⚽️ HT Kick Off: 2025: Year of East Bengal, India women’s teams and Bibiano’s boysAs that happened, the men’s game floundered on and off the pitch.
On two successive days in April, the Indian league season for women and men ended. East Bengal won the Indian Women’s League (IWL) in some style, dropping a mere five points and with a 100% record at home. That was on April 11. One day later, Mohun Bagan Super Giant completed the Indian Super League double erasing a self-goal to beat Bengaluru FC at a Salt Lake stadium packed to the rafters. Everything but footballBy the time East Bengal won the first SAFF Women’s Club Championship, also at a canter and not long after nearly making the quarter-final of the AFC Women’s Champions League, another season of IWL had begun but no one knows if and when the top three tiers of the men’s league will start. “We want to play,” Jose Molina plea rings true nearly a month after he was removed as Mohun Bagan Super Giant head coach. Men’s club football has had a handful of matches in a year of crises and conflict. 2025 has been one for court hearings, zero interest from commercial partners, letters from clubs that lamented and raged at the same time and proposals and counter-proposals so different that they left no scope for negotiation leading to doubts whether everyone was singing from the same “let’s football” hymn sheet. As this issue was being put together, another set of suggestions was discussed at another meeting with the promise of more (meetings if not ideas). One thing leads to another and the lack of game time contributed to India not being able to qualify for the 2027 Asian Cup. The campaign that started under Manolo Marquez with India playing like they had two left feet ended under Khalid Jamil with a defeat in Dhaka, a first in 22 years. Hope flickered when India won bronze in the CAFA Nations Cup in September but was snuffed out in little over a month. The year of what felt like a never-ending stream of bad news also had Mohun Bagan playing hooky for the second year in a row in Asia for which they have been banned and fined. Mohun Bagan and AIFF also got into a war of words over players’ injury management and the club has been consistent in its refusal to release players outside FIFA dates. Consequence: Jamil saying he will look beyond a number of India regulars as he rebuilds the side.
Bibiano Fernandes and his band of teenagers prevented 2025 from being an annus horribilis on the men’s side. India coming back from a goal down to beat Iran and qualify for the next year’s Asian under-17 finals was the country’s “miracle on ice” moment in men’s football this year. “It’s been three days and I am still getting goosebumps talking about it,” Fernandes said earlier this month. Silver lining2026 is also when India will play the finals of the AFC Women’s Asian Cup, the first time as a team who have qualified. July 5 will be a red letter day in Indian football as the senior women’s team notched up an away win against opponents who were then 24 places higher in the FIFA rankings. Beating Thailand in Thailand to make the high table of Asian women’s football would unarguably be the achievement of the year. “I think if the players believe in themselves, Thailand are beatable,” Crispin Chhetri had told HT before the qualifiers. “Right now, we have started thinking that we could go to Australia.” A head coach trying to gee the team up, I had thought even as I was writing that interview. But the team walked Chhetri’s talk and how. Nine players in the squad that qualified for Australia at Chaing Mai’s 700th Anniversary Stadium were part of the 2022 Asian Cup side which was scratched from the competition because of an outbreak of Covid-19. “It came up before we played Thailand; the players saying how unfair it was to have been scratched. They had pledged they would prove to the world that they could qualify,” said Sangita Basfore in an interview to HT. Basfore had missed the tournament with an ACL injury.
“There will be more good news,” Satyanarayan M, the AIFF deputy secretary-general, had said that July evening. “Watch out for the under-20 women’s team.” In a little over a month, they made the Asian finals also beating the home team. So, there will be three national teams to look forward to in 2026. And what about the top men’s league? “It will happen, 100%,” a senior AIFF official told me earlier in the week. Happy New Year. Play of the week
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In other newsSpain end on top: Spain will end 2025 as the top men’s team in the FIFA rankings, reports AP. There were limited changes in the new rankings published Monday, after the previous standings had been released on November 19. The top 10 remain unchanged with, in order, Argentina, France, England, Brazil, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Croatia following Spain. Vietnam, which climbed three places to 107th in the rankings, registered the biggest leap. India stayed at 142. The next rankings will be published on January 19. Napoli win Super Cup: Napoli won the Italian Super Cup on Monday as David Neres scored twice to secure the reigning Serie A champions a 2-0 win over Bologna in the final in Jeddah, reports AFP. Brazilian winger Neres curled in a brilliant shot from distance to give Napoli the lead before half-time against last season’s Italian Cup winners. He struck again in the second half after intercepting a weak pass from Bologna goalkeeper Federico Ravaglia as he tried to play out from the back. Neres finished with three goals in the Super Cup after also scoring in the 2-0 semi-final win over AC Milan last week. It is the third time Napoli have won the competition, after 1990 and 2014.
Reckless, says Slot; Frank differs: Liverpool striker Alexander Isak will be laid up for two months with a broken ankle and fibula from a tackle that coach Arne Slot has described as reckless, reports AP. Isak had surgery on Monday, two days after he was injured in the act of scoring the opening goal of a 2-1 win over Tottenham in the Premier League. “This was, for me, a reckless challenge….If you make a tackle like that 10 times, 10 times there is a serious chance the player gets a serious injury,” said Slot after Micky Van de Ven slid into Isak and trapped his shooting foot just after he’d shot. Tottenham manager Thomas Frank hit back at Slot. “We are talking about a defender that will do everything he can to avoid the goal….If my defender does not do that, they are not true defenders,” he said, as per AFP. Minamino faces long lay-off: Monaco’s Japanese attacking midfielder Takumi Minamino has suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his left knee, the Ligue 1 club announced on Monday, casting serious doubts over his ability to take part in the 2026 World Cup, says AFP. The former Liverpool player was injured during Monaco’s 2-1 win in their French Cup tie against Auxerre on Sunday. The 30-year-old was stretchered from the field of play with his face in his hands. Minamino, who has 26 goals in 73 caps for the Samurai Blue, is one of the key men in coach Hajime Moriyasu’s side. PSG women hit by nine-point sanction: The Paris Saint-Germain women’s team were on Monday hit with a three-defeats-by-forfeit sanction by French football authorities for a licensing issue involving summer signing Florianne Jourde, reports AFP. Following a complaint from Fleury, who lost 4-0 to PSG last month in the top-flight Premiere Ligue, the French Football Federation (FFF) sanctioned the club to a defeat by forfeit and extended it to cover their two previous matches – a 2-0 win over Le Havre and 1-0 victory against Strasbourg. By effectively losing nine points, PSG drop from second to fifth place in the table. Neymar surgery: Neymar underwent minor surgery on his left knee, his club Santos has said, report AP. Neymar, 33, previously said he wanted to fix the pains that have sidelined him from several matches this year. The arthroscopy was performed by Rodrigo Lasmar, who also works with the Brazil squad. Last weekend, the striker said during a music event in Sao Paulo he still hoped to play in the World Cup and score in the final. Neymar has struggled to recover since he tore his ACL in October 2023.
World Cup prize money: Prize money for next year’s World Cup will be 50% higher than the previous edition with FIFA agreeing a record $727 million financial contribution to the tournament, reports Reuters. The biggest slice of FIFA’s funding package for the North American showpiece – $655 million – will be performance-based payments to 48 participating nations with the champions taking $50 million and the runners-up $33 million.The 16 nations that fail to survive beyond the initial group phase will earn $9 million while in addition, each qualified nation is entitled to $1.5 million to cover preparation costs. AIFF gets time: Gearing up for full-scale implementation of the National Sports Governance (NSG) Act in January, the Sports Ministry on Monday decided that national federations, which are due to hold elections in the coming months, will be allowed to defer them till December 2026 to implement the “foundational” changes required by the new law. The most awaited NSF election next year is the one due in the embattled All India Football Federation (AIFF), currently headed by Kalyan Chaubey. The PT Usha-led Indian Olympic Association (IOA) is also due to go to polls towards the end of next year. “Compliance requirements under NSG Act, 2025 necessitate adequate preparation time for NSFs to establish robust electoral structure and procedures, and alignment of the Constitution/Bye-laws of NSFs with the NSG Act,” according to a letter from the ministry to all the NSFs and the IOA. You may also be interested in:
Iconic momentZidanes at AFCON
Zinedine Zidane watched his goalkeeper son's safe hands as Algeria started their Africa Cup of Nations campaign with a 3-0 win over 10-man Sudan on Wednesday, reports AP. Riyad Mahrez scored twice and the 20-year-old Ibrahim Maza scored his first international goal for Algeria, one of the tournament favourites, to move top of Group E. Zidane, who was at Moulay El Hassan Stadium in Rabat to see his son Luca Zidane playing in the Algeria goal, was feted by the crowd every time he was shown on the big screens. Luca Zidane opted to represent his grandfather's country after getting the Fennec Foxes' invitation and he's been given his chance to shine because of an injury to Alexandre Oukidja, who might have been expected to start otherwise. Also readA happy Christmas is no guarantee of the Premier League title Inspired by Iniesta, El Aynaoui dreams of Brazil Benjamin’s European stint a big leap for India They said it
That’s all for this week. As always, I look forward to your feedback. You can either write to me at dhiman@htlive.com, or reply to this mail.
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