Football: Super Saturdays and Sundays

It’s way past midnight in India and a lot of youngsters are up watching a game of EPL/UEFA Champions League hoping and egging their team to victory. The sports bars are filled to capacity and the tension is palpable. I sometimes wonder as to what makes football tick in India despite India being 140+ in the current FIFA world rankings and not having a popular league of our own. Albeit a small sample, all you need to look at is the popularity list appearing on sportskeeda.com to see football comfortably above our self appointed national pastime of cricket!

The youth of today seem to be catching on to football much more than the youth of yore, and it’s not too hard to figure out the reasons. Fast paced just like today’s generation, with easy access to the sport, all you need is a football and space equivalent to a small street to generate a huge amount of excitement and action! Even in the rains, this is one sport that you can actually enjoy while it is pouring, not really worrying too much about injuries or getting completely dirty. It is great exercise for someone looking to burn a few calories, while you actually get to have a meaningful contribution to the game, unlike cricket, where you might end up simply retrieving the ball from all parts of the ground and not getting to bat or bowl! How disappointing would that be and I am sure most of us would have experienced that at some point in our cricketing days. You could score a goal not worrying about a referee raising the dreaded offside flag. A true definition of a team sport can be seen in football, where even a shortage of one member can mean big trouble for teams, and hence every position becomes indispensable. All these factors make football world’s truly local game which, needless to say, unites people from various backgrounds.

What draws the youth towards this sport? What makes this game tick? Is it the tiki taka that Barcelona employ so effortlessly that you might be mistaken to think that football is a single team sport? Is it because of the sheer brilliance and ease with which a certain Lionel Messi wades through countless defenders to deposit the ball into the net or a Ronaldo that exhibits sublime skills that often bamboozle the opposition and marvel the audience? Is it the excitement that a Manchester derby or a North London derby brings to the television sets, not to forget the ruthless and famed efficiency of the Germans!

The answer is difficult and certainly too many factors to consider. But one factor that is certain to be present is the sheer excitement that the sport brings to its fans. The pace with which the game is played, skill levels displayed, intense rivalry between teams, not to mention the big money spends on players, are just some of the few aspects. Another important factor that draws so many of us to football is the perfect timing of the matches. Weekends are a perfect time to schedule matches, especially the Barclay’s Premier League falling mostly on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Fans are eagerly waiting for the weekend to set in and anxiously follow their favorite teams

Television coverage of the matches has played a huge role in helping the popularity of the sport. Telecast in the earlier days was only restricted to the FIFA World Cup and Euro Championships. But all you need to do now is tune into any sports channel and you will find yourself watching a program on football, be it the BPL, La Liga, Serie A etc. One cannot help but think that all this can only be good for a country like ours, which is struggling to move away from an image of a predominantly cricketing nation to a country that embraces all sports and looks to emerge as a sporting nation.

So many of us dream to see our country playing in the FIFA World Cup someday and we truly hope that this dream does not stay as a dream, but is converted to reality. Not only would we require the concerned authorities to push the sport at all levels but we would also require interest and involvement from the public and all the coverage that the sport is currently getting can only help and not harm.