country — produced not one senior national-team player, because owners chase this season's trophy by buying ready-made strikers rather than developing kids. The century-old academies of East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, he says, shut down once the ISL arrived. "Bengal football is dead."

Pay-to-Play, Fixing, and Governance by Ego

Bajaj's allegations of everyday corruption are unsparing. He claims you can pay ₹1 to 1.5 lakh to play for a state team or in the Santosh Trophy, and ₹20,000 to 40,000 for junior sides — regardless of ability — because those certificates unlock college admissions and jobs. Match-fixing, he says, is rampant in state leagues, visible in foreign betting syndicates flooding the YouTube-stream comments and in blatant own-goals; yet no one in Indian football history has ever been jailed for it, because there's no law that even defines fixing.

The federation itself, he argues, runs on ego and self-preservation. He alleges a successful national coach who won three titles in a single year was fired over the president's personal grudge, triggering a ₹6 crore severance funded by slashing youth, women's, and coaching budgets by half. He claims India spent ₹40 lakh preparing a bid to host the Asian Cup, reached the final round, then watched the president simply give it away — twice. And after a loss to Bangladesh, he says, the emergency meeting wasn't about the defeat at all; it was about protecting officials' seats from a Supreme Court challenge. The whole edifice, in his telling, sits on fake district clubs that exist only to cast votes.

The Way Out: Build It, Then Prove It

For all the anger, Bajaj's case is ultimately constructive, and it rests on his own record. His academy, Minerva, he says, produced more than 250 internationals in a decade — more than every other Indian club and academy combined — and won the I-League with academy boys. At the 2017 U-17 World Cup, he claims his youth sides beat India's own U-15 and U-17 teams, and that India's only World Cup goal ever was scored by a player picked out of that match.

His method is deliberately unglamorous: catch children in the myelin-building window between five and thirteen, drill skills into muscle memory through sheer repetition — the 10,000-hour rule — and wrap it in real sports science. Two hundred kids now train on scholarship in what he calls his "World Cup 2034 batch." The mission, he says, is simple and personal: get India to the World Cup, and produce the one star who makes an entire country finally believe it can.

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Originally published on Raj Shamani. Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g_O05YEKQs