A Voice Among Closed Stadiums: How I-League Clubs Are Writing Their Own Story

In that corner of Salt Lake Stadium, where 1,31,781 spectators held their breath together in July 2026, the rows of seats now lie empty. No one recorded the roar of that evening — no television camera, no microphone. But whoever was there knows that the echo buried in the grass is still present.

For the past few years, the image of Indian football that dominates the media revolves around the ISL. Broadcast deals, marquee foreign players, and franchise teams in big cities. But on the other side of the pitch, there is another world that the camera almost never finds — that morning of Mohammedan Sporting, when in 2026 they earned a place in the ISL from the I-League. This was not just a promotion. It was the end of a decade when the Indian football pyramid had been closed — from 2026 to 2026, no club could come up.

During that closure, I went to the Maidan in Kolkata almost every week. The derby between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, watched by millions around the world, has its roots in the same soil where small I-League clubs play. I remember that night of 27 November 2026 — at Tilak Maidan in Goa, behind closed doors, the first ISL Kolkata derby was played. ATK Mohun Bagan beat SC East Bengal 2-0. But there was no one in the stadium. I was covering it from a hotel room, canned crowd noise playing on the broadcast, and 12 empty rows visible behind the goal. That night I felt for the first time what a 'big match' feels like without a 'big crowd'. I wrote about the silence between passes, the players' shouts, and the sound of the ball hitting advertising boards — 1,200 words just about what was missing.

The story of I-League clubs is similar — what is not visible is often the most true. If Mohammedan Sporting's 2026 promotion is seen as merely a 'slot' victory, then we are ignoring the entire ecosystem standing behind it. A 135-year-old club that waited so long for a promotion is not just a question of one season. It is a question of a generation that cannot believe the path from bottom to top in Indian football can ever open.

Look at another layer of data. Many clubs playing in the I-League have budgets not even a tenth of the average ISL club. But players emerging from these very clubs are becoming the backbone of the national team today. Sunil Chhetri's 95 international goals are still counted, but how empty is the queue of strikers standing behind him — this question will not be found in any federation press release. This queue is connected to that soil of the I-League and state leagues which we dismiss by calling it 'grassroots'.

One counter-intuitive point needs to be understood here. The problem with Indian football is not that we lack money or talent. The problem is that we have started measuring success by TV ratings and franchise value. When the pyramid was closed in 2026, the argument was that the lower leagues are 'not sustainable'. But what is sustainable? The club that runs at a loss year after year but whose roots extend three generations, or the one that runs on big corporate money and shuts down in two years? The Mohun Bagan and East Bengal derby is still alive today because its roots are in the soil of the Maidan, not in some broadcast contract.

One evening last year in Delhi, I went to watch a local club's match. There were perhaps 200 people in the stand. After the rain the pitch was muddy, and a 19-year-old boy, whose name is not registered in any database, scored in the 80th minute and ran straight to his mother. In that moment, the sound that rose was truer than the artificial noise of any big stadium. The real strength of Indian football lives in the breaths of these 200 people — and we have forgotten to count them.

This does not mean the ISL or big tournaments are wrong. But as long as we allow only one club per season to come up, the system will reward one and forget all the rest. Mohammedan Sporting's story is proof that the path can open — but it must also be remembered that this path was 135 years long.

Next time you watch a big ISL match, for a moment look away from the scoreboard and think about how many boys in how many small towns, on how many grounds, were running for that same goal that weekend — whose names are not on any transfer list, but whose feet hide the future of that country. The question is not who the next Chhetri is. The question is when we will open the path to find the next Chhetri.

— Jacob Lopez, from Delhi