India Is About to Miss the World Cup And Nobody Seems to Care

On FIFA 2026, unsold media rights, and the deeper rot inside Indian football that nobody wants to talk about.

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Two months. That’s how long we have before the biggest sporting event on the planet kicks off in North America. Sixty-four matches. Forty-eight nations. Billions of eyeballs across the world are trained on a tournament that, once every four years, makes football fans out of people who don’t even follow the sport.

And India – a country of 1.4 billion people, a country where the Premier League has a fanbase that most European clubs would kill for, a country where La Liga runs dedicated India campaigns, where the Champions League is appointment viewing for millions of young people who have never been to a live football match in their lives – India might not broadcast it at all.

The media rights for the FIFA World Cup 2026 are unsold. Two months before kick-off. Not because nobody tried. FIFA initially valued the combined rights for 2026 and 2030 at $100 million. When that got no response, they cut it to $35 million. A 65% discount. Still nothing. Not a single serious bidder. Compare that to four years ago, when Viacom18 paid $62 million just for the Qatar rights alone.

That number should stop you in your tracks.

This Isn’t Just a Broadcasting Story

The easy version of this story is a simple business one. Cricket consumes India’s broadcasting budget. JioStar, the merged entity that now controls what was Star India and Viacom18, has already spent enormous sums locking up cricket rights. Sony Sports isn’t interested. FanCode is circling but cautious. The timezone problem is real – matches across the US, Canada, and Mexico mean 3 am kick-offs for Indian fans, which kills advertising returns. Nobody wants to pay tens of millions for an audience watching in the middle of the night.

That’s the surface-level explanation, and it’s accurate. But it’s not the whole story. Because buried underneath that business logic is something more uncomfortable: football in India has been so badly managed, so systematically neglected, so thoroughly corrupted from the inside, that even when the greatest football tournament in the world arrives, the market treats Indian football audiences as an afterthought.

That’s not a business problem. That’s a structural failure that’s been decades in the making.

What This Means for FIFA, and Why India Actually Matters

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: India is not a small football market. It’s an enormous one. The Premier League’s Indian fanbase is in the tens of millions. La Liga has invested significantly in India – regional language broadcasts, grassroots academies, and partnership events. Every major European club has an India strategy. Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, their social media teams produce content in Hindi. They run fan events in Mumbai and Delhi. They know something that FIFA’s rights valuation apparently doesn’t reflect: Indian fans care about football in a way that the numbers around the domestic game don’t capture.

So when the World Cup has no broadcast deal in India, the consequence isn’t just that a few hundred million people miss some matches. The consequence is that the world’s biggest football tournament voluntarily walks away from one of the fastest-growing football audiences on earth. FIFA loses. The sponsors lose every brand that’s paid to be associated with the tournament loses reach in a market they’ve been cultivating for years. The legitimate broadcasters lose. And the fans, who will absolutely find a way to watch, will do it through pirated streams.

Because that’s what happens when rights go unsold, and access goes dark. People don’t stop watching football. They just stop watching it legally. The grey market for World Cup streams in India is going to be significant. And once a generation of fans gets comfortable watching sport through unofficial channels, you’ve created a habit that’s very difficult to reverse. That’s bad for rights holders across all sports, not just football.

The ISL Problem Is the Same Problem, Just Smaller

While all of this has been happening at the international level, something equally alarming has been unfolding in Indian domestic football.

The Indian Super League, which was supposed to be the vehicle that transformed Indian football commercially and on the pitch, has been in suspension since July. The operator, Football Sports Development Limited, walked away. AIFF launched a tender for a new master rights holder with a 15-year mandate. Not a single bidder came forward. Not one, for a deal worth $5.8 million a year.

Let me put that number into context. The IPL, India’s cricket league, commands over $600 million a year in media rights. The ISL, the flagship football property of the same country, couldn’t attract a single bidder at $5.8 million. That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm. And it tells you everything about how the market views the product.

City Football Group, the organisation behind Manchester City, New York City FC, Mumbai City FC, and a dozen other clubs globally, divested from Mumbai City FC, citing uncertainty around the ISL’s future. When a group that has built its entire strategy around investing early in emerging football markets decides to walk away, you pay attention. That’s not a casual decision. That’s a signal.

AIFF is now running the media rights tender itself, for the first time in the league’s history. The AFC has removed direct Champions League 2 entry for ISL clubs because the season format is too short. The league that was supposed to elevate Indian football is now struggling to find anyone willing to pay anything meaningful to broadcast it.

I Played This Game. I Know Why This Is Happening.

I want to get personal here for a moment, because I think the structural rot in Indian football is not abstract to me. I lived it.

When I was playing under-14 and under-15 football, I watched how selection worked. Talented kids from the right connections got picked. Money changed hands. Coaches were accommodated. And the kids who were actually good, who had put in the work, who genuinely loved the game, got passed over. I saw kids from Northeast India arriving at tournaments with paperwork that didn’t add up. Birth certificates that didn’t match faces. Age fraud, right there in front of everyone, and nobody said a word because the people who would have said the word were the same people who were benefiting from the silence.

That was my introduction to organised football in India. And it wasn’t an aberration. It was the system.

In case you wondered if I was ever actually any good. 😄 I was. Which made watching the politics even more painful. Check out the long ranger banger!

Moving on, the money that should have gone into developing young players went into the pockets of administrators. The coaching structure was about maintaining power, not developing talent. There was no pipeline, no pathway, no honest process for a talented kid to rise based on merit. And so talented kids, one by one, drifted away. They found other things to do with their lives. Their parents, who had already been quietly sceptical about the idea of a football career, who had been told by everyone around them that sport wasn’t a real profession, took it as confirmation. Why push your child toward a system that’s designed to reject them unless they pay to play?

I ended up going outside and settled in London to work on the business side of sport. Not because I gave up on sport – I still love it, I’ve coached, I’ve worked inside the industry, it’s where my professional life has been built. But because the ecosystem in India at that time, and for a long time since, was not built for people like me to succeed within it. It was built for other people to extract value from the existence of the game while the game itself slowly hollowed out.

The Parent Problem, The Culture Problem, The Governance Problem

Indian parents generalising, but not unfairly, do not look at football as a career. They look at it as physical education. As something to keep the child active, to tick the box of extracurricular involvement, and to give them something to say when relatives ask what the child does besides studying. The idea that football could be a genuine livelihood, that there is a professional infrastructure globally that pays people extremely well to play, coach, manage, scout, market, and govern the sport but that idea has barely penetrated the mainstream consciousness.

And honestly, the way Indian football has been run, can you blame them? The national team has been declining in the Asian rankings for years. The World Cup qualification campaigns have been embarrassing. The domestic league is now in crisis. There’s no clear pathway from grassroots football to a professional contract in India. There’s no visible success story that a parent can point to and say – This is what it looks like if my child is good enough.

The governance structure doesn’t help. Indian football, from the top of AIFF to the district-level associations, is deeply political. Positions exist not to build the sport but to hold the position. Budget gets spent on administration, on the overhead of the administrative class, to fill local operators’ pockets, and not on academies, not on pitch quality, not on coaching education, not on the development programmes that would actually produce better players. The people who could change things are often the same people who benefit from things staying the same.

And so the cycle continues. Bad governance produces bad football. Bad football produces no commercial interest. No commercial interest means no media rights money. No media rights money means no investment in the game. No investment means the product gets worse. Which means the governance structure can point to the lack of commercial interest as a reason not to invest. Round and round.

The World Cup Should Have Been Different. It Still Could Be.

Here’s the thing about the FIFA World Cup 2026 media rights situation that makes me angry, rather than just sad: it didn’t have to be this way.

The World Cup is the one event that transcends the structural problems of domestic Indian football. You don’t need to care about the ISL to want to watch England vs France or Argentina defending their title – this is a market that Indian fans are deeply invested in – the Premier League clubs whose players they follow all season long. The World Cup is not a test of how much Indians care about Indian football. It’s a test of how much they care about football, full stop. And the answer to that question, historically, has been: a lot.

The rights should have been sold months ago. FIFA’s pricing, even at $35 million for two World Cups, is not the problem – the problem is that the market has been allowed to reach a state of consolidation and uncertainty where no broadcaster feels confident enough in the commercial return to commit. That’s a market failure, and it’s a failure that has real consequences for fans who deserve access.

There’s still time. The rights could be acquired in the next few weeks. FanCode remains a potential bidder and has shown a genuine appetite for football rights internationally. A digital-first solution that is streaming without linear television is entirely plausible and might actually serve younger Indian audiences better than a traditional broadcast deal would have anyway.

But the ISL? That’s a slower problem. That’s going to take genuine governance reform, real investment in the development pathway, and someone in a position of authority within Indian football who actually wants to build the sport rather than administer it. Those people exist. I’ve met them. There are coaches, administrators, club owners, and investors who genuinely want Indian football to be something. The question is whether they can operate within a structure that, for the most part, seems designed to exhaust them.

What I Actually Believe

I believe Indian football can be something. I believe it because I’ve seen the fans not just the casual ones but the deeply committed ones who know formations, who have opinions about pressing intensity, who follow lower-league European football because they’ve fallen in love with the game at a level the ISL hasn’t been able to compete with. Those fans exist in huge numbers. They’re just being consistently let down.

I believe the commercial opportunity is real. Any European property that has figured this out – La Liga’s India push, the Premier League’s dedicated regional content, is seeing returns. The audience is there. It just needs a product worth investing in.

And I believe the governance reform has to come from outside the current power structure, because the current power structure has too much invested in the way things are. That means pressure from AFC and FIFA, from investors who refuse to participate until the politics clean up, from a new generation of Indian football people like the coaches, agents, club executives – who’ve been outside the system long enough to see it clearly and who are trying to build something within it without being absorbed by it.

That’s the optimistic version.

The pessimistic version is that we’re going to watch the FIFA World Cup 2026 on a pirated stream, the ISL will limp through a shortened season that convinces nobody it’s worth investing in, AIFF will hold elections that change nothing, and we’ll have this same conversation in 2030.

I’d rather believe we’re closer to the turning point than we think.

But someone has to be willing to say clearly that we’re nowhere near where we should be.

I just did.

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P.S. – If you’ve been following what I’m building at Delfiex, a lot of this connects – the idea that fan engagement in sport needs to be rebuilt from honest foundations, that the relationship between fans and the sports they love deserves better infrastructure than what currently exists. The waitlist is live at delfiex.com. If you’re curious, click below

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Today’s recommended podcast…

The Hundred debate is back…The recent Overlap episode with Lalit Modi has sparked the debate again around The Hundred and the future of English cricket. His take that the format might not last feels aggressive, but some of the underlying points are hard to ignore.

I wrote about this 2 years ago, why The Hundred doesn’t really solve a new problem, and instead feels like a product trying to replicate the success of the Indian Premier League. Sharing that piece again – Click here

Also worth noting is that the piece was reshared by Lalit Modi himself back then, which made the conversation even more interesting.