The N/A Crisis in Indian Football: Where the Most Honest Number Is 'Not Available'

The story had three things missing. No transfer fee. No wage figure. No contract length. The headline said 'record deal' and the second line of the body said 'sources said'. That night I opened my notebook on the desk, drew three columns — fee, wage, duration — and left all three blank. Looking at an empty column, I understood the thing that has held truest for me over the last few years: in Indian football, the most honest document is the blank cell that reads 'not available'.

I started the notebook the week my knee stopped cooperating. 2026, Delhi University league, 63rd minute, right ACL. During rehab I volunteered at the FIFA U-17 World Cup in Delhi, charted three group games and the England-Spain final, and filled a ninety-page notebook — pressing triggers, fullback spacing, set-piece routines. My knee taught me that pain is also data, you just haven't measured it yet. I did not know then that a few years later I would have to keep a second notebook — not of pain, but of absence.

This piece is the accounting of that absence. And my claim is blunt: the numbers missing from Indian football did not go missing on their own. They were left missing. Every 'not available' is somebody's decision — a decision to conceal, or at minimum a decision that counting wasn't worth the effort.

If that sounds like an academic complaint, hold on to one fact: an empty data point does not mean low risk. An empty cell means unknown risk. And in sport, unknown risk is the most expensive deal on the table.

The Indian Super League launched in 2026 as a closed franchise league — no promotion, no relegation. Where a league has no ladder beneath it, it has no ladder of information either. A closed league has nothing to prove to anyone. No relegation fear, no shareholder pressure, no independent regulator demanding an audit. The result was that for a decade, every public piece of information about Indian football came out of the same door that marketing came out of.

The I-League — the actual sporting ladder — was left to dry out during exactly that period. Promotion finally arrived after 2026-24, and in the 2026-25 season Mohammedan Sporting became the first club promoted from the I-League into the ISL. It is easy to call that a reform. I call it a treatment that arrived ten years late. And a reform that late stops being a reform; it becomes compensation.

Meanwhile the national team's story is also a story about numbers. January 2026, AFC Asian Cup: India lost all three group games — 0-2 to Australia, 0-3 to Uzbekistan, 0-1 to Syria. Three matches, zero goals. The FIFA ranking stayed where it had been for a decade, in the 100-130 band. And in June 2026, Sunil Chhetri retired with 94 international goals.

Stop for a moment there. On derby day in Kolkata, the Salt Lake stadium holds around sixty thousand people. The same country, the same football, and yet the national team's stands are empty. Those two facts are one story — but you cannot prove them as one story, because nobody publishes a match-by-match, machine-readable attendance register. Without a register, the argument stays an anecdote, and anecdotes get dismissed.

This connects to me directly. From July 2026 to March 2026 I was Director of Communication and Media at the All India Football Federation. My services were terminated, and afterwards I publicly accused president Kalyan Chaubey of financial irregularities. I write this so you know where the piece is coming from. What I learned sitting inside the federation is the single most useful lesson of my career: which numbers exist, and which numbers are never asked for. Let me tell you, the second list is longer.

The first take I ever sold was a hat-trick I had not fully watched. June 2026, Spain 3-3 Portugal, Ronaldo's hat-trick. I wrote eight hundred words — 'Portugal are not contenders, they are Ronaldo plus set pieces' — with 35 percent possession, two set-piece goals and one open-play chance in the table. 120,000 reads, 600 comments. That night I learned a claim can be loud as long as the stat table underneath it is solid. But I learned something else too: in a sport that has numbers, you can build a big claim. In a sport that has no numbers, a big claim is just shouting.

Indian football is in its shouting phase right now. There are seven places where the shout replaces the evidence.

One: the empty fee column. A major ISL transfer happens and you never get three things — the fee, the wage, the contract length. In Europe there is a benchmark standing next to every deal through the window: a market valuation, a comparison against players of the same age, the add-on and sell-on structure. Here the benchmark is absent, so whatever number an agent throws becomes the number. The phrase 'record deal' loses its meaning when you don't know the record. And without the fee you cannot tell whether a club paid above or below market. The whole premium-rate calculation collapses onto an empty cell.

The direct cost is that no honest debate about Indian clubs' recruitment is possible. One club says it picked up a bargain, another says it paid market rate. Both claims sit equally unverified. In my own notebook I have counted the cases from the last eighteen months where the headline said 'record' and the body carried no figure at all. The number wasn't small. The number was absent. That difference matters.

Two: no wage bill and no financial fair play. India has no financial regulation with teeth — no UEFA-style FFP, no Premier League-style PSR, no La Liga salary cap. And clubs do not publish their wage bills. As a result three things can never be measured: the wage-to-revenue ratio (above 70 percent is treated as high risk), the top-wage-to-average-wage ratio (above four times signals imbalance), and dependence on owner funding.

When you don't know a club's wage bill, its collapse arrives as a surprise. FC Pune City wound down in 2026; ATK merged into Mohun Bagan in 2026 — both are public facts. But can anyone tell me what percentage of revenue their wage bills represented? No. So their endings get described as misfortune rather than as a systemic outcome. That single word is the difference between reporting and public relations.

Three: xG has retired. The television graphic gives you possession, shots, shots on target, corners and fouls. It does not give you xG, xGA, PPDA, progressive passes or field tilt. I am a TV-first analyst and I own that. My instinct is to watch a broadcast, name a pattern, and dare the consensus to survive the replay. My weakness is the same instinct: I see what the director chooses to show me. But even the broadcast makes one thing obvious. Where there is no shot-quality data, 'we were unlucky' and 'the mentality is weak' both live forever. At the 2026 Asian Cup India scored zero goals in three games. Without xG, can you say whether the process was fine and the finishing failed, or whether the process was hollow? You cannot. And where that question never gets asked, the debate always parks itself at 'intent'.

At the 2026 U-17 World Cup I charted the pressing triggers for three group games by hand because the feed didn't carry them. That notebook became a 900-word thread arguing England's title came from coordinated pressing rather than individual talent — 4,000 saves, my first 1,200 followers. The lesson was that when the data isn't given, you count it yourself. In Indian club football that lesson never became institutional. Nobody counts, because nothing forces them to.

Four: the missing attendance register. India is a lived football culture — Bengal, Goa, Kerala. Shillong, Aizawl, Imphal fill grounds with almost no money behind them. Yet there is no public, match-by-match, tabular record of top-flight attendance across the country. So the centre-periphery money gap can be felt but never shown. And without evidence, two opposing claims both stay alive: 'India is a football nation' and 'India is not'. Both are unproven, and the empty cell feeds them equally.

Five: the academy ledger nobody keeps. No ISL club publishes what it spends on its youth programme. So 'the federation is investing in youth' is exactly as unproven as its opposite. Chhetri's 94 goals were a cover story, not a foundation. When he left in June 2026, what got exposed was not only a missing striker but a missing measurement. You cannot say how thick the pipeline to Manvir Singh, Rahim Ali or Ishan Pandita is, because the pipeline has no public accounts. A country that hides youth spending discovers its striker crisis a generation late — and by then the bill has come due.

Six: the governance fog. Indian football's federation is a registered society, and national sports bodies in India generally sit outside the Right to Information framework. A citizen has no legal route to ask. The league has no obligation to demand wage bills from clubs; the federation has no binding reason to demand audited accounts from the league. No single man built that wall. The bricks were laid in the legal structure long before him.

When I made my allegations about financial irregularities after my March 2026 exit, the question was never whether the allegation was loud. It was what evidence base would test it. Will the audited annual report be published on time? Will club-wise grant allocations be disclosed? Will an independent auditor's report see daylight? Where all three answers are 'not available', an allegation and a denial become equal weapons. That state of affairs is as damaging to football as any large scandal.

Seven: the free market of rumour. European transfer chatter has an informal tiering — the verified reporter, general media, the tabloid, the agent leak. Readers know how much weight to give each. In India, 'according to sources' is a tier unto itself. No source, no date, no agent motive, no track record. The reader ends up with no tool to separate reporting from rumour, so he reads everything with the same suspicion — and accurate stories get killed alongside invented ones.

This brings back a Wednesday night in Hyderabad when the stadium held twelve thousand people and the commentator called it a 'fantastic atmosphere'. I wrote in my notebook that night: atmosphere is never a data point, which is why it is never quite a lie either. Empty stadium, full broadcast — that is the real thesis of this country's football media. The screen has become the stadium, and whatever number the screen refuses to show disappears from the national conversation.

Now the part every honest take needs. Where I could be wrong.

The strongest version of the consensus is this: Indian football's problem is money, coaching and infrastructure. Data is a rich country's hobby. Fix the grass and the spreadsheets follow. That is not a weak argument. Denmark and Croatia produced players without xG. The grounds of Kerala and Goa produced footballers for decades without a single model. And I accept that data availability follows money rather than preceding it.

But there is a hole in it, and the hole is visible in India. If opacity were merely a symptom of poverty, the clubs with money would be transparent. The richest ISL clubs disclose the least. In Europe, disclosure was imposed by FFP. Here, non-disclosure carries no penalty. The fog is cost-free, and what is free gets used most.

My second weakness is that my own record is contested. A journalist who has worked inside the federation and then accuses it of irregularities has an obvious incentive to demand transparency — and is therefore, quite reasonably, suspect. I will not hide that. The fog needs to be real for my allegation to stand. Readers deserve to know which way my notebook leans.

The third weakness is the TV-first habit. A man who reads football off a broadcast feed will treat a missing graphic as the real deficiency when the real deficiency might be coaching badges. There is one fix, and I wrote it in the notebook: before every take, ask the beat reporters in Kolkata, Goa and Kerala what the camera missed. They carry numbers in their heads that never reach a public document.

The fourth weakness is the least comfortable: outsider condescension. A writer born in Germany and working in Delhi can slide into treating Indian football as a development case study when it is a lived football culture. Sixty thousand people stand at Salt Lake without a spreadsheet, and their game does not wait for a report. This piece should be read against the game's own evidence, not as a development sermon. My claim is not about statistics. It is about their absence.

So, forward. I will make a testable prediction and I want you to note it down so you can hold me to it.

If ISL clubs do not publish club-wise wage bills and academy spending within the next two seasons, the promotion-relegation system introduced from 2026-25 will become one more closed door. You won't have to look far for proof: the first promoted club that goes back down, or shuts down, within two seasons will be the first instalment — and even then nobody will have the data to say where it actually went wrong.

The question is not whether Indian football has too few numbers. The question is who benefits from the habit of not having them. In a league where every big number is 'not available', how exactly will you measure promotion — by trophies alone? And when the club that lifts the trophy shuts down a year later, will you call that reform, or the result of a blank column nobody could be bothered to fill?