by Sri Varshith Kumar Reddy E
Kashmir’s grassroots obsession, and what it tells India about building a sporting nation from the ground up
KL Image by Bilal Bahadur
The mountains above Srinagar turn a particular shade of amber in late summer evenings, the kind of gold that travel writers exhaust their adjectives describing. On the dusty grounds of SP College, something more interesting than scenery is happening. Dozens of children navigate a football through shadows long after the light has grown uncertain, shouting in colloquial Kashmiri, unbothered by the hour. There are no corporate academies here, no celebrity coaches imported from Europe on six-figure retainers, no glistening astroturf financed by a sporting goods conglomerate.
It is just Football, not cricket, not kabaddi that remains the reigning passion of the Kashmir Valley, a fact that has confounded Delhi’s sporting establishment for decades and delighted international football writers for almost as long.
While billions of viewers tune into the FIFA World Cup 2026, a first-ever 48-team tournament projected to generate $80 billion in global economic impact and $11 billion in FIFA revenue alone another football story deserves a prime-time slot. Not in New York, Los Angeles, or Mexico City. But in Kashmir.
A Century on the Pitch
The story of football in Kashmir begins, like so many things in colonial India, with a confident Englishman. Cecil Tyndale Biscoe, a British missionary who founded Srinagar’s CMS Mission School in 1891, introduced the sport to the Valley and met with predictable local resistance. The Pandit students refused to kick the leather ball on caste grounds. Biscoe made the sport compulsory. Within a generation, Kashmir had adopted football as something closer to civic ritual.
By the time Maharaja Hari Singh presided over a fading princely state in the 1930s, the annual Maharaja’s Birthday Cup at SP College grounds drew thousands of spectators. Clubs named Friends Club, J&K Police Club, Idgah Club, and Suliman Club became household names across the Valley.
After independence, the Jammu and Kashmir Football Association was formally constituted in 1964. The JKFA went on to produce at least 21 players who represented India at national level. Mohammad Yousuf Dar became the first Kashmir footballer to don the national jersey in the 1970s; Abdul Majeed Kakroo followed, representing India from 1981 to 1989.
What makes this lineage remarkable is the conditions under which it survived. Through three decades of insurgency, curfews, economic blockades, and political uncertainty, football never left the Valley. Cricket, the India’s nominal national religion colonised Bengal, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu with ease. Kashmir resisted.
Today, the Jammu and Kashmir Football Association lists 137 approved clubs across 28 registered districts, with 2,539 players registered in the AIFF’s Central Registration System and 247 certified coaches on record. The Valley is also home to the Kashmir Super League, a corporate tournament organised annually by the J&K Sports Council, whose 2025 edition at the iconic TRC Turf Ground in Srinagar featured six premier teams drawing crowds that would fill many Tier-I city venues to capacity.
The Snow Leopards
Real Kashmir FC represents the moment this quiet persistence announced itself to the world. Founded in 2016 by Shamim Meraj, a local newspaper editor, and Sandeep Chattoo, a hotelier, the club began as a relief effort for those affected by the catastrophic 2014 floods. Its founding motto — create, believe, and inspire had the ring of a motivational poster, and then the club went and lived up to it.
Within two years, Real Kashmir FC won the I-League Second Division, becoming the first club from Jammu & Kashmir to compete in India’s top flight. In 2017, they became the first J&K club to play in Scotland. Their nickname, the “Snow Leopards”, Sheeni Seh in Kashmiri, carries precisely the kind of poetic charge that marketing consultants spend years and crores trying to manufacture and never quite achieve. International journalists arriving to cover a conflict-affected region left writing about football. Here was a club from one of the world’s most geopolitically scrutinised valleys competing and winning at national level, without a multinational backer, on community will alone.
The Snow Leopards subsequently lifted the prestigious IFA Shield, one of Asia’s oldest football trophies in back-to-back editions in 2020 and 2021, becoming the first club from Kashmir to win it. In the 2024–25 I-League season they played 22 competitive matches, scoring 31 goals at a rate of 1.41 per game, and play their home fixtures at TRC Turf Ground in Srinagar, a venue where local support creates an atmosphere that no visiting side has found comfortable. The club has become what economists call a focal point with a mechanism concentrating dispersed community sentiment into a single, legible identity.
The Economics
Reducing Kashmir’s football culture to sentiment misses the more interesting story. Strip away the romance and what remains is a functioning economic ecosystem that India’s policy community has been slow to study.
Start with Gary Becker’s foundational insight that human capital is formed well outside classrooms. Every child who joins a local football club in the Valley is acquiring something economists find difficult to price but impossible to ignore; habits of discipline, capacity for teamwork, the ability to perform under pressure, and social networks that shape economic trajectories for decades. The J&K government recognised this, partially, when it announced in 2017 that it would establish football clubs in every village across the Valley, allocating an initial Rs 50 lakh seed corpus. The impulse was right even if the execution was typically bureaucratic.
Robert Putnam’s framework of social capital adds the second layer. When Putnam studied Italian civic institutions, he found that regions with thriving associational life including sports clubs that consistently outperformed others on almost every measure of institutional quality and economic output. Kashmir’s 137 approved clubs and 247 certified coaches are nodes in a social network that places where trust is built, community norms are reinforced, and the grinding anonymity of urban alienation is interrupted by something requiring collective cooperation. In a region that has experienced the social fragmentation accompanying sustained political conflict, this is a consequential function.
Richard Thaler’s behavioural economics adds a third dimension that policymakers rarely consider. When young people have a compelling positive activity like one offering status, belonging, and identity, the opportunity cost of disengagement rises sharply. Football actively restructures the incentive architecture of daily life. Evidence from post-conflict societies globally is consistent with sustained community sports participation reduces rates of radicalisation, substance abuse, and social withdrawal in ways that no government programme, however generously funded, can fully replicate.
The employment multiplier effects are modest, real, and worth counting. Coaches, referees, ground staff, equipment traders, sports physiotherapists, event managers, and hospitality operators around match venues constitute the kind of dignified, locally rooted livelihoods that development economists spend careers trying to engineer. Football tourism that encapsulates youth tournaments, training camps, visiting clubs drawn by an extraordinary natural setting remains almost entirely untapped. A football ground backed by the Himalayas offers a backdrop that would embarrass most of Europe’s celebrated stadiums, and nobody in India’s tourism ministry appears to have noticed.
The Iceland Lesson, the Morocco Mirror
When Iceland qualified for the 2016 European Championship, the world laughed before it applauded. A nation of roughly 330,000 people, smaller than Srinagar’s urban district had fielded a competitive international team. The explanation was structural, not accidental. Beginning in the early 2000s, Iceland invested in grassroots infrastructure with heated indoor football halls, artificial pitches in every town, and a philosophy prioritising universal participation over elite selection.
By 2016, Iceland had one A-licensed UEFA coach per 1,793 inhabitants compared to England’s ratio of roughly one per 43,500, meaning that high-quality coaching was genuinely embedded at community level, not concentrated in a handful of elite academies.
Morocco’s 2022 World Cup semifinal run told a complementary story. The Royal Moroccan Football Federation decentralised its youth development architecture nationwide, marrying the street culture of urban medinas with a professionalised national talent pipeline. Morocco arrives at World Cup 2026 having been declared 2025 AFCON champions; awarded the title after CAF’s Appeals Committee ruled that Senegal forfeited the final following a chaotic walk-off, a result as controversial as it is official.
Japan, meanwhile, built its grassroots revolution through school football leagues, embedding the game in everyday educational life rather than siloing it in specialist academies. The J-League was the consequence of Japan’s grassroots development, not its cause.
The shared thread across Iceland, Morocco, and Japan is the same: football must first belong to ordinary people before it can produce extraordinary ones.
The Kashmir Model: Five Pillars
What Kashmir has developed largely without policy design and almost entirely without central government intention deserves a framework rather than mere admiration. Call it the Kashmir Model of Sports Development and consider its five constitutive elements.
Community before commercialisation. Kashmir’s football grew because communities needed it. The game arrived through a missionary school, spread through local tournaments, and survived conflict because no corporate entity owned it and therefore no corporate entity could abandon it when the economics turned difficult.
Local leagues before elite leagues. The Valley’s tradition of corporate trophies, school competitions, and neighbourhood tournaments predates Real Kashmir FC by decades. The club did not create Kashmiri football; Kashmiri football created the conditions in which a club like Real Kashmir could be viable.
Participation before performance. The metric that matters in Kashmir is how many children play on a given Saturday afternoon. Performance, when it comes, is downstream of participation at scale.
Public grounds before mega stadiums. The dusty grounds of SP College and the municipal spaces where Kashmir’s football is played every evening are the social infrastructure of a functioning community sport culture. The lesson is to maintain and modestly improve what already exists, rather than replace it with gleaming private facilities that serve shareholders more faithfully than communities.
Identity through sport. Football in Kashmir has become a language of belonging in a region where almost every other language of belonging has been contested. When Real Kashmir FC plays, the Valley cheers as a community sharing something uncomplicated and joyful. That is not a trivial political achievement.
What India Should Do?
India will not play at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The qualification campaign ended in the second round. India’s FIFA ranking stood at 136th as of April 2026, a slight recovery from a November 2025 low of 142nd, itself a reflection of three coaching changes in under two years and losses to regional neighbours including Thailand, Hong Kong, and Bangladesh. The football market in India is projected to reach $0.40 billion by 2033, yet commercial potential is outrunning the developmental infrastructure required to sustain it.
The Union Budget 2026-27 allocated Rs 4,479 crore to the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, an 18 per cent increase over the previous year with the Sports Authority of India receiving Rs 917 crore, up from Rs 830 crore in 2025-26. The money is real. The question is where it goes. India’s default sporting policy is to extract the exceptional and ignore the ecosystem that identify ten talented children, send them to Germany, and announce a new academy.
It has produced some Olympic medals and zero World Cup appearance (India has technically qualified for the FIFA World Cup exactly once, in 1950, but the team withdrew before the tournament began and has never played a single match on football’s biggest stage) in seventy-five years of independent football.
The model India needs already exists. The Northeast region encompassing Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya maintains passionate local leagues and has produced national players. Tribal districts across central India represent untapped sporting populations. The Aspirational Districts programme, targeting the country’s least-developed areas, could incorporate sports-led development as a genuine pillar rather than an afterthought. Tier-II and Tier-III cities, where the next hundred million Indians will spend their leisure time, need public sporting infrastructure that serves communities rather than impresses visiting dignitaries.
The investment required is nowhere near astronomical. Iceland built its revolution on a budget that India would spend on a single multi-sport event. The prerequisite is philosophical rather than financial that sport as infrastructure rather than spectacle; the pitch any pitch, however dusty as the starting point rather than the stadium as the finish line.
Across the Valley, as the Himalayan dusk settles over Srinagar and the FIFA World Cup 2026 flickers to life on television sets in tea houses and drawing rooms, those children are still playing. They are playing because, in Kashmir, football is what communities do. It is how they express joy, process difficulty, and assert a continuity of life that no political upheaval has entirely managed to interrupt. It is social capital, economic capital, and development capital, the three things that India’s planning institutions have historically tried to manufacture from above and that Kashmir grew organically from below.
Long before India qualifies for a FIFA World Cup, it may discover that one corner of the Himalayas has already mastered the first lesson of footballing success by making the game belong to the people.
(The author is a pracademic working on government policy and public institutions. Ideas are personal.)
