⚽️ HT Kick Off: 2025: Year of East Bengal, India women’s teams and Bibiano’s boys

On 2 successive years in apr, the amerind conference 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.

By 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.

2026 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.

---

---